Talk:List of mine warfare vessels of the United States Navy

Question
147.240.236.9 23:12, 17 November 2005 (UTC) Where is the list of World War II minelayers and minesweepers, the AM, AMS, and AMc series. I can't add them because I don't have the entire list. Could someone please add these. 147.240.236.9 23:12, 17 November 2005 (UTC)

Found some
OK, I found a partial list. There are still some missing. Who has the missing items? 147.240.236.9 23:02, 14 December 2005 (UTC)

Needs thorough editing
There is only one authority on the terminology, the U.S. Navy itself. Only the Navy determines what the classifications "mean." Not a matter for "other opinions" or "sources" at all. The list everyone should be working from is the Naval Vessel Register's US Navy Inactive Classification Symbols. In addition there is a lot of improper tagging of small non-commissioned types as "USS" and that is a blunder akin to "President Stevenson" or "President Goldwater" in an article. The Navy explicitly reserves that for vessels in commission, even to using "ex USS Name, and removing the term form ships in overhaul/layup non-commissioned status though informally once commissioned ships get the honorific in many cases. Palmeira (talk) 13:37, 21 April 2015 (UTC)

Dates?
It would be nice for this article to include dates of commission and decommission, as similar articles in the sidebar do (eg List of frigates of the United States Navy). At the very least, it can and should be organized by ship class, occasionally including contextual information about when various classes were in service. As it is, almost every ship listed here was in service during WWII, but then it also has Littoral combat ships listed, which while definitely mine warfare vessels seem amiss amongst the endless page of decommissioned small craft. Adding dates or contextual information is a surely massive task -- any thoughts before I get started on it? -- - - mathmitch7 (talk/contribs) 19:02, 25 March 2021 (UTC)
 * So I've been splitting this article up into ship classes, which has been very useful in terms of identifying which ships were in service when. One very confusing thing that this article should reckon with is that as numerous small craft, most mine warfare ships in the US Navy were reclassified one if not multiple times to new types. Consider eg the USS Goldfinch (AMS-12), which variously had the hull numbers YMS-306, AMS-12, and MSC(O)-12. This ship is currently listed three times for its three different nominal types on this page, as a Auxiliary Motor Mine Sweeper (YMS), an Ocean Minesweeper (AMS), and a "Minesweeper, Coastal (Old)" (MSC(O)). As each ship has a unique trajectory on the reclassification path, and some ships were destroyed/transferred while their sister ships were reclassified, there's no easy way to consolidate this. This is made all the more confusing by the fact that some names are re-used for multiple minesweeping ships over the years, eg USS Albatross, which was the name of (as far as I can tell) four different USN minesweepers (including one planned but not constructed). I don't really know my point here, I just think the list should probably be consolidated with the principle that one ship should have one entry on this list. One way I could see doing this would be to break it down top-level by classes first and not hull number/type, and then actually implementing some kind of tables that would list multiple hull numbers for the same ship, multiple commission/decommission dates/transfer dates, etc. I also think it would be reasonable to break this list up into subpages as well (which could absolutely be overlapping), but that's kinda a different project. Does anybody have any thoughts on how we might clarify this extensive list? - - mathmitch7 (talk/contribs) 12:36, 27 March 2021 (UTC)