Apparently the french archives site was victimized by a hacker attack and for at least now, the archives are no longer available. Their site simply says "Suite à des attaques perpétrées sur les bases de données du SHD, celles-ci ne sont plus disponibles, pour une durée indéterminée. Nous vous prions de bien vouloir nous en excuser." -- I cant read french, but GoogleTranslate offers that up as "Following attacks on databases of SHD, they are no longer available, for an indefinite period. We ask you to forgive us." -- It doesn't sound real positive. If this site is something that you'd like to see come back online, I'd suggest considering contacting the site administrators expressing your support. For those of you who had never been there, their site had numerous detailed scans of plans for probably a few hundred french vessels from about mid 1800s to mid 1900s. These plans no longer being available would be a significant loss. www.servicehistorique.sga.defense.g...docnum.htm
I have many of them but not all. I collected quite a few. The hacker attack was far-reaching, and sadly, our French friends neglected to update the antivirus. The extent of the damage included the French Navy being unable to use its' advanced Rafale aircraft due to the computers that generate their flight plans being corrupted. In time, I am certain that the archive will come back up. In the meanwhile, people who need french plans can email me to see if I've got them (like always, anyhow lol.
I've collected a lot of them as well, but I focused only on the WWII era ship plans. If anyone is looking for one of the french archive plans, post a request here. I might have it... Carl
Googles translate is pretty good. The french language is more flowery than the translation but that is normal for written communications. I'm interested in the drawings for the PROVENCE. I've got a couple of them but haven't had time to do a good job of it yet. The wayback machine is spotty at best and often has issues with datadriven systems. Still, it is worth a try. My bet is that the site will return but it may take 6-9 months. SHD is a recognized society... This implies structure and permanence, it also implies a slowness of action that is not something that is tolerated in the US. It is French in a very cultural sense. I was talking with the folks of the society "I remember", sort of a veterans group. They have a relatively active group with a tremendous amount on material. None of it has shown up on the web yet and my guess it that it will be a few years yet. And I was talking with them eight years ago. This is the way it works.
It looks like with a bit of URL rewriting one can gain access to all of the tiff files (so far from what I've tested atleast). I'm going to try to mirror as much of the site as I can on my own machine, from there I can provide files as need be to people. Will update this with how it goes... Edit: Well, as of this morning I was in the A's still, I'm guesstimating that I have about 20 complete sets so far, out of somewhere around 600... Download speeds from the archives site are less than stellar, this could take a few days.
Update: Finished scraping the site. Its around 7gb, so I won't be rehosting it anywhere - I don't want to spend a week uploading it - not to mention the legality of doing such would be dubious. If you have specific requests for any ships, PM me and I'll send you what I have for the ships you're interested in.
I don't see it on the list. I don't think it was ever officially a part of the french navy, so its not too surprising that it is absent.
True, but I have 2 sets of plans (USS Utah and USS Salt Lake City) that are from him and I wasn't that impressed...the deck veiws and side profile were okay, but the plans only showed around 2/3 of the ribs, and drawing the others was a pain.
Merde! You're right! Here goes: They gave in to those hackers like it was 1940 all over again! They need to look back further, to the better example set in the Great War, although, even then they nearly gave up. They should look back to the glories of Napoleon. No wait, he lost in the end.
Nick, I have quite a bit of hosting space and bandwidth. If you want to, I can set up a site and give you FTP privileges to upload the files at which point we could make the files available again... A mirror of the main one, since in light of the magnitude of the hax-attack, the historical site is probably low on the list of things to fix. I would hate to see it unavailable.
Somehow I never saw your reply to this until today. Its great in concept, but the problem is, I have all the files and theyre browsable to me in a filesystem sort of way, but the siterip didn't make a very clean 'mirror' (I actually ended up deleting most everything that wasnt a pdf or tiff as a result), so some very boring time would have to be spent to re-assemble it in a people/web friendly way. That issue aside, if you want a copy uploaded somewhere, send me a PM.