Posted on 04/10/2017 8:45:57 PM PDT by johnk
Crazy Ivan.
60 kts? Don’t even imagine a speed that high. My 30+ years as a naval architect argues that the physics of the problem just won’t support that claim. A surface effect ship can make that speed, but could never carry the deadweight payload required of an aircraft carrier.
I hadn’t mess duty in the Chief’s mess on the Dubuque in 1994—as an embarked Marine. Not easy, but much better than the slave labor on the mess decks
Exactly! We just screwed up, he thought I was doing it, and I thought he was doing it, and...neither of us did it! But for some reason, we never got chewed out for it. It seems now, like the kind of thing SOMEONE would have got an ass-chewing for!
That is exactly so...far better than the general enlisted mess.
Food was better, and for some odd reason, the chiefs didn’t mess with you.
I know in the general enlisted mess, there was often acrimonious back and forth between the lower enlisted peons like me and our fellow lower enlisted peons, and there always seemed to be some E3 or E4 cook who would be a hard-ass about something, because I saw them being a-holes to some other poor pimply faced FNG bottom feeder like me!
I worked for a young fellow that was a sailor on the Princeton after she hit a mine in the Gulf War. They claimed she was sea worthy but tons of stuff didn’t work right. They’re supposed to do a test at sea out of San Diego but leadership knows the skipper and that the ship is a disaster and says you can do test while tied up at dock with other ships. They’re doing the test and a sailor hits the button to close the hanger doors, but he hits the foam dispenser instead. There was foam everywhere. A huge mess. There was foam on their ship as well as the ones tied next to them. The skipper walked out to see it and said, “Well, at least there’s one thing that works on this f**g ship”. The sailors were picking up the foam in plastic bags. The guy I worked for said it was very funny.
It was a calm day on Yankee Station in 1971 (or maybe it was ‘70) when the U.S.S. Enterprise took some down time from bombing to conduct a top end run. I was on the destroyer closest to her starboard side and was called out of my electronic cave to watch the action by my buddy on the surface radar up in CIC. Our ship and the other five escorts were steaming east around 20 knots and the Enterprise was dead in the water almost to the horizon behind us. I saw a great cloud of steam from her and she started to accelerate. In a couple of minutes, she passed us with a rooster tail higher than her flight deck and the wake put us on 20 degree rolls. She disappeared over the horizon and I called my radarman and asked how fast she was going. He replied that the surface radar was unable to track speed in excess of 65 knots and that the Enterprise exceeded that several miles before she disappeared. That carrier was fully loaded with crew, planes, ordnance and all the stuff needed for bombing the snot out of Hanoi.
High speed turn during sea trials.
From that point, I always looked a the sub guys and engine room guys a little different, because it had to be far, FAR worse for those guys if they ever lost airflow.
After that, when I watched those movies about WWII submarines and the guys being held under by depth charges, and the air getting stinking, humid to the point of nearly raining from condensation, and CO2 levels rising, I could only shake my head and remind me how glad I was never to have to experience that level.
One of my favorite movies was "The Bedford Incident" with Richard Widmark and Sidney Poitier, where Richard Widmark is the martinet Captain of a destroyer that encounters a Soviet sub up in the Arctic ice and harasses it, trying to force it to surface. He has an old WWII German U-Boat commander aboard as a NATO advisor (this movie took place in the late Fifties or early Sixties) and the German understood all too well what was going on in that Soviet non-nuclear sub that they forced back down every time they tried to come up and snorkel in some air. He fought with the Captain, telling him that he was going to make that sub captain desperate, and that was the most dangerous and unpredictable foe, a desperate submariner.
Great movie. Richard Widmark always reminded me of my dad, if not only in appearance to a degree, but his mannerisms when smoking, which was spot on...felt like I was watching my Dad in the movie, the way he lit and smoked his unfiltered Pall Mall cigarettes.
My dad was the XO on one of the blockade destroyers (out of Newport, RI) during the Cuban Missile Crisis, so I definitely was inclined to see him in that character anyway...:)
LOL, that’s hilarious!
I don’t know how fast the JFK could go, it was never even revealed to us. But when I stood in the hangar bay looking out at the ocean as it swept by when we were running at high speed, the perception felt much the same to me as being on a Greyhound bus traveling at highway speeds.
Carrier Photos...GREAT!
Swing checks. Right full rudder, rudder amidships, left full rudder, rudder amidships. Swing checks complete.
“Veer left!”
Good movie.
Port and starboard are nautical terms for left and right, respectively. Port is the left-hand side of or direction from a vessel, facing forward.
I never piloted an aircraft carrier, but isn’t this a turn to starboard?
I ship will heel over to starboard in a port turn. Like a car does.
A carrier can only go as fast as the slowest escort vessel.
Looks like hillary is getting a tour of the control room
Now, KEEL TO STARBOARD KEEL TO STARBOARD. The poor guy in #1 pumproom goes flying against the bulkhead if he didn’t hear it.
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