Question To Boldly Go...

I found this little article just now. And since we have quite a few Navy vets among us you might enjoy this. CVN 80

Completely unrelated, but the thread title made me think of this time B5 took a swipe at Trek (starting at 1m21s, and please don't kill me for this, E. E.):

The Navy without having an Enterprise would seem to be somehow wrong...

That being said, the Ford class carriers are rather interesting because of all the new technology they are using. No more steam catapults for example. One would almost think they were designed by a gageteer.

However, I do have many concerns about them as well. Every new class of ships has included bugs, design flaws and mysterious anomalies that often only crop up after they become operational and exposed to the high operating tempo the Navy forces on our Fleet. I long for the days of the 600 or even 1,000 ship Navy. The current operational setting places great stress on the ships and the crews. Fatigue at sea is a recipe for disaster, just look at the number of recent "incidents".

Every ship needs full manning, not minimal manning and not "optimized crew size" manning. We need enough people on each ship to mitigate fatigue and provide a ready reserve of people to deal with manning for maneuvering watches, battle stations and extended times at stations.

MM2, so what you're positing that it is possible that the recent spate of collisions are not necessarily operator error so much as operator fatigue?

Anne wrote: MM2, so what you're positing that it is possible that the recent spate of collisions are not necessarily operator error so much as operator fatigue?

Driving a ship through a busy straight is not the same thing as driving one's vehicle down the road. A closer analogy would a multiple street intersection with no street lights and no police and no clearly marked lanes to segregate the traffic. It is damned easy to have way too many contacts within a relatively short range for one person to track.

Nor is it remotely like air traffic control for a busy airport. For one thing, there are no filed flight plans nor will there be. Unlike aircraft, which can easily change altitude to segregate craft going in different directions, ships have a choice of "surface", "aground", or "sunk". The same applies to the idea of just having them "go around". Airplanes might get out of the way, but islands and reefs usually won't even try.

Much of the idea behind minimal manning is that all the tedious work can be offloaded to computers. I'd lay odds that so many automated track computations are wildly off, and/or fluctuate wildly between consecutive "solutions", that very little trust can be placed in them once things get busy. So now you have to have an E4 or three sitting in the dark manually correcting the contacts that seem to offer the most risk. Efficiency expert: but a computer screen can take the place of an old-fashioned tote board for relaying his work to the bridge! Nope. Because then there isn't an E3 or E4 asking WTF the guys in CIC are smoking, say again and get it right this time while the lookouts check to see if the radar blips come equipped with running lights (nor ls that person relaying the Conning Officer's questions on which ship out there is which target.)

Back when rocks were softer, there would be a number of Operations Specialists tracking air and surface targets in CIC, with a Petty Officer of the Watch, a CIC Officer of the Watch, and a Tactical Action Officer making sure the right information is getting to the right stations, including the bridge crew and lookouts. Even then, CIC watchstanders would be on some version of port/starboard watches, which quickly become "port and report" once special activities and training drills are taken into account.

Lookouts are very useful, btw. They do need to stay sharp, but again, minimal manning may mean that there's only so many people to stand watches AND do everything that has to be done aboard ship.

Restricted maneuvering details - which may be set for fairly obvious reasons - can mean that the officers who take care of specific duties aren't getting relieved so frequently either.

There's more to it than that, and the mind boggles at how exhaustion combined with any number of problems could stack up, but yeah, anyone claiming to the reporters it was a simple "operator error" doesn't know what they're talking about.

Thank you for your concise explanation. I rather thought that relieving the commander of those ships was a lot of closing the door after all the livestock had been pilfered, but I'm just an army puke and you couldn't get me in more water than is necessary to shower for very much, so I'll rely on more experienced minds to tell me the facts. Sure I'll salt them the way that seems sensible, but I wouldn't touch electricity and running a ship sounds more like juggling about 50 balls with a few sharp objects and a running chainsaw with the throttle strapped wide open in the mix! So I'm not pleased to hear what my mind was telling me was true to be true and know that a couple of officers have lost their careers over these scrapes...
For all you else where I'm enjoying one of the outer circles of hell right now its and the fires have so much smoke in my area that I'll be cold smoked as well!

