It's time for our regular Open Thread. Talk about whatever you want, so long as it isn't Culture War.
Watching recommendation: Netflix has They Shall Not Grow Old through the end of the year. This is a selection of colorized film from WWI, with audio from interviews with veterans overlaid. Well worth a watch.
Overhauls are Electronic Warfare Part 1, Phalanx, The Two-Power Standard Today, and for 2022 Norway Parts eleven and twelve and More Missiles!.
Comments
https://twitter.com/JeremyStohs/status/1485567288027893764
The US has 8990 VLS cells. The rest of NATO combined has 2328.
Amazing!
3 times I remember, I've come across broadcast TV showing real battleship gunfire (probably - they might have been cruisers) - and all of them were by accident. Twice when something about a not-itself-military X traced the history behind X to WWII and showed probably-the-same establishing montage, and once when someone else left a D-Day documentary on in the background.
(I have seen it on purpose in internet video. Both agree that battleship guns sound surprisingly normal - somewhat low-pitched, but not as dramatically so as the obvious guess of 32x length = 5 octaves below small arms would suggest.)
I'm pretty sure the sound mostly comes from the cloud of gas expanding from the barrel running into the air (hence suppressors) and that's going to have dramatically different scaling effects than if it was the barrel generating the sound. It may be slightly deeper, but I'd also suspect that a lot of it is faster attenuation of higher frequencies and the microphone being further away.
Came across this:
Revitalizing US Navy Shipbuilding
hxxps://austinvernon.site/blog/navyshipbuilding.html (replace xx with tt)
I don't know enough to critique the ideas, but it is interesting.
It's a mix of quite sensible proposals that were pretty much all implemented long before I was born, and bad ideas. A lot of the production stuff has been standard for a long time, while 20-kt warships built to commercial standards are...dubious at best, even if they would be cheaper. There are still people at NavSea who remember the lessons of Sheffield, Stark and Cole.
Do you have any ideas you would suggest for revitalizing US (military) shipbuilding and is the situation actually as dire as it seems?
If there was an easy solution, we'd have already done it. The obvious thing to do is to try and give shipbuilders and employees stability so they're not constantly looking over their shoulder in case Congress changes its mind. Beyond that, I don't really know.