New Submarine Documentary Tonight
Tonight at 8pm ET/PT on Discovery Channel is a new documentary that discusses the construction of USS Virginia -- Submarine: Hidden Hunter. (Also, this morning, they're showing three episodes of Sharks of Steel. When they show the "Battle Stations" clip on the Topeka, you'll be able to see me getting up out of my chair in the Wardroom. I'm the one who carefully pushes my chair back under the table; after all, stowage for sea is important!).
posted by Bubblehead at 9:54 AM
8 Comments:
How can you tell the difference from the Seawolf and Virginia class of submarine.
4/24/2005 12:26 PM
The Virginia is the one that hides in the corner when the Seawolf sails by? (Didn't know if the comment was the first line of a joke.) Seriously, Seawolfs have a 40 foot diameter, while Virginia have a 33 ft diameter. Virginia's a little bit longer than the first two Seawolfs (about 25 feet). Also, the Virginia sail sits a little farther forward on the hull than they do on Seawolfs. (Since Virginias have a non-penetrating scope, you're not constrained to putting the sail above the control room, and apparently it's hydrodynamically advantageous to have the sail farther forward.) Bottom line: if they're not side by side, it'd be hard for a layman to tell which was which.
4/24/2005 3:20 PM
The show was pretty good, but one of the Virginia guys said he was a "sub-MARR-in-er"...
4/24/2005 7:01 PM
Other than the gay whale joke, there aren't any traditional submarine-type jokes. If you think the news is all depressing, I ran across a site that made me really depressed. See, this site had a post that was really, really horrible, and I couldn't stop laughing at it. You shouldn't visit it if you don't like obscenities, though, or have any basic humanity left in you. If not, and you enjoy "humor" that should probably be a cause for psychiatric treatment, then you can click here
4/24/2005 11:39 PM
Yes, the normal ship computers run on Windows, and yes, they crash frequently. Yes, but that picture of the sonar sphere was officially cleared by the Navy, so that makes all the difference. As far as the baseball caps, we've worn them for at least the last 40 years; some guys like hats while onboard, but most guys only wear them onboard when a TV crew's around. (You can also wear them on the Conn and turn it around to look out the 'scope; you look really cool if you pull it off right.) As far as stowage goes: there are standup lockers for the dress uniforms, but all 12 chiefs share one locker. Salad bar: Yep, but you run out of fresh veggies about 2 weeks into a run; it's nice for weekly ops, though. Yes, there's a deep fat fryer (with a really cool fire suppression system) but we normally don't do "angles and dangles" when food prep is going on unless, again, a TV crew is onboard. The most important thing to remember is that submariners are, in fact, exactly as cool as these propaganda shows make us out to be.
So, what did you think about the Swedish female submariners?
4/25/2005 10:06 PM
I misunderstood; the touch-screens don't run Windows, but all of the desktops and laptops do. The combat system is good old military-grade software that is amazingly almost as buggy as what we get in the civilian world... Regarding female submariners, I remain convinced that the biggest opponents of allowing females as submarine crewmembers are the current submarine wives...
4/26/2005 2:49 PM
Yes, she did... and all she could do was look at me and say, "That just looks wrong"...
4/26/2005 10:59 PM
Quite useful information, thanks for your post.
11/21/2011 8:57 AM
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