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Turkey: Naval rank ensigns - Senior officers

The "bomb"
Commodore
Captain
Commander

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The "bomb"

The basic charge of several Turkish rank ensigns is a "bomb" (fide Album des Pavillons [pay00]). A bomb is a kind of 20-pointed star with points of different length, with the sequence <long-small-medium-small-long> repeated four times.

The graphic construction of the bomb is very detailed in Flaggenbuch (1939) [neu92], with the following construction details:

diameter of the long rays: 40;
diameter of the medium rays: 34;
diameter of the small rays: 24.

The inner diameter of the bomb is not indicated, it could be 20. It seems that a small ray points upwards, followed clockwise by a medium ray, then by a small one and a long one, etc..

Comparatively, the bomb in Album seems to be somewhat bigger, slightly differently designed, and somewhat skewed toward the edges of the flag.

The bombs in the swallow-tailed flags in Album are relatively bigger than those in square flags, whereas in Flaggenbuch all the bombs are of the same size.

Therefore, we have decided to show the flags as they are represented in these two sources.

Ivan Sache & Zeljko Heimer, 16 April 2003

The images in the Album are taken from BR20 (1958 release), confirmed by Album des Pavillons (1990 and 1923 releases). The design of the bomb was also confirmed by an illustration in a special page of Naval Forces (December 1997) on the Turkish Navy.

Armand Noël du Payrat, 18 April 2003