Instead of Scrapping Aircraft Carriers

When I was in school I read The Death of the Thresher. I didn't find out about the torpedo battery theory of the USS Scorpion until much, much later.

For those in the Navy, we have an Arleigh Burke class destroyer called the USS Chung-Hoon. Does the ship name ever cause them problems on the radio?

"No, seriously, we're a United States warship."
"Then why do you have Chinese name?!"
"Because it's named after Rear Admiral Chung-Hoon."
"Why you name ship after Chinese Admiral if you American ship?"

<----- Rode Chung-Hoon on sea trials last year

The theory has been advanced that the U.S.S. Scorpion was sunk by the Soviets in retaliation for the loss of the Hotel class nuclear missile carrying submarine near Hawaii a few months earlier.

While we're on the subject of nuclear reactors, I came up with an interesting new reactor idea that I posted over at EnergyFromThorium, which is run by Kirk Sorenson, a former NASA deep space propulsion engineer who was tasked with looking at nuclear reactors for space. He's since founded FliBe energy to build reactors for the military.

Anyway, the idea stems from the fact that a liquid reactor's core is liquid, and it's easy to change the shape or volume of a liquid in a container by changing the shape of the container. But then I'd been playing with my pond pumps and noticed that I could make an enormous mound of water by moving one of my high volume pumps near the surface, aimed upwards. Whereas changing the shape of the container does let you change the shape or the volume, moving parts of the container implies a mechanism that could jam. But an unstable, dynamic mound of liquid can't jam in the up position, it has to be maintained in that shape by a pump.

So imagine a basin (a big bowl or your bathroom sink) that can only hold a subcritical mass of uranium or thorium fluoride. The pump is installed in the bottom, aimed upward, and the fluid can overflow over the sides of the sink into a dispersed catchment area and return loop, after passing through heat exchangers to heat the fluid that runs the turbines. If the pump isn't on, the sink's worth of fluid is subcritical, but when the pump starts forming a mound of fluid above the level of the sink, the reaction starts up. The reaction rate is controlled by adjusting the pump flow and nozzle position. An excursion that superheats the fluid would cause the mound to pop and splash outward, almost instantly damping the rise, and something like an Earthquake would likewise jostle it into a less critical geometry before the pump spun down or a valve closed on the pump infeed.

It adds yet another layer of safety to the already extremely safe liquid fluoride designs, and requires only one moving part that has to stay moving to keep the reaction going. All failures are safe ones, even from explosions or earthquakes.

Speaking of bridges:

Caltrans was warned of Bay Bridge leaking before span opened

Water is ponding inside the bridge, near the high-strength steel cable structures, and the inside is turning into rust sludge.

Oh yeah, the new Bay Bridge span has been quite the fiasco. They should have just rehabbed the old span, imo. Would have been cheaper.

Yeah, but the new one is prettier.

Sorry, that's total tin hat bullshit. The most plausible explanation is the hot run in the tube theory.

Scorpion?

I didn't think that a "hot run in the tube" had ever sank a submarine before.

You can correct me if I'm wrong.

Instead of a fancy bridge, how about WSF just get a damn POS system that allows CC transactions to be backed out when reader loses service.

I like this idea: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2011/02/artificial-reefs/harrigan-text

Hot in the tube explains why the boat is pointing the wrong way. They were trying to engage the safety device that prevents the fish from coming back at the sub that fired.

It's just not as exciting as space sea battles.

I know that.

But hasn't that tactic worked EVERY time in the past for a U.S. submarine that had a hot run in the tube?

Why would it fail in that particular instance?

I'm not going to spend time researching a question I don't care about to debunk your conspiracy theory. I don't care if you think it was the Russians or the Klingons for that matter.

Why don't you go research it and see why the damage was in the torpedo room area and a hatch was blown outward, indicating an internal explosion.

It isn't my conspiracy theory. I had nothing to do with formulating it or making the case.

Wouldn't the sub pointing the wrong way also be explained by the Scorpion turning away from a serious threat?

It wasn't a hot run in a tube, it was a "hot torpedo", which always means a hot run in the tube - except for the one time on the Scorpion where it meant there was a torpedo battery cooking off after the ship had suffered a shimmy (a vibration that was known to be a problem on that particular boat), leading to a low-order detonation of the torpedo in the torpedo room. What the naval ordnance people had discovered prior to Scorpion's loss was that they had one batch of torpedoes whose batteries were sensitive to vibration, activating the battery prematurely in an uncontrolled manner. The battery then got hotter and hotter until the warhead cooked off. Those particular torpedoes were on the Scorpion.

So if Scorpion had the usual unexplained vibration as it went on a high speed run, a torpedo was likely suffer the runaway battery problem. The first symptom is an extremely hot torpedo, and the natural thing to holler out would be "hot torpedo!" The submarine would then immediately do a 180 to safe the torpedo, but in this case that wouldn't prevent the explosion because the detonator wasn't the issue, the battery was. So the torpedo explodes and the sub goes to the bottom.

Interesting.

In that case why not simply jettison the torpedo?

The warning about the problem hadn't made it to the fleet yet, as I recall, as ordnance was worried that they didn't want the crews to lose faith in the torpedoes in their tubes, and were just going to swap them out when the subs made it back to port. So the crew wouldn't have a plan in place for how to detect and handle such an event, and the torpedo could have been in the racks where there simply wasn't enough time.

Ok gt. Valid points all around.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Sidon_(P259)

That would probably be NPTU Charleston, where the former SSBN-626 and SSBN-635 have been converted to "Moored Training Ships". They aren't on land, they are permanently docked in the Cooper River in Goose Creek, South Carolina.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Power_School#Nuclear_Power_Training_Unit

I think it's neat that they are going to get some Los Angeles class Moored Training Ships!

USS La Jolla SSN-701 is one, it looks like. San Francisco, too. Seems her usefulness after ramming into an underwater mountain was limited.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_La_Jolla_(SSN-701)

Weirdly, now someone wants to turn oil tankers into floating cities.

More at the link.

stop the madness.

This oil tanker idea makes far more sense. Unlike aircraft carriers, there is a substantial supply. Shipping containers have already been repurposed as building blocks and vertical farms. This tanker dividend could really pay off well.

Reading the wiki I still think it is funny that people think La Jolla is a city when it is not, it is just a neighorhood. It describes one zip code in the city.

No it doesn't, it makes about the same sense. Read the comments at the link for anything that I would choose to say.

For a more practical recycling efforts read this. The SS United States deserves better than rusting dockside. Interestingly (to me anyway) it was her technological superiority that rendered her unmarketable. When she was taken out of passenger service, the propulsion was considered a defense secret (the ship was built with a dual purpose in mind) and they couldn't just auction it off.

Well a supertanker as more empty internal space than a carrier could dream of. No contaminated by radioactive materials areas. Its crew is only 1% of a carrier so it doesn't have the massive crew support facilities of the supercarrier.

Sigh. Ships are made of steel, and therefore require periodic maintenance and drydocking to repair corrosion and clean off sea life. Otherwise, the hulls would corrode, and the bridge would sink. Using ships as bridges is a comical idea, unless you want your water around it to be like Suisun Bay; full of contamination.