It's time for our regular open thread. Talk about whatever you want, so long as it's not culture war.
The big news this week is that my appearance on Russell Hogg's Subject to Change podcast is out. If you want to listen to an hour of me rambling about Yamato, the Japanese Navy in general, the French Fleet, the obsolescence of the battleship and the future of the aircraft carrier, then it can be found here. Thanks to Russell for having me on. He's also done interviews with other interesting people,
Overhauls for 2018 are Early Dreadnoughts, ASW in WWII Forces, Sensors and Weapons 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.
Comments
Looking forward to listening to the podcast, always enjoy discussions of the IJN.
I am sure everyone here is quite familiar with the Spanish spy the British codenamed "Garbo" during WW2. Amazon Prime is showing an excellent Spanish production about his story. I found it to be excellent. Not only was it an enjoyable recapping of just how deeply the German Abwehr was reeled in by the supposed network that Garbo had built, but the production values and presentation were both first rate. I have a weakness for European documentaries as they usually have a comfortable presentation style.
This was time well spent. The title is Garbo the Spy.
Also, if you have anything close to a decent speaker system you will find that what the Spanish sound engineers have done adds the the overall excellence of the documentar.y
The USS Johnston, one of the destroyers lost in the action off Samar, has been found at 20,000 feet in the Phillipine Trench. Parts of the wreck were located two years ago, but it wasn't possible to visit and identify the main portion until last month.
What do the people here who understand procurement think of NASA's decision to fund only SpaceX's lunar lander?
Congress have only given NASA a fraction of the budget they say they need to return to the moon by 2024, so there's a certain logic to going for the cheapest option. Still, it's weirdly ambitious.
Is the message to congress 'you'd better give us more money if you want it to go to defence insiders' with a side order of 'what if regular starship becomes operational before Orion/SLS does?'
My only mildly informed take is that NASA is taking a cue from the administration to strangle Artemis w/o repeating the clear orders that Obama caught flack on from the cancellation of Ares. It's pretty clear to me that even with all the money going to just one competitor that a 4 year timeline is out the window, and we'll probably see something trickle out in the next year or two that the program has been re-baselined to a 10 year+ goal, and then it will slowly die over the next few budget cycles until they salvage something equivalent to Orion out of it. We'll see how much it blows up in Nelson's confirmation hearings, but I think the writing is on the wall for Artemis. The more interesting question to me is how the Blue Origin/Space X of the world live up to the mantra of "we're going to the moon whether the government is coming with us or not" and if they can figure out how to keep a steady funding stream turned on for longer than 4 years.
Into what roles do the US armed services tend to send recruits who do really well on the ASVAB, with AFQT scores in the top few percentiles? In the Navy, the answer seems to be the nuclear field. But what about the other services?
For the Army it's Intelligence, specifically the language school at Monterey. At least it was in the 90s.
For the Air Force it was, and probably still is, the language fields. Linguists receive a lot of intense training and are sought after. I can imagine mastering something like Mandarin is pretty difficult.
Interestingly enough the musical squadrons have some very gifted personnel--often with many having advanced degrees. I am not quite sure of their ASVAB scores, and perhaps a MA in music is not the same as a MA in chemical engineering in some eyes, but smart people indeed.
Peeking at the USMC's schedule of enlistment bonuses, the brainiest field that gets some real money is Electronics Maintenance.
I guess if you can work an ammeter, you get the good crayons.
@Neal: Musicians are a weird group. I knew some of the 7th Fleet musicians in Yokosuka. They were mostly professional guys with bachelor's or Master's degrees in music theory/performance who allowed themselves to be recruited into the Navy. They had their own company at boot camp.
In general, I consider most of the military's bands to be incredibly inefficient, and mostly waste.
If someone has an MA in Chemical Engineering, I'll definitely be asking questions, like "where did you get that, and why is it an arts degree?" But yeah, military music has always been kind of weird. The Royal Marines provide the RN's bands, because the RN's personnel system in the later half of the 19th century wasn't really able to keep musicians.
As soon as I hit Post I realized I meant to have corrected that to MS vice MA. Alas, such were my good intentions.
I never had cause to interact with the music personnel very often, but on those occasions when we were hauling them from A to B it was interesting to hear something of their backgrounds. Some were, in their off time and since we were in NJ, gigging and teaching up in NYC. Overall though, it was a completely separate part of the AF. I wonder if they even took the normal testing?
As far as I can tell, military bands are all about hard-to-fake signaling of priorities. How do you know the Navy cares about this occasion? Well, they made a dozen highly trained performers in fancy uniforms show up and do their thing. That's not cheap. It's unlikely the Navy would bother if they didn't really care.
And AFAICT most military musicians do have to go through boot camp, are subject to the UCMJ, and do have to comply with fitness standards and such, so they are actual service members. The only exception I've heard of is the US Marine Band "The President's Own".
Indonesia has a missing submarine, and it's not looking good.
Johan Larson:
Who would have just been hanging around a base otherwise. The marginal cost of sending some musicians to an event is pretty cheap once you've decided to have musicians so doesn't really show commitment.
@bean
Maybe they went to Oxbridge, where no matter what subject you study, any Bachelor's or Master's (MSc, MMath, MEng, whatever) eventually [turns into an MA](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MasterofArts(Oxford,Cambridge,andDublin)), because Reasons And Tradition.
I'm trying to gather the prices of various bits of military hardware. So far I have 43 different ship prices (and about 200 others.
Can anyone help my find more data?
You can see what I have so far at http://euclid.nmu.edu/~rappleto/prices.xls
I already know about https://newwars.wordpress.com/warship-costs/
Unfortunately, military pricing is bizarre and byzantine, and simply collecting prices without knowing the background isn't going to tell you much. See here for a longer explanation. As for ships, I've seen prices in some older issues of Janes, although those are subject to so many caveats that I'm not even sure of the actual price of the Iowas.
I'm sure that's true.
Even worse if the price is in wartime, in a foreign currency, and from generations ago.
But one might make different decisions if one knew a P-38 cost the same as a P-39, or twice as much. Or that a submarine costs 1/3 a battleship or 1/10. Even if it's only a rough estimate, that's useful knowledge.
From what depth can a salvage team recover a submarine? Searchers have found some traces of the Indonesian vessel though it is assumed lost in waters of 800m.
I doubt they'd attempt to raise her if she's that deep. It's not impossible, but it's not likely to be economical to do so. They'll send an ROV down and figure out what went wrong.
The oldest commissioned 688 is not QUITE that old, per Wikipedia, but it's not much newer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USSProvidence(SSN-719) her keel was laid down on 14 October 1982 She was launched on 4 August 1984 commissioned on 27 July 1985 And apparently a boat from 1981 was decommed in 2018 (and another one is technically afloat, but not commissioned, as a training facility)
It's not that they'd raise her if she was more modern. 800m is deep, and while we can work at that depth, it's really annoying to do so. Note what happened with Miami, which was in a lot better shape. If they do bring her up, it will be to recover the bodies of the crew.
If a US sub crew is trapped in conditions that make escape from the boat impossible, is there some sort of designated suicide order, to preserve remaining survivors as long as possible? Or do they all live and die together?
I am not a submariner, but knowing what I do of USN culture, I'd strongly suspect that they all live and die together.
Another question about the Nanggala- what might a "torpedo straightener" be? Apparently that was one of the objects recovered- I suspect there is some form of mistranslation.
I do, too. My guess would be that it's a torpedo guide of some sort, to keep it straight as it leaves the tube.
I'm guessing "straightener" is a very literal translation of something related to either the guidance section or the fire control system.