The Navy Thread

I thought they'd gone back to steam catapults by royal decree anyway.

Nope, they just ingnored him and he forgot about it.

Like every one thought would happen.

And the nuke reactor replaced with a powerplant burning all-natural organic coal.

Well, from what I've been reading in a quick google search, this is one instance where Trump shouldn't have been ignored, since the EMALS has some pretty damn severe reliability problems, to the point that it's basically better to rip them out and rework the ships to use steam catapults. The statistics I saw were with EMALS as it currently is, it only has a 9% chance to do a 4-day surge, and eve worse, it only has a 70% chance to do even a single goddamn day of sustained operations. And since supercarriers like the Ford are DESIGNED around CATOBAR aircraft, until the issues are ironed out, the ship is basically a giant floating paperweight.

No that is not an instance where he should be listened to at all. The extensive cost and time it would take to refit would be prohibitive and introduce a large number of issues itself given the carrier was intended to be used with EMALS in the first place. That and the carrier has other issues including radar, arresting systems, and the new munitions elevators. All of which are using new stuff not tested before. EMALS has also been fixed recently and the fix will hit the first carrier sometime in 2019. The limitation came from a need to change control software. Plus the testing and evaluation schedule was still working on other systems which led to the 2019 delay because they literally are testing a brand new carrier design.

Let's not forget that one way or another EMALS is the future. The benefits it provides are pretty massive over a steam catapult, and with the way its development has been heading it's only a question of when.

They are still going to do more shake down stuff and I am betting more things are going to break. Another problem is the gear is so new the crews and techs don't actually have fully developed SOP for maintenance and repair cycles. They will likely get EMALS working the way they wanted to.

Frankly I think Trump is whining because he can't dick wave with the carrier and his grossly overt ignorance on damn near everything pretty much suggests he should be ignored especially when he starts firing his actual capable and knowledgeable advisors like McMasters.

edited 25th Mar '18 11:09:29 AM by TuefelHundenIV

Wreck of the USS Juneau, famous for the deaths of the 5 Sullivan brothers, discovered in Pacific

By James Rogers | Fox News

The wreck of the USS Juneau, which was sunk by a Japanese torpedo and lost 687 sailors in 1942, has been discovered by billionaire Paul Allen’s crew.

Five brothers from the Sullivan family were famously lost on the USS Juneau. Their story, which attracted widespread attention, was depicted in the 1944 movie “The Fighting Sullivans.” Two USS Navy ships have been named “The Sullivans” in memory of the brothers.

The brothers wanted to serve on the same ship, despite naval policies preventing siblings from serving together.

The USS Juneau was found on St. Patrick’s Day resting on the seafloor near the Solomon Islands. An autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) from the research vessel Petrel first identified the wreck using sonar on March 17. The following day, a remotely operated underwater vehicle (ROV) was deployed from Petrel to verify the wreckage, capturing video footage of the Juneau. Juneau 2

“We certainly didn’t plan to find the Juneau on St. Patrick’s Day. The variables of these searches are just too great,” said Robert Kraft, director of subsea operations for Paul Allen, in a statement. “But finding the USS Juneau on Saint Patrick’s Day is an unexpected coincidence to the Sullivan brothers and all the service members who were lost 76 years ago.”

Juneau was sunk on Nov. 13 1942 during the Battle of Guadalcanal. When a second torpedo hit her port side, an explosion cut the ship in half, killing most of the crew. The light cruiser sank in just 30 seconds. Around 115 of Juneau’s crew are believed to have survived the sinking, including, possibly, two of the Sullivan brothers. However, with U.S. forces concerned about the risk of further Japanese attacks, rescue efforts did not take place until eight days later. Only 10 men were rescued from the water.

The first ship named after the brothers, USS The Sullivans (DD-537), was commissioned in 1943 and is now a museum ship in Buffalo. The second ship to bear the family name (DDG-68) is in active service as a guided missile destroyer.

“As the fifth commanding officer of USS The Sullivans (DDG 68), a ship named after five brothers, I am excited to hear that Allen and his team were able to locate the light cruiser USS Juneau (CL 52) that sunk during the Battle of Guadalcanal,” said Vice Adm. Rich Brown, commander, Naval Surface Forces, in a statement. “The story of the USS Juneau crew and Sullivan brothers epitomize the service and sacrifice of our nation’s greatest generation.”

Expeditions led by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen have discovered a host of historic military shipwrecks, such as the USS Lexington, which was located earlier this month, 76 years after it was lost in the Battle of the Coral Sea.

