White Sands Battleship?
You never know quite what you’re going to come across when you set off on a hunt for some information.
Chasing up some leads on old RAF bases in Scotland, one of those ultra-smart web searches threw up this image (no, I couldn’t find anything on the original page to suggest why, it certainly had nothing to with my search).
The caption that came with it indicated that it was a representation of the Bismarck, constructed for the British during World War II, to carry out practice air attacks for a forthcoming assault on the German battleship.
Also said never to have been used, and built for the British by the Americans.
The location given for this creation is somewhere on the White Sands ranges, used for such things as missile test.
Unfortunately, that’s all the info the story came with. No indication of the actual location of this feature, and not even as much as a hint of which part of the White Sand’s ranges it could be found on.
Normally, it’s fairly easy, if a little time consuming on occasion, to apply the Mark I eyeball to Google Mapping or Google Earth and spot where an image has been grabbed from, and there’s plenty of detail to work with on this one. Unfortunately, it doesn’t take long to realise that unless you’ve got a lot of spare time, or get very lucky early on, you won’t be finding this one soon. The ranges are just as large as you would expect them to be for missile (and whatever else) testing, and the picture is too small to give a general indication of its surroundings. The ranges are next to featureless unless you zoom in close enough to see the road detail given in the pic, and at that level, progress is deathly slow over the area concerned.
So, if you find yourself with nothing better to do, you could do worse than have a stab at the White Sands ranges, and if you get lucky, post the lat/lon or a links back here, and put the rest of us out of our misery.
(I’m not being mean by not posting a link to White Sands to get you started. The area is so big, posting a point could be mis-interpreted as a hint to the actual location, and stop you looking at locations far away from the starting point. That bias would be counter-productive, since we don’t have a clue about where it is).