Consider also:

Imagine yourself driving an eighteen-wheeler in a large parking lot. Granted, the parking is nowhere near full -- only a few cars around, and they aren't packed together. However the maximum steering you manage to do is like a quarter-turn of the wheel, your brakes are ridiculously underpowered to the tune that it would take some 200 meters to stop (at parking lot speeds!), the other cars are all moving (even if they some of them don't move very much) and, to make it worse, the pavement under you is moving too, pulling you invisibly in some direction. Oh, and there are also hidden tiger traps under the asphalt -- you know where they are supposed to be, but they are very hard to see. How long can you maneuver in these conditions before something happens?

That's pretty much what means piloting a large ship in a harbor.

Sir Lee wrote: Consider also:

Imagine yourself driving an eighteen-wheeler in a large parking lot. Granted, the parking is nowhere near full -- only a few cars around, and they aren't packed together. However the maximum steering you manage to do is like a quarter-turn of the wheel, your brakes are ridiculously underpowered to the tune that it would take some 200 meters to stop (at parking lot speeds!), the other cars are all moving (even if they some of them don't move very much) and, to make it worse, the pavement under you is moving too, pulling you invisibly in some direction. Oh, and there are also hidden tiger traps under the asphalt -- you know where they are supposed to be, but they are very hard to see. How long can you maneuver in these conditions before something happens?

That's pretty much what means piloting a large ship in a harbor.

And occasionally some idiot on a motorcycle zips by going twice as fast as you, not paying any attention to you.

MM2ss wrote: The Navy without having an Enterprise would seem to be somehow wrong...

That being said, the Ford class carriers are rather interesting because of all the new technology they are using. No more steam catapults for example. One would almost think they were designed by a gageteer.

However, I do have many concerns about them as well. Every new class of ships has included bugs, design flaws and mysterious anomalies that often only crop up after they become operational and exposed to the high operating tempo the Navy forces on our Fleet. I long for the days of the 600 or even 1,000 ship Navy. The current operational setting places great stress on the ships and the crews. Fatigue at sea is a recipe for disaster, just look at the number of recent "incidents".

Every ship needs full manning, not minimal manning and not "optimized crew size" manning. We need enough people on each ship to mitigate fatigue and provide a ready reserve of people to deal with manning for maneuvering watches, battle stations and extended times at stations.

The Catch there i cost. As much as I also would love to see a cold war era sized fleet again, Most people would not be willing to pay the extra taxes to bring the Navy back to those numbers.

Every new anything always has bugs it is just a fact of life, Look at WW2, the B-29 had an extreme engine flaw when it was first built and then deployed, it was not fixed until almost the end of the war. the reason new technology always has bugs is no body can for see all the stresses that will be imposed on it till it is. we try to get it as good as we can the first time and fix flaws as they show up. That is the way it is with cars, computers, phones, heck even guns and well everything man made. The big change with these ships is they are designed to be upgraded and modified. The systems are all modular and the ships reactors are made with a whole lot of extra output potential for future changes. But time will tell what we got right and what we got wrong.

Kristin Darken wrote: Sometimes the idiot on a motorcycle is trying to block you with a protest sign.

Greenpeace gets really pissy when you capsize their little boats with high pressure fire hoses...

To be fair, if Greenpeace capsized your boats with fire hoses, I suspect pissy wouldn't even begin to describe the reaction.

No plan survives contact with reality intact, let alone contact with an active enemy!!!

Kristin Darken wrote: Sometimes the idiot on a motorcycle is trying to block you with a protest sign.

Greenpeace gets really pissy when you capsize their little boats with high pressure fire hoses...

I've heard that Greenpeace used to try to harass Navy submarines, and it went very, very poorly for them. Like, commandos scuttling their boats out in the ocean and calling the Coast Guard to rescue them afterwards poorly.

Katssun wrote:

Kristin Darken wrote: Sometimes the idiot on a motorcycle is trying to block you with a protest sign.

Greenpeace gets really pissy when you capsize their little boats with high pressure fire hoses...

I've heard that Greenpeace used to try to harass Navy submarines, and it went very, very poorly for them. Like, commandos scuttling their boats out in the ocean and calling the Coast Guard to rescue them afterwards poorly.

Remember that one of France's greatest modern victories was the sinking of a Greenpeace ship.

Yeah, that's still a sore subject with both New Zealand and Australia.