"This is a Five Minute Guide to the HMS TV Tropes..."
Do you see torpedo boats?
Drachinifel[1]
is a YouTube channel and website focused on naval history. The presenter, also known as Drachinifel, is noted for his biting humor, especially when discussing design faults (he is a civil engineer in his professional life).
The channel began as a series of discussions on individual ships and ship classes ('Five Minute Guide to Warships', initially using Text-to-Speech but later transitioning to spoken dialogue), but rapidly became a general series on naval history as whole, especially in the Classic Age of Sail (roughly 1650 to 1850), the late 19th century (with the transition to steam propulsion and iron armor) and the world wars. He generally posts three or four videos every week:
- The "Five Minute Guide" appears every Saturday
- Sundays feature the "Drydock," where Drachinifel answers viewer questions on naval history.
- The "Wednesday Rum Ration" can be an extended video on a particular topic, a museum ship tour, or a discussion with a veteran or naval history author.
- The "Fun Friday" videos can be book reviews, tours of his personal library, game reviews, or other topics seen in the Wednesday series.
Tropes occurring in the series
- April Fools' Day: has done several April 1 special videos. For 2024, the subject was the battle between the IJN cruiser Takao and Godzilla in Godzilla Minus One.
- Ascended Fanboy: Drachinifel has been invited to museum ships and naval history conferences and has had prominent naval historians such as Jon Parshall on the channel as guests.
- Cool Ship: Drachinifel is quick to praise ships he considers exemplary, especially HMS Warspite.
- Crossover: Has done videos with The Chieftain, C&Rsenal, The Cap & Ball Channel, and other history YouTube channels.
- Deadpan Snarker: Drach is noted for his dry, biting wit.
- Reliably Unreliable Guns: He discusses the flaws of several ship-borne weapon systems, most notably the Mark 14 torpedo and Japan's Type 96 25mm anti-aircraft gunnote .
- Running Gag: Thanks to Drach's engineering background, the square-cube law seems to get mentioned at least once in every "Drydock" episode.
