It is time once again for our regular Open Thread. Talk about whatever you want, so long as it isn't culture war.
Overhauls are Russian Battleships Part 2, Carrier Doom Part 3, Early US Battleships, Ship Structure and Strength, Squalus, The Pre-Battlecruisers, Hornet Part 2 and for 2025, The 2024 Brown Award Post, We need to talk about ship names and reader Alex's review of the RAF Museum Cosford.
Comments
A random question that came to me based off my reading and I might try and think about later on my Substack (btw I have a Substack now, as all the cool kids do!): what happened to war novels? The GWOT seems to have as much impact on literature as Korea did, and way less than Vietnam which is still getting Big N "Novels" published (eg 2024's The Women, by Kristin Hannah, which was awful btw). Some of it is probably related to the overall collapse of literacy and especially literary males; some it is the rise of video games. I do wonder how much is the rise of the techno-thriller as a genre?
Another possibility is that a lot fewer people served, and those that did were somewhat more selected on certain traits which may be anticorrelated with being the sort of person who writes novels like that. When you're drafting people, you get a reasonable cross-section of society in a way the AVF probably doesn't. (I don't think this is a good thing, but also don't see a better option.)
How likely would a ship be to avoid a contact mine without prior notice? That is to say, if somebody put a few mines outside San Diego or King’s Bay, would the ship’s normal operating procedures pick it up?
My suspicion is not, especially once they’re outside of channels, but maybe they run sonar by default or something.
Assuming we're talking about the Navy, I believe checking for that is part of standard port security procedures. Typically, ships going in and out will be escorted by some form of security boat, and fitting one of those with a sonar capable of detecting moored mines is easy. I think there's also been a reasonable amount of work done on looking for bottom mines, although I'm less sure on the exact parameters there. (Also, one part of security is watching who is going through for people who might be up to nefarious things.)
In the modern era, that mine is very likely to be a bottom mine. And there's a good chance that it will look exactly like an old refrigerator or oil drum or something, of which there will be many cluttering the sea bottom near a major harbor. So, yeah, the guard boat saw it on high-speed sonar, but you sailed right over it anyway.
Possibly you sailed right over it twenty times in peacetime, until it was turned on at the start of the war.
Thank you both!
Unrelated question - what is the intuition behind x-bows on offshore support vessels? Most other features (overhangs, clipper bows, bulbous bows, etc,) are relatively straightforward, but not the shovel shape of x-bows.
Regarding the cultural impact of the GWOT: I'm a Brit, expat since the late 90s so I haven't experienced it directly myself, but it's very striking to me how much the traumatised Iraq/Afghanistan vet has become a common trope in British popular culture. For the most obvious example see Martin Freeman's Watson in the opening episode of Sherlock.