And Now For Something Completely Different...
... a picture of a couple of weird-ass skimmers:
These strange looking ships are the first two Littoral Combat Ships, USS Freedom (LCS 1) and USS Independence (LCS 2) exercising together off the coast of San Diego. Normally I don't post pictures of skimmers without periscope crosshairs superimposed over them, but the last thread was rapidly reaching the limit on the number of allowed comments and I needed to post something.
What's the most fascinating thing you've ever seen through the periscope?
Update 1320 09 May: Coming up tonight on TSSBP -- how much does it cost to repair a reduction gear on an SSGN after a bolt gets left adrift inside the housing during an inspection?
posted by Bubblehead at 8:13 PM
51 Comments:
A line of perfectly straight seagulls resting their asses on our floating wire antenna in the middle of the North Atlantic!!
We might as well had a large neon sign pointing in our direction - SUBMARINE HERE !!
My CO was so pissed he wanted to electrify the FWA...
5/08/2012 8:21 PM
A pacific white sided dolphin swiming directly behind the scope while below PD. He was pointing right at the scope swimming in the slip stream. Must have been 2ft away.
5/08/2012 8:34 PM
Big topless titties under a parasail.
5/08/2012 9:12 PM
OOD had the scope hooked up to the monitor taking observation on alarge merchant. He says "I can read something on the side it says...nos...nosmo its the nosmo king." I was helm looked at the monitor and said "Sir, its an LPG tanker it says 'No Smoking'"
5/08/2012 9:30 PM
Something that made me want to shit my poopie suit. And that's all I say about that.
5/08/2012 9:37 PM
A blue-green-white iceberg about 1x2 miles and Lord knows how high in an otherwise clear ocean. It was given an extremely generous and distant passage.
5/08/2012 9:50 PM
Those two ships are the same class? No way.......
When you are looking at perivis and the weirdos in the locked room tell the OOD "DO NOT DIP THE SCOPE!".
hagar
5/08/2012 11:16 PM
Very good looking women on a cruse ship while transiting The canal. It was heart warming to see so many of my countrymen cheering us on as we were out for a little bit of a cruise too. Also, contacts bearing a flag of a country that shall remain nameless. Not all that fascinating, but to me at the time it was.
5/09/2012 12:48 AM
Aside from spotting people at the smoke pit when they got a phone call the most interesting underway thing I ever saw was fog. Lots and lots of fog.
I recently got a tour of the USS Freedom and I will say that is one damned impressive ship (even for a surface boat). I was really surprised at how small the crew was. The fire control setup and room had me getting my Navy geek on. I had to refrain from asking the FCC too many questions about all his toys because I didnt want to get thrown off the boat.
The highlight of that tour was watching the XO sweeping the passageway outside his stateroom.
5/09/2012 2:57 AM
Kamchatka volcanoes....
5/09/2012 6:57 AM
Times two on Kamchatka volcanoes. Those thing really are amazing, they just seem to "erupt" (pun intended) from the ocean. Stunning really...
5/09/2012 7:03 AM
OOD: "I think I see a an ice burg, bearing mark."
JOOD: "Yeah, I think you are right. JOOW, go and get the ice pilot."
Ice Pilot looking through the periscope: "Huh, I've never seen an ice burg before..."
We were all scared at that point.
5/09/2012 7:16 AM
May '87 FleetEx took 8x10 shots of Saratoga in the hairs.
5/09/2012 8:03 AM
Fred.... Deciding if he wanted Mustard as he was chomping away.
5/09/2012 8:30 AM
USS New Jersey (BB-62) driving through our operating area near Pearl Harbor. Big, beautiful ship.
5/09/2012 8:43 AM
SBX-1. It looks like EPCOT at sea.
5/09/2012 8:59 AM
The underside of a freshly frozen polynia, it looked like thousands of prisms had been thrown on a sheet of glass with a bright light behind it. beautiful
5/09/2012 9:22 AM
The bottom of another large country's newest cruiser circa 1985
5/09/2012 10:42 AM
What's the most fascinating thing you've ever seen through the periscope?
Another ship's screw.
5/09/2012 12:08 PM
Y'know, I seen me a mermaid once. I even seen me a shark eat an octopus. But I ain't never seen no phantom Russian submarine.
5/09/2012 12:42 PM
Skimmer CO Canned:
http://www.wtop.com/120/2857684/USS-The-Sullivans-commander-removed-from-job
5/09/2012 12:49 PM
How could they be the same class? maybe prototypes for the class but if they are the same class the next step will be all subs are SSN's
5/09/2012 1:14 PM
As far as the reduction gears go, that's kind of old news. Pretty sure that happened over a year ago.
5/09/2012 2:41 PM
WRT the picture, they are both Littoral Combat Ships. However, from the Navy Fact File:
"The LCS class consists of two variants, the Freedom variant and Independence variant - designed and built by two industry teams, respectively led by Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics, Bath Iron Works. These seaframes will be outfitted with reconfigurable payloads, called Mission Packages, which can be changed out quickly. Mission packages are supported by special detachments that will deploy manned and unmanned vehicles and sensors in support of mine, undersea and surface warfare missions."
5/09/2012 2:48 PM
Rumor is the one star list will be out tomorrow. Any bets on the selectees?
5/09/2012 2:48 PM
Beautiful deck of a grisha heeled over
5/09/2012 5:06 PM
Looking out the scope one morning after duty section I see a JO's wife kissing a STS2 behind a dumpster between the parking lot and pier. Didn't realize the periviz was on as I shifted to high power.
Didn't end well for the JO, STS2, or one month pregnant JO wife-whore.
Everything else I have seen is classified.
5/09/2012 5:39 PM
The port buoy, sitting on the turtleback, after a hovering drill gone horribly awry...
