It is time once again for our regular open thread. Talk about whatever you want, so long as it isn't culture war.
I will be speaking at the Cambridge (MA) LessWrong Meetup on Sunday at 2:30 PM Central, discussing nuclear weapons and nuclear warfare. As I live in Oklahoma, I will be attending virtually, and all of you can, too. Link.
Book update: 77,000 words, mostly done with the chapter covering pre-WWI and starting on the WWI chapter. I've been busy doing nuclear stuff instead.
2018 overhauls are Early Dreadnoughts, ASW in WWII Forces, Sensors and Weapons, my Links Index and my review of Iowa. 2019 overhauls are A Brief History of the Destroyer, my review of the Tulsa Air and Space Museum, The Iowa Class, Shells Part 1, Sea Story - Black Oil and Falklands Part 13. 2020 overhauls are Container Ships, Coastal Defenses Part 1, O'Callahan and the Franklin and French Battleships in WWII. 2021 overhauls are Father Capodanno, The Top Gun Rant and The Fate of the French Fleet Parts one, two and three.
Comments
Pewpewpew!
https://www.navy.mil/Press-Office/News-Stories/Article/2998829/laser-trailblazer-navy-conducts-historic-test-of-new-laser-weapon-system/
More lasers!
Is there a link for the virtual version of the Cambridge talk?
Sorry. Thought that was already up. Added.
After some confusion, we're using the standard Naval Gazing meeting room for this. https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_YTg3NDAxYjQtNDRiYi00MjliLWE0N2UtNTVlY2Y3NzI0ZDhm%40thread.v2/0?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%22526c61e2-efd9-4a5a-b476-009121b3d0d5%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%228c3f077e-377f-438a-904a-8f951f2dfcf9%22%7d.
I'd love to see more sea anecdotes from Jim Pobog or any other NG readers, especially from the old steam turbine days. (What in particular was updated in that post, btw?)
Things get listed as overhauled even if I didn't touch anything. I may have one more Pobog post somewhere in my archives. If anyone else has them, I'd be more than happy to share.
Anyone have any recommended reading about the history of the Russian Navy? Ideally something a high-level overview, not too detailed. My impression is that it's mostly just one disaster after another... from the Crimean War, to Tsushima, to the Russian revolution and World Wars, to the Kursk, to this latest ship sinking. But... they must have had SOME successes, right?
@aj gyles
A bit earlier in her history, the Russian Navy was able to eclipse both the Swedes and the Turks - confining them to the far sides of their respective seas.
In re The Falklands Unpleasantness:
What were the legal statuses of the STUFT ships? They were not warships, but they did (in particular MV Atlantic Conveyor) warship things... (And the UK had forsworn Letters of Marque)
Bell is downsizing its V-247 tiltrotor UAV and pitching it to the Navy as a maritime surveillance and light attack aircraft. Now downsized, it will be able to operate off cruiser and destroyer helipads in addition to carriers and LHA/LHDs.
What's everyone's opinion on the Super Tucano? Is it still a relevant option for smaller air forces, or does the concept of "low threat" environment no longer apply after analysis of the Ukrainian war?
@Ian
Legal status isn't too much of a problem in those cases. They're merchant ships, but in government service, which lets the government do things they normally couldn't, like mount weapons. (Not that the British did that, but it happened all the time in WWII.) Atlantic Conveyor didn't really do warship things, except transfer off some Harriers. There were a number of merchant ships that flew combat missions in WWII, although a lot of those were one way.
@FXBDM
Still relevant. A Tucano is a perfect choice for hunting insurgents, who are likely to be limited to SA-7s or maybe an old Stinger or two. We've known that because they did that for a while with little problem. Russia put Ukraine in the wrong category, but this doesn't really change the categories themselves.
@FXBDM: absolutely still relevant in the role it was designed for (low-intensity conflict/COIN). Although some Air Force budgeteer is busy putting a brief together about how "As we return to focusing on combat against near-peer and pacing threats, we must divest our forces of infrastructure designed to face more stressing threats"
On the subject of the Falklands, my current favorite podcast, The Rest is History, recently did a couple of episodes on the war; they don't spend a lot of time on the military side, but mostly focus on the political/diplomatic side with some interesting stuff (especially about peace negotations).
Yay, capcha back.
It was definitely interesting to get more info on the political side of it. The foreign office wanting to sell out the Falklanders for trade benefits, and trying to stonewall the PM's efforts to save them? That's literally a Yes Minister plot, although they changed it to St. George's Island.
I didn't realize the captcha was gone. As for Yes Minister, that's the most accurate show ever broadcast about politics, AIUI.
I saw an interesting quote from Richard B. Frank's Tower of Skulls on Twitter the other day:
To what extent is this quote accurate? Can we draw a "straight line" between the Japanese success at Pearl Harbor and Japanese vulnerabilities at Midway?
That's pretty accurate. Up until the radar/CIC combination reached maturity, carriers didn't have a good way of defending themselves against air attack. US doctrine was to disperse them to make sure that a single strike didn't get the whole force, but with obvious costs in effectiveness. Philippine Sea was the harbinger of the new method, as the Japanese got in the first strike and still lost.
In theory, it should have been possible to keep a concentrated carrier force safe even prior to 1944 by just Doing More Offense. Of course said carriers would need to put a really heavy emphasis on scouting to make absolutely certain nobody else snuck up on them and Best Defense-d them first, and running a really airtight air search was very hard to do.
Another hot take from Twitter. This time, we're looking at a photo of the USNS Alan Shepard, a Lewis and Clark-class dry cargo ship. It has quite a bit of rust on it. Is this indicative of neglect, as the tweet alleges, or is this level of rust somewhat normal for a hard-working cargo ship?
That's a bloody awful lot of running rust. I'd suggest that like most supply ships, she's being run ragged. Not necessarily being neglected and allowing critical systems to completely fail, but too overworked to poke minor stuff. That's distressingly common lately, and the only real fixes are either more ships or a lower optempo.
It's not like the Russian case, where there are ships rusting to pieces for lack of money to maintain them, or lack of personnel to do the maintenance.
I've noticed that most images of container ships make them look much cleaner than a few decades ago--the Shepard here looks pretty much how I always imagine cargo ships.
Is it better rust-proofing? Cheaper maintenance done overseas? Or is it mostly just companies photographing their own ships right after a cleanup/photoshop retouching of rust stains?
@quanticle:
Mostly the latter, but while I truly hate #RustyShip Twitter, there is some level of neglect. What I think they miss is that this level of neglect is not the result of neglect on the part of ship's force but on the Navy as a whole. Given how hard we ride our ships and how underfunded they are for both maintenance and personnel, they should look like this, and when they don't, it's because the ship missed other things to prioritize on looking good.