Open Thread 175

Comments

1. February 21, 2025Neal said...

   Interesting that the name mentioned as the new CJCS to replace General Brown was a 3 star. Usually it is a 4 star slot.

   Any guess as to who the next CNO will be?

   Finished Sheffield's Forgotten Victory. Nice tidy review. Nothing earth shaking yet still worth the time.

   Mentioned in the book was the 1964 26 part series from the BBC called The Great War.

   If you have have seen this it is excellent and every bit as good as its later cousin The World At War. Good segments on the RN and its learning curve. Very good watching.

2. February 22, 2025bean said...

   Adm Gilday was a 3-star before they tapped him for CNO. I think it's less usual to do that for CJCS, but these are unusual times.

3. February 23, 2025BerndL said...

   So the Iowa used a 440V main electrical system, but was this stepped down to 110V for house loads? Do they have standard American sockets for equipment that's not hardwired?

   How is the ship wired today? Do they bring in shore power at 240 split, or do they still need higher voltage for e.g. bilge pumps, some of the 5" turrets, etc?

4. February 23, 2025muddywaters said...

   @BerndL: still using the 1980s shore power connections.

   While Iowa does sometimes blank-fire a 5"/38, this doesn't require electrical power. While the 5"/38 was the first USN 5" with power aiming (which may have been what allowed it to be both heavy enough to be a good anti-surface gun and fast-turning enough to be a good AA gun) and this was the primary mode, it retained the backup manual mode.

5. February 23, 2025bean said...

   I’m not really sure how that’s handled. There’s a lot of equipment onboard that’s definitely 110V, like IT gear, and I don’t know how much work Ops had to do to make that happen. I suspect they may just be running 110V over the old 440V wiring, and have changed some plugs.

   As for the 5″ mounts, in an extremely deep cut, I was once the elevation motor, no electricity needed. (I am somewhat surprised that I left out the bit of that story about carrying a box of booze through a gaggle of boy scouts. It was a weird day.)

6. February 23, 2025muddywaters said...

   Iowas in service had some 115V single-phase equipment, including their original IT gear a.k.a. fire control, as well as 440V 3-phase equipment such as gun turret motors, so they must have had the ability to supply both voltages. (The manuals at HNSA often state power requirements, presumably because the original designers would have used them to size wiring etc.)

7. February 23, 2025BerndL said...

   Ah, neat. I figured, because it's really common to run 480V to an outbuilding and step it down to 240/120 locally. Iowa's the kind of size where you'd want to do that instead of having a central 110V power room and separate distribution lines.

   I'm actually really curious about the bilge pumps now. A 1600A 440V service could run some serious hardware, and those are the things that come to mind first for why they'd want that much.

   (Come to think of it, what do they do with mothballed ships moored out rather than at a pier? Run essential stuff off of the emergency generators?)

8. February 23, 2025bean said...

   I would sort of expect them to run power from shore because generators are sort of irritating and waterproof cables exist. As for the bilge pumps, part of mothballing is generally sealing the hull as tightly as possible. A lot of the stuff in the bilges comes in through things like the shaft stuffing glands, which leak a little bit because they have to to let the shafts turn. But you can tighten them down if you aren't planning to use the shafts, which cuts down leakage. I think the main load might be AC/de-humidification, actually.

9. February 24, 2025muddywaters said...

   This describes the mothballing process.