It's time once again for our (slightly delayed) open thread. Talk about whatever you want, so long as it isn't culture war.
The USNI Christmas Sale has started! This is the time of year when my book budget gets much smaller than it used to be, and it's a great time if you want to stock up on naval books, too. I will do my usual list of recommendations next time, but there's a lot of good stuff.
2017 overhauls are A Brief History of the Battleship and Iowa Part 1. 2018 overhauls are Survivability Fire and Mission Kills, Underbottom Explosions, The Last Days of the High Seas Fleet, Samar, Turret and Barbette and The Space Force and the FAA. 2019 overhauls are JDAM, Riverine Warfare - Europe, Cluster Bombs and Leyte Gulf 75. 2020 overhauls are Esper's 500-ship Navy, The Battleship and the Carrier, The World Wonders and Where the Blog Begins. 2021 overhauls are Submarines in the Falklands Parts one, two and three.
Comments
OT 116 is now up. Sorry for the delay.
Sabaton history just dropped a video on Dreadnought, and wow am I not impressed with the first few minutes. This is probably bad enough to provoke a full response post, because a lot of this stuff is really 101 if you have the relevant books. I could do a better job completely offhand.
"Each dreadnought's armor belt below the water had to be strong enough to withstand at least two torpedo hits"
I hate everyone involved in this. How do you mangle things that badly if you're trying even a little bit? I hold my offhand comments to a higher standard than this.
Here's a list of the USMC's primary officer MOSes:
Anyone know which of these the corps has the most trouble filling, either because lack of interest among applicants, or rarity of the skills?
Recycled uniforms in WWI?
In the early scenes of the new Netflix film "All Quiet on the Western Front," we see German soldiers stripping clothing off dead soldiers at the front. The uniforms are then shipped home, cleaned and patched up, and issued to new recruits.
Was that really done? I've heard of reclaiming weapons and gear from fallen soldiers. But I'm surprised to hear this would (or could) be done with uniforms.
Fun concept from the Good Idea Fairy that was posted on The Motte: offshore nuclear plants!
Clever concept. It'd be amazing politically to build plants and only send them to a nuclear hostile area when they started suffering rolling blackouts.
The biggest downsides I saw were the need to use extremely compact, sea-rated turbines and transformers, which will massively increase both capital and maintenance costs.
@Bernd: see here.
Interesting. The Army tried something similar with a Liberty Ship converted into a floating reactor by the name of MH-1A in the 1960s, but that was a much smaller reactor. I don't actually think the turbines would be as much of a problem as you think. Steel is cheap and air is free, so you have lots of reason to use bigger, cheaper turbines. Not everything needs to be built the way the USN builds things, because on a submarine, air very much is not free.
I would like to request this bit not be followed up on under the culture war rules.
Researching this was fun. There's already a big turkish corp called Karpowerships doing it with marine diesels (now running off LNG, interestingly).
One huge disadvantage I hadn't thought of was the need to pay oil rig wage premiums to nuclear techs who, if they liked being on boats, could have just stayed with the navy.
I suppose the competing technology would be SMRs moved by road or rail, if they're small enough. Apart from that, I think that if floating in the sea were inherently a good place to put power stations long-term, we'd do that already.
Bernd:
bean:
Probably doesn't matter since any area so nuclear hostile could probably get Putingas burners on similar notice.
bernd:
Nuclear power is pretty labor efficient so you could probably get away with such high pay (the oil industry certainly manages it).
They're also likely to be closer to shore so living on shore and commuting daily might be possible.
Lambert:
The Army project that resulted in a Liberty ship having a reactor also developed air transportable reactors.
The reason I figured the turbines would have to be specially made is that they appeared to have much less space than usual for the "turbine hall," which is usually about twice the size of the actual reactor building on land, right?
Another interesting tidbit I noticed researching this: Wärtsilä is making 50% thermal efficient natural gas diesel engines for both marine and land applications. Some people had been speculating about natgas turbines powering ships with the new regs on fuel oil, but to my mind these seem like a better deal in any situation where you're not pairing a gas turbine with combined cycle or cogen.
Karpowerships is going this route in their new project off Dakar, with LNG tanker deliveries to the power barge.
Fair point. I don't know enough about nuclear plant design to have any idea how much that can be shrunk without too much loss of efficiency. In practical terms, you'll probably lose a little bit, but given the economics of nuclear, I don't think that will be a major issue.
And yeah, I think I've heard of natural gas diesels for a while. They and natural gas turbines were reasonably common on LNG tankers for a while because they'd just burn the boiloff, although I think that got killed off by some tax stuff (who pays for the fuel, and who gets taxed on it), so these days they just reliquify it.
USNC is working on MMRs (Micro Modular Reactors) which only use ceramics, with as little as possible metals, are cooled by helium, without water, and they are trying to kill anything that can produce risk at any level.
Also, quite small, and the first power-up should be in four years.
https://www.usnc.com/projects/
They are also working on Nuclear Termal Propulsion and Nuclear Electric Propulsion for spacecrafts.
I read that as USMC and was very confused why the Marine Corps had its own nuclear reactor program.
Cool, although that's been said enough times I'll believe it when I see it. (Including by me, and that didn't work out either.)
For updates going forward, I'm planning to stop reading through all of the older posts, and just read and possibly update ones where I think I've done work. Is there interest in me still listing the previous posts that haven't been checked/updated, or does nobody care?
There is a lot of good in the back-catalog. How would the inter-linking get updated under the new system?
Say, for example, you write the Battle of Tsushima post. Would it be easier to make the dozens of incoming links all at once?
The plan is that as part of putting together the OT, I'll look at the list of posts I would have been overhauling, and if any of them seem likely to have link updates, I'll do a full read of them. If it's something where I haven't touched the subject in the last year, I'll just skip it. Definitely not abandoning the archives entirely.
Will second the statement that there is a lot of value in the back-catalogue.
So much so that it'd be a pity if it was to disappear a decade or two from now. (I recently saw this happen to a site that was widely referenced from across the world, just because they'd stopped posting in 2012 or so and had lost interest in supporting the site.)
Much better if it was all PDF'd and stuck on some of the big archive sites.
But that's some time off I hope.
If the army had wanted to keep their reactor funding, threatening to give them to the Marine Reactor Program as hand-me-downs would have been a terrifying threat. "I hear they're planning break-down modifications so they're man-portable for air assaults"
I never realized you re-read everything for each OT, that's amazing. I'm sure it's fine to just list the stuff you worked on and update any links.