Last year Allen’s crew found the long-lost wreck of the USS Indianapolis in the Philippine Sea. The sinking of the Indianapolis, which delivered the Hiroshima bomb and is mentioned in the movie "Jaws," in 1945 resulted in the greatest single loss of life at sea in the U.S. Navy’s history. Of 1,196 crew aboard the heavy cruiser, only 317 survived.

Fox News’ Christopher Carbone contributed to this article. Follow James Rogers on Twitter @jamesjrogers

Well, if Paul Allen is tooling around the Solomons to find more ships, he has plenty to go after, there's still tons of ships from both sides yet to be found in that part of the South Pacific. Maybe he'll find Hiei, Kirishima or Hornet next.

People also forget that the whole point of shakedown cruise is to get everything running so you can find out what will break (not if it will break). Ships are crazy complicated pieces of engineering even when they aren't using brand new technology. Only way to find out what's gonna fail is to get it out in the waves and wind with everything running and see what gives first.

^ And not just only to see what breaks, but also how it breaks when it breaks. Will the thing break in such a way that it can be patched together by Seaman Snuffy with some duct tape and 550 cord and it'll hold until we pull back into port? Or will it break in such a catastrophically epic way that we might need to call Abandon Ship? (Or a tow...)

What is left of a sub that falls below crush depth? Is it like steping on a soda can, or does it just plain dicintigrate?

Intense pressure alone can't disintegrate the steel hull and the interior machinery. Basically, a bunch of scrap metal sinks to the ocean floor.

Some say that the sudden inrush of water flooding the hull compresses the atmosphere inside the sub, causing it to ignite and incinerate the interior. I don't know if that's true, or what the physics of the argument behind it are. Sounds like a sea story to me.

I am mostly curious to the state of the reactor.

Because this arises from an argument about the saftey of nuclear powered ships in war.

I have pointed out that dispute the fact that we have the better part of a dozen ships now giving fish homes with nuclear weapons and equipment aboard.... none of them have any radiation levels above that of the normal background radiation meaning that they are 100% safe to use at sea.

Other people are arguing that that's not true because none of them have had any of the nuclear hardware breached.....

But I am pretty sure that examples like Thatcher and Krusk which went past crush depth and exploded respectivly are pretty good indications of safety.

The Kursk blew up because of one of her torpedoes, not the reactor.

Here is something else to consider. The sub will not have uniform resistances throughout its structure. Part of why crush depth matters is that water pressure breaches the hull and floods the sub. However that is pressure on a hollow space that is the biggest concern. The numerous more solid structures such as struts, engines, reactors, bulkheads, and similar solid structures will resist far greater pressure by comparison. Also as the sub fills with water the less the external pressure affects the structure as pressure is basically equalized and the water can't really compress itself.

edited 9th Apr '18 7:53:04 PM by TuefelHundenIV

Given the design of the reactors used in most nuclear submarines I'd imagine even if the submarine were crushed the reactor would be mostly intact, or at the very least wouldn't allow all that much nuclear material to escape. Most of the really bad nuclear incidents on subs have been because of some sort of explosive failure.

@Tom: Yes, which is honestly why she is an even better indicator of how things would go in combat IMHO.... since you know explodin due to a torpedo is what one could expect.

@Tuffey: Fair enough, any of them at depths that would break the reactor?

@Archon: None have radiation levels above background, which is a pretty good thing.

Here's a good picture of a naval reactor, it's an older one but you can see the pressure vessel is substantial. [1]◊

Of course, it's not that a torpedo goes off on the sub, but where. A torpedo going off in a bow tube would have a rather different effect from one striking amidships, but all the same, I suspect the engineers took that into account when designing the reactors. Then again, engineering is one of those areas where you probably shouldn't go assuming. It's rude.

Immy: Courtesy of that image and the fact they try to protect the reactor to begin with I would be amazed if the reactor would crack open even at max depth. Especially how much of it is pretty much solid machinery.

I don't think the walls of the reactor vessel are actually as thick as the upper rim seems to suggest. Still, better a few tons too much than one ounce too little.

Is there any website out there that would help with identifying the specific ships in a class? I know that they had diffrences but I can only really tell Yammers from Musashi.... Or the various Atago class heavy cruisers since they changed the exaust system on them.

I would also like to be able to tell Kaga and Akagi apart in photos(post refit when the exaust was standardized), or Shokaku and Zukaku.

edited 15th Apr '18 3:43:35 PM by Imca

Your best bet would be looking for markings, on newer classes the differences are often minimal.

Where it gets really fun is that individual ships can change their outward appearances in some pretty substantial ways due to refits and rebuilds. The various Battleships that served in WWI and WWII were among the worst for this sort of thing, with about the only thing not moving around being the turrets.

Looking for WWII ships specificly actualy.

Hence why I specified post refit Akagi and Kaga, they were very diffrent pre-refit, then got very standardized.