Likely be more firings and people deciding this isn't the career for them. Just hope that the innocent can survive living under a microscope and come out the other side as better people and a better Navy. Will not be pleasant knowing that it could have been you in the shoes of anyone involved.

Don't be ridiculous.

I didn't ask about stopping.  Just slowing down. Let's say 5-10 kts.  Seems that could have prevented the collision without causing a snowball effect for potential nearby ships.  Seems as though both ships were traveling close to the same speed.

So let's say the ship is doing 20 kts, once the decision is made to reduce speed to 15 kts, how long will it take for the ship to slow down to 15 kts?

No, it means we get a new admiral and after the first incident the curfew will become more restrictive for several months.

Depends on how badly you want it.  All back full would probably take a minute or two to ring up, and then several more minutes to start slowing at all, and maybe 10+ minutes to drop five knots of speed.  

It's a long game, you have to know way in advance what you're going to do.  These aren't race cars, and there aren't any brakes.

We're not?

As someone who was jammed up by a navy admiral recently over something he had no control over I can't say I'm sorry to see an admiral meet the same fate.

Hacked Nav system doesn't hack the big glass windows either.

Sorry to inject some humor in a very serious thread, but can't help that I read that in this voice.

So maybe 10 minutes or so? Thank you.

I get that they aren't race cars.  I used to fly a 300,000+ lb aircraft (including air refueling which is by no means an easy skill to gain proficiency at), and now I drive 7,000+ foot long freight trains anywhere from 5,000 to 19,000 tons.  Neither of these are/were race cars.

Your article is wrong.

USS Porter back in 2012.

So history repeated itself of the Andrea Doria collision in the 1950's. I'm sure that wasn't even the first collision or mishap due to radar scale errors.

After all this time, haven't they made it super obvious what radar or map scale you're on?

The ship was leaning to the left until sailors secured water tight dos. Then others worked with counter flooding to create a balance. This actually saved the ship from rolling over. That is why the USS America came to help. Sailors needed berthing and food. Also help could be given by the Americas sailors.

IIRC thier relative speed was around 1/4 knot

People scoffed when I suggested a reporter's car was hacked and crashed.  Then we learn from Wikileaks Vault 7 that it could be done.  We're highly dependent on computerized systems and are more vulnerable to hacking.  I hope it wasn't done though.

So as an example, on your freight trains, imagine you have a 9,000 ton Freight train.

That's about how much water a DDG is moving at any given moment.

And it's a Greyhound with 100,000 HP.

And the ship that hit it... has a DWT* (which is about how much it can carry) of ~50,000 tons... and can almost make 9 knots flat out.

*-They measure merchant ships a little different.

I think people are fooled by what appears to be slow relative velocity between vessels.  Most of us are calibrated based on our experiences riding bicycles or driving cars which are relatively light weight and very maneuverable compared to other things.

When you look at freight trains, big rigs, large ships, and so on the relative speed can sometimes fool a person into thinking it can stop or change direction quickly.   Momentum is very simply put mass x velocity.  In the case of a big ship like this even though the velocity component is pretty low (maybe the speed of a jog or run) the mass is HUGE in that equation.

20 knots is about 34 ft/second with rounding, and a 30,000 ton vessel (note that gross tons displacement don't = actual pounds of weight, but lets assume they do for now to make the math easy, and I think actual weigth is really higher than displacement ratings now), would have a momentum of over 2 TRILLION lb/ft s.


The energy required to slow down that momentum starts to come in when you talk about 1/2 mv^2 (Kinetic energy).  Since mass is not changing we can say that the kinetic energy required to change from 20knots to 15 knots is the same as going from about 34 ft/s to 25 ft/s and you could even say from 5knots to 0knots since it is a fixed mass system.   So you have 1/2 m * ( 34-25 ft/s)^2 = 1/2*m* 81 ft^2/s^2.   Plug in that 30,000 tons = 60,000,000 lbs (probably a bad assumption, but still really big) and you have 2,430,000,000 lb ft^2 / s^2 of energy.  

