While I've Been Off-Line...

Sorry for the non-existent posting over the last many days; I was visiting my folks back in the land of the dial-up Internet connection. Here are some submarine-related items that have been in the news since then:

1) The Navy announced a schedule for the rebuilding of USS Miami (SSN 755) following the shipyard fire.

2) DARPA has an "unmanned submarine hunter" program. It won't work until we get computers that think like humans since there are so many extraneous submarine-like noises in the ocean that it'll lock on to something other than a submarine, but it's still pretty cool from a geek perspective.

3) PCU North Dakota (SSN 784) released their official ship's crest. I've seen worse. Not so much with the ship's motto "Strength from the Soil", which sucks just about as much ass as any boat's motto I've ever heard. It's especially disturbing that they chose that when they had the much better option "Reapers of the Deep" alongside it on their crest. I'm guessing the PTB decided the latter was too "warlike", so they had to adopt the pussified version as the official motto; I'm glad they kept the better version visible on the coat of arms.

4) Here's an interesting report from a Guardian reporter about his ride on HMS Triumph (S 93).

5) And here's the long-form trailer for the upcoming new ABC series "Last Resort", apparently about a boomer that declares themselves an independent nation after getting genocidal orders from the evil U.S. military establishment. I'm not guessing it'll have a lot in the way of an accurate depiction of submarine life, but I'm sure we'll learn a lot about how evil either the CIA or conservatives in the U.S. military/government are (or maybe even the evil military/industrial complex, along with oil companies).