For my birthday this year, my girlfriend and I visited the Stafford Air & Space Museum in Weatherford, Oklahoma. Weatherford, about an hour west of Oklahoma City on I-40, is the birthplace of Gemini and Apollo astronaut Tom Stafford. They like him very much there, and assembled an air and space museum in his honor. It's much better than a museum of this type in a place like Weatherford (birthplace of Tom Stafford, population about 11,000) has any right to be.

Lord Nelson and me in a simulator at the Stafford Museum

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In 1944, the Pacific Fleet was faced with a serious logistical problem. While a bewildering variety of ships had made it possible for the Pacific Fleet to operate out of a primitive island lagoon, saving weeks shuttling back and forth to the nearest permanent base, the carriers only carried enough ordnance for three or four days of strikes. This had been adequate for facing the Japanese fleet, or for pounding isolated islands into submission, but there was no way to provide sustained air power for the final push if the carriers had to spend three-quarters of their time shuttling back and forth to the fleet's base at Ulithi.

Missouri receiving 16" powder tanks from ammunition ship Mount Baker

The Fifth Fleet logistics staff were tasked with coming up with a solution, and they managed to devise one within a matter of weeks. In essence, it was very simple. All of the existing ammunition ships had booms¹ to allow them to move ordnance to ships tied up alongside. A line was run from one of these booms to the receiving ship, where it was attached to a line from a winch, and a cargo hook was hung from the junction. This was used to suspend the ordnance to be delivered, which was then hauled across and struck down into the ship's magazines, just as it would be in harbor. The whole operation very much resembled underway replenishment of fuel, except that instead of simply pumping liquid, thousands of pounds of ammunition had to be manhandled on deck.² 500 and 1000 pound bombs were a particular challenge, as they had to be rolled across the deck, and could easily pulp limbs if they got out of control. Read more...

Happy New Year, everyone! I hope that 2019 will treat you well.

It's our regular open thread. Talk about whatever you like.

Take a look at this selection of panoramas of various compartments aboard Iowa. There's a lot of ones of areas not open to the public, and even a few of areas I've never been to.

The big update this time out is all four parts on armor. Also, we have Dreadnoughts of the minor powers and A Spotter's Guide to Warships of the World Wars.

In the aftermath of World War I, the RN and USN continued to develop the concepts they had created to handle information during the war, on both tactical and strategic levels. Aircraft added to the ocean surveillance picture, making it easier to survey wide areas, but the major development was in tactical plotting.

A sailor uses a Dead Reckoning Tracer

Plotting had first been introduced at Jutland, where it had given Jellicoe a decisive edge in positioning his fleet, despite problems with the implementation. During the interwar years, navies on both sides of the Atlantic worked out plotting techniques in exercises, added dedicated plotting spaces to their ships, and built automatic plotting tables which made an indication of the ship's location on a chart. The British maintained two separate plots, one for the strategic situation, and one for the immediate area around the ship in question. The Americans did not, and suffered in automatic plotting technology, too. The British used a device which projected a spot of light onto the map that moved based on the ship's indicated course and speed. The mechanical American Dead Reckoning Tracer tended to jump under the shock of gunfire. Plotting proved particularly vital in enabling night tactics, exemplified in the British victory at the Battle of Cape Matapan, where it gave them the confidence to avoid friendly fire and allowed them to take the Italians entirely by surprise. Read more...

One aspect of air travel I'm particularly interested in is frequent flier/loyalty programs. These have three basic purposes from the perspective of the airlines:

1. They allow the airline to differentiate what is essentially a commodity product, a trip from A to B, and turn it into something unique.

2. They give customers an incentive to put all of their flights with a given airline.

3. They give the airlines the ability to sell lots and lots of miles to banks, who in turn use them to incentivize customers to spend on their credit cards. The banks collect their money on interchange fees.

We can divide the programs into two broad parts, status and points. Status is earned on an annual basis, and is designed to reward the airline’s best customers with upgrades, free checked bags, and other amenities. Most people don’t have status, and the easiest way to get basic status is through having a credit card. Points are earned by everyone, while status traditionally requires spending significant amounts of time/money with the airline. Read more...