You'd need to apply 4.4 Million HP in reverse to make that 5 knot change happen in a second.   74,000 HP applied over a minute could get you there too assuming perfect energy conversion from the engines to the props (so like 1,200hp/second).  My guess is this ship had something close to 10,000 shaft horsepower +/- but that his a huge swag, and I won't show my ignorance on fixed pitch props when run in reverse and try to calculate that out.  There are probably also engine limitations and gearing limitations for full astern thrust as well.   But the point is even if you could get 100% of engine power instantaneously applied in full reverse you are talking several minutes to slow the ship down by 5 knots.

You could also use the basic physics 101 and say that F=m*a and plug in various decelerations as a negative "a" in the equation for any time interval you wanted and have a rough idea of the force required.

So, since we are talking thousands of horsepower from the engines instantly in reverse, the other alternative would be to somehow instantly deploy some sort of speed brake in the water with some pretty significant surface area (probably at least the size of the rudder if not larger and broad side to the velocity vector).  And then have enough strength in that brake to keep it from just ripping off completely.

Think about a airliner landing on a runway fully loaded.  Even with full reverse thrust (same power required to take off) it takes a long time to stop that plane...maybe a mile or so for some of the big jumbo jets.   Same with a train or a big rig.  All of the accumulated power to get up to that speed has to then be applied to slow it back down again.  


The thing I think about when I visualize stopping on the water is the guys on the lake driving the jet ski or bass boat for the first time and coming in hot and crashing into the boat or dock after they realize way too late that a) they need some forward thrust to turn, and b) there are not brakes and letting off the throttle has an immediate effect of slowing down from the drag on the hull (also related to the square of velocity), but once you are just floating along there is nothing really stopping you.

Statistical anomaly.

Going to add a little here on a couple of points I've read.

Considering the idea that these big merchies are chasing down and intentionally colliding with a substantially smaller and more agile warship?  No.  Just no.  No more than ships are intentionally running down whales and capturing/killing them on their bulbous bows.  In a more local sort of scenario, are city buses chasing down and ramming family sedans, etc.?  Nope.  But they have more than a few accidents.  

Adding a little to the extensive discussion of the size and relative lack of maneuverability of the big merchies, I looked up one of the nearby ships.  It was/is very similar in size to three football fields.  Others have pointed out that the flow of water around ships can cause currents that can drag ships around and overpower their own control forces.  Not sure I saw it mentioned but even if one does go to a backing bell and reverse the direction the big old single screw is turning, that has very little effect.  Inertia is a mfr.  One thing it can do is thrash around and it might also negate the ability of the water flowing past the rudder to actually put a turning motion on the ship, you might lose steering control, not that there was much to begin with, all things considered.

My ship was a single screw, fixed pitch, steam turbine.  Not a twin screw destroyer, let alone a gas turbine variable pitch hot rod.  So the idea that harsh maneuvering would somehow empty the available hydraulic fluid from service was not something we dealt with.  OTOH, that it became a possibility as ships evolved is a frightening sort of thought.  Haven't been on a modern naval ship in years, really at all.  Forty years ago there were design elements and practices that likely where unchanged since perhaps even before WWII.  Like some of the "switches" used to energize gear, use of sound powered phones, we had old, used binoculars, signalmen and a few others were adept at using the old hand operated search/signal lights.  Hand/flag semaphore signals.  "We've always done it that way." isn't always a bad thing.

I think we should put to bed the idea that the crew didn't see the ships around them, or that the radar systems didn't pick them up, or that they weren't operating at full power.  They probably had two or more surface search radars in use and operating (we had one but the costs to have more than one is radically different now than then, even then the "Raytheons" of the world were getting to be out there on everything that floated/floats.  Which was not much fun for my EWs.  If I would have to guess, they had more information about what was out there than they could deal with and they were concentrating on the idea of getting onto the traffic and the traffic plan.    Perhaps like merging onto a freeway.  Now we have, or should, long, long merge lanes were you get parallel to the flow of traffic and to speed so under most conditions, you edge sideways into an appropriate spot in the flow.  Unlike some of the ramps on the old Pasadena Freeway which have a stop sign on the ramp and seemingly about 100 feet available to merge.  Getting on a freeway, would it help if your wife was calling out the location and speed of the trucks two lanes over, three or four deep on the lane you were entering, the distance to the next ramp or curve, etc/., or are you trying to get to speed and in the same direction as everyone else, to make a smooth merge?  and not trying to enter from a stop light on a right turn with heavy oncoming traffic?