5/09/2012 5:46 PM
LCS= Prixfix ships that are disposable in combat hence, the small crews and massive amount of automation. "In April 2012, Chief of Naval Operations Greenert said "You won't send it into an anti-access area. But Navy Secretary Ray Mabus clarified that the ship could operate in combat areas, as long as it remained under the protection of real warships." No joke. Oh and the PM got canned for Inappropriate conduct in Jan of this year. Program is plagued with cost overruns and hull structure issues. Just another waste of tax dollars that could be spent on Submarines.
5/09/2012 6:16 PM
To those of us obsessed with female lifeforms, this probably tops any perisscope sightings open to public discussion. At bottom of THIS LINK.
5/09/2012 6:28 PM
@ anon 5:39 PM
''Looking out the scope one morning after duty section I see a JO's wife kissing a STS2''
I really enjoy viewing lesbian sex.
Just sayin'
5/09/2012 6:30 PM
While playing surface ship in the persian gulf I saw a dead hadji floating face down. Best part was that the XO wanted to recover the body for identification. We told the XO that the body was purple and bloated and he would explode when we hit him with the fin. CO called it in we let him float away. Good times.
5/09/2012 6:35 PM
Damn, vigilus. Stop plugging your tinfoil-hat website.
5/09/2012 7:03 PM
While conducting ops several decades ago off a North African country, whose name rhymes with "tibia,", I saw what appeared to be an inverted ship, floating just above the horizon. The ship's waterline was facing the sky, and the stacks and cranes were pointed down towards the horizon.
Turns out it was an optical mirage, called a "fata morgana," which inverted the image and allowed us to see over the horizon a little bit.
5/09/2012 7:05 PM
My former CO and COB walking down the pier...too soon?
5/09/2012 8:32 PM
29 comments before Vigilus got on his anti-woman high-horse again. Gimme McMullen any day! At least his posts are sorta funny, in a crazy-uncle sorta way; Vigilus strikes me as a woman-hating future rapist in-waiting
Back to topic: coming up to PD at night w/ full moon and small waves: hard to describe the beauty. I wonder with the 774 class and its camera-scopes if some magic will be lost: looking out the scope was a small privelege (but the camera's gotta be less fatiguing that walking around w/ one eye stuck on that scope for hours on end....)
5/09/2012 9:44 PM
Anonymous 5/09/2012 10:42 AM wrote:
The bottom of another large country's newest cruiser circa 1985
I think we may have been on the same boat. Christmas in Singapore, and Perth after the Challenger disaster?
5/09/2012 10:47 PM
watching a section of the missile deck superstructure peeling away like it was cardboard while being tossed around sea state 4 conditions.
5/10/2012 1:32 AM
TDU cans bobbing up. Needless to say I was COB and DOOW! The Captain was on the conn!
5/10/2012 5:16 AM
This...today's periscope sighting:
“I have to tell you that over the course of several years as I talked to friends and family and neighbors, when I think about members of my own staff who are in incredibly committed monogamous relationships, same-sex relationships, who are raising kids together; when I think about those soldiers or airmen or marines or sailors who are out there fighting on my behalf and yet feel constrained, even now that ‘don't ask, don't tell’ is gone, because they are not able to commit themselves in a marriage, at a certain point I've just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same sex couples should be able to get married.”
-- President Barack H. Obama, May 9, 2012
Sad. But look at it this way...at least now we know what the fighting's all about.
5/10/2012 6:46 AM
Yeah, the idea was to pick one of the hulls for the class. But....we decided not to pick (as in, we're getting both), at ridiculous cost. They have completely different structures, fire control systems, electronics, maintenance...so the training for each is completely different. Really a brilliant move.
All I wanted was an electric stapler at my sweet staff job, but I couldn't get that because of fiscal constraints.....if we had just picked one of those two, maybe I'd have my electric stapler.....
5/10/2012 7:53 AM
@anon 5/10 1:32 AM
yea, and we had to cover your targets for an additional two weeks
5/10/2012 10:52 AM
My first patrol:
Me: "Are those TDU cans?"
Dipshit rider from HMJ: "Oh no, they put weights in those so they sink"
Me: "I'm pretty sure that is a TDU can"
CO (who had not been in control 3 seconds before): "My scope"
CO takes one look out the scope and heads straight down to the TDU room.
One of my former students at USNA told me he was headed to one of the LCS', I asked him if he was going to the one that is rusting away or the one thats hull is cracking....
5/10/2012 11:14 AM
My computer desk top is a picture of an ice berg I took in the early seventies transiting between undisclosed locations. It was right on our track and if I had not decided I wanted a NAVSAT fix (I was Navigator), we would have run right into the berg. "Always scratch that itch."
5/10/2012 3:44 PM
Presidential Seal 6:46 - they are out there on my behalf too, yours too probably.
Once Obama is re-elected do we have to listen to you guys crying like women for another four years?
5/10/2012 4:42 PM
Fact, not fiction: Obama will lose in a landslide. Pretty simple math, really.
5/10/2012 5:21 PM
Did they move the Democrat convention out of NC yet?
5/10/2012 5:24 PM
Periscope liberty north east of Norway in the 70's.
A P-3 Orion coming straight at me with all four engines turning. On high power I could see the pilot and copilot's faces.
ex-EM1(SS)
5/11/2012 6:33 AM
PACEX 1989...we got close enough to the Nimitz doing flight ops the CO was reading the names off the planes as they landed.
5/11/2012 11:01 AM
I was a nuke MM. The only periscope I looked through was the one on the screen of the Atari video game we had in the lounge.
5/12/2012 6:42 PM
People keep talking about "How can they be in the same class?"
They are not. They are both the first ship in their respective classes. The Freedom-class and Independence-class are competing classes for the LCS standard.
5/19/2012 9:53 AM
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