In 1907, Teddy Roosevelt ordered the bulk of the American battlefleet sent from its bases on the Atlantic to the West Coast in a test of its readiness to deploy quickly, in the event of a war with Japan. The resulting force, known as the "Great White Fleet" due to the gleaming paint scheme used, reached San Francisco in May 1908, to a tremendous welcome.

The Great White Fleet in San Francisco Bay

Even as the fleet was completing the last legs to the West Coast, it was announced that it would return to the East Coast via Australia, the Philippines, and Suez. This promptly set off a diplomatic storm, as nations along the route vied to get a visit from the fleet. Australia had moved first, issuing an informal invitation before the battleships had even passed through the Strait of Magellan, but American efforts to forestall further invitations by announcing the route early proved futile. New Zealand and Japan were quickly added to the itinerary, although in both cases only one port would be visited. The Chinese invitation was also accepted, although only after considerable wrangling over the site of the visit and the number of ships to participate. A British invitation for a visit to the UK was turned down due to time constraints, but their offer of their numerous bases along the route, most prominently Gibraltar, was gratefully accepted. Read more...

I've previously discussed the fields of Electronic Signal Measures (ESM) and Electronic Countermeasures (ECM). But now let's turn to the third major branch of electronic warfare, Electronic Counter-Countermeasures (ECCM). ECCM is concerned with defeating or at least mitigating the effectiveness of ECM, through a variety of techniques even more diverse than those used to attack systems in the first place.

Modern AESA radars like this AN/APG-81 incorporate many ECCM features

The most basic ECCM technique to counter jamming is increasing transmission power. Because radar return strength falls off with the fourth power of range³ while jamming falls off with the square of range, at some point the reflected signal will be stronger than the jammer, and the radar will pick it up. This is a particular problem when airborne platforms attempt to jam surface radars, which have much larger power budgets. Read more...

I've had the privilege of getting to see the inside of the forward Mk 38 Main Battery Director on both Iowa and Massachusetts. This position, known as Spot 1, is the primary position for main battery fire control, and provides an incredible view of the area around the ship. I thought I'd share some of my pictures from the visits.

The outside of Iowa's Spot 1

The basic purpose of the director is to provide range, bearing and level information to the fire-control system. This information allows the ship to know the position of the target and to compensate for the ship's own roll and pitch, so that it can place shells on the target accurately. Read more...

Last time, we discussed the basic division of electronic warfare into Electronic Signal Measures (ESM, detection of enemy electronic signals), Electronic Countermeasures (ECM, use of active measures to mess up enemy signals) and Electronic Counter-Countermeasures (ECCM, techniques to defeat enemy ECM), and how ESM works. This time, we'll look at the area most people think of when they talk about electronic warfare, ECM.

A radar screen showing the effects of jamming

The most basic ECM technique is simple noise jamming. This is flooding a relevant portion of the electromagnetic spectrum with white noise, with the intent of drowning out the relevant signal. For a radio, it's the equivalent of trying to talk while someone blasts loud music, and the same principle applies to radar, reducing the range at which a radar unit can get a useful return.⁴ Noise jamming is usually divided into a few categories, spot, barrage, and sweep. Spot jamming is transmission on a specific frequency, which is highly effective if the system in question is limited to only a single frequency.⁵ However, most modern radars are "frequency agile", which means they can switch away from a jammed frequency to any of a great number of other frequencies. One way to counter frequency agility is to jam the entire band the radar could be operating in, known as barrage jamming. The problem with barrage jamming is that it is rare to find a jammer powerful enough to be able to blanket a wide spectrum. Sweep jamming, where the jammer's power is swept across a variety of frequencies, is capable of defeating electronics with poor error-checking, although it's not particularly useful against better-designed systems. Read more...

It's time for our usual biweekly open thread. Talk about whatever you want, even topics unrelated to the subject of the blog.

This week, I'm going to highlight Nomenclature of Naval Vessels, a 1942 publication on all of the terms that get used on ships.

Updates over the past two weeks include Ironclads, The Loss of HMS Victoria, The Death of Force Z, Parts One and Two on Huascar and The South American Dreadnought Race.