If you go to the video, there were three (the fourth was behind the front three) practically abreast, not sure the actual separation and the one to the right/starboard was perhaps somewhat ahead of the others.  Did the McCain get past the first only to be now still in the path of the next two and got hit by the one in the middle?

Oh yeah, suggesting these "four" incidents have much in common is speaking from a position, of, uh, uh, well, a really difficult position to see from.  Having been around some of the large "fishing fleets," I'm almost surprised there aren't more collisions and it may well be there are, we just don't hear about them because they don't involve Navy vessels.   The grounding and oil spill is unfortunate and hard not to be human error but hardly nefarious.  There's been no talk of evil forces hacking or crippling the Fitzgerald until now.  Probably for good reasons.  And the minesweeper hitting the reef?  I got no feel good comments on that.

Don't know why I bothered. Beaten like a rented red headed step mule.

Some shitty historian, because here's three in the last 30.

This first one was even in the same geographical location as McCain:

Attached File


Attached File


Attached File

It very accurately describes a large number of my fellow SWOs, IMO.  Most were barely adequate ship handlers, didn't know the Rules of the Road adequately (especially nav lights), and couldn't produce a day's work in navigation to save their lives.  I'm very sure 99% have never picked up a sextant.  Even SWO school was geared toward making engineers, not ship drivers.

I think the Brits' approach is a smarter one.

As an engineer in training, I think you should be aware of the fact that: "all models are wrong, some are useful"

That videogame is a model.

I've had several former SWOs sail with me once they decided to leave active duty and work on the merchant side of the house. Overall they were great officers and I found them professional and conscientious, but I will admit almost to a man their shiphandling and navigational abilities on arrival were poor. A few months of intensive work usually got them to a point where I felt comfortable letting them fully stand their own watch, but at least they tended to be meticulous with the paperwork from the get go.

For real?  That's basic shit that our nonrates 2 weeks out of boot camp are expected to know before they get thier helm and lookout quals.

My version of "adequate" is the one I was held to for my 3/M license - memorized every Rule word for word in order to score 100% on the exam. 

What are the odds that he will be allowed to retire with his three stars intact, or will he be reduced to two?

What would you know?

If you can tell me a specific action he did wrong which contributed to this accident I would be more inclined to be concerned with his final rank.

A commander's responsibility versus criminal negligence are two different things.

7th Fleet Commander out it looks like.  

I asked because it is/was my understanding that the third star came with the job.

So having been relieved of the job, would he revert back to two stars as he eases into retirement?

Does the Navy still post lookout? Talked with my dad who said many years ago they had four lookouts on watch.

Yep.  He's right that GD never fails, though that's mostly due to people like Balista who think reading random shit on twitter gives them information worth posting.

And deployed amphibs generally bring a hell of a medical team

I don't think it's likely anything will happen to him.

Same here...



CT lost a seaman on the Fitz as well.

Yes

I know from personal experience (1600 Master) that isn't an easy task.

I also think SWOs should be tested at an equivalent level as someone who earns a 3rd mate's license, or even a 1600 license.

Gotcha.

My ship does a pretty good job with nav rules.  OODs get grilled virtually every watch by CO, XO, or OPS. Night orders almost always have a rule or section of a rule that the watch section must read aloud and discuss (even if we've been over that one 10 times before) and our CO requires OODs to take the closed book DWO exam annually.

Not seeing anything new about results of recovery efforts. The latest out there is still quoting Admiral Swift and his remarks yesterday.

sorta.  If he retires before he holds the rank for three years he technically retires as 2 star.  But FOGOs are weird.  

I like how the navy fires commanders, but punishment through busting them down seems unnecessary.  His career is over even though he didn't wreck a boat 5000 miles away.

I think that pretty stupid too.

Former USS Cole commander on the USS McCain crash.

Down to only one lookout now.

@Josh

Are Port and Starboard lookouts still posted?

I assume they still have aft lookout during normal operations?

What!?

The video I posted above FF to 2:18.

Saw a news report that they are having difficulty extracting bodies from inside the McCain due to the damage to the ship.

Yeah....

I had lookouts all over the place on a CVN.  I don't know for sure on a DDG.  I would think you need at least two.