Watch Out for that… Whale?
The Navy is shaking down its first high-speed, high-tech, small-crew Littoral Combat Ship — and has run into (ahem) an interesting problem:
Another potential problem is the high speed of the LCS, which is the fastest seagoing ship to ever serve with the U.S. fleet. The USS Freedom has gone as fast as 85 kilometers an hour, and it’s believed that the power plant can be tweaked to get that a little higher. At such high speeds, it’s easier to run into whales. This occasionally happens, especially at night. For larger ships, the result is usually a dead, or badly injured whale, and little damage to the ship. But the smaller LCS, hitting a large whale, while travelling at high speed, could leave the ship damaged (the whale would definitely be dead.) So far, the sailors on the bridge are to keep a sharp lookout for whales when the ship is travelling at high speed.
It might not be an exaggeration to say that we’re one tragic accident away from a lawsuit that could scuttle the entire LCS project.
Thoughts:
1. As my mom would say; “This is why we cant have anything nice”.
2. I thought that whales were rare and going extinct? If they are, then the problem solves itself.
3. Greenpeace has ships. Aren’t they also known to sail in littoral waters? How do they manage to avoid the whales?
4. The Japanese and Norwegians are known to have whale fleets. Here at last, we can begin the process of taking back jobs that were outsourced overseas.
5. Whales are carbon based life forms and Al Gore says that carbon is bad; therefore the whales must die. Its just as simple as that, isnt it?
6. Whale meat. Its “whats for dinner”.
Do they still sell those little whistle thingies to warn deer off the road? Do they have anything like that for whales?
“The USS Freedom has gone as fast as 85 kilometers an hour, and it’s believed that the power plant can be tweaked to get that a little higher.”
Ah, superchargers, is there anything they can’t do? With Pontiac going the way of the dodo, good to know gearheads will have something else to tweak.
Sorry, Frank, that’s not that funny.
Stephen, I hope something can stop the LCS program, as it’s a pathetic joke. We don’t need 49-knot ships with crews of 50 on what is essentially a fast civilian design.
We need battle-capable frigates and destroyers with large enough crews to handle damage control.
The Freedom has a hull of 3/8 inch aluminum and a kevlar inner protection system.
It is just the design we need for chasing Pirates, and Terrorists trying things in port, near shore, and up rivers.
It also has the wedding rings of the first soldier killed in Afghanistan fused together and placed in the “mast” made to look like the Twin Towers.
Oh, and it will go far faster than 80 kph. It’s engines are GE gas turbines, and it uses pumps like a big ol’ jet ski.
This is not as big a problem as all that.
- While the LCS can make that kind of speed, it can’t make it for long. You’re literally getting in the hundreds of gallons to the mile, and her ass tanks aren’t that fat.
- You also know where the major whale concentrations are.
- You also can hit whales at much lower speeds. USS MyLast climbed over one to bloody effect out in the Pacific one time.
Cheers,
Chris
I don’t want the whales to go extinct, so I favor giving the endangered ones GPS trackers and letting Greenpeace go out on escort duty and shoot at whatever goes after them. Let those Japanese, Icelandic and Norwegian ships fight to get to those “scientific” finds, I say. If that science requires exploding harpoons, then I’m willing to let Greenpeace vessels experiment with the hulls of whaling ships. I’m sure various navies around the world would be interested in the data, so it’s legitimate research.
In regard to the older issue of extreme low frequency sonar devices that are damn near proven to deafen marine mammals, I hope to hell we’re working on something better. I understand necessary evils, but I really hope we can come up with something else. When push comes to shove, I sure as hell don’t want enemy submarines going undetected. Still, I hate it.
I would agree with Greenpeace pirate ships being armed…if the Japanese and Norwegians (Iceland has no navy to speak of) are allowed to shoot back. Be an interesting thirty seconds.
The Greenpeace cowards, however, would never dare to touch a weapon in the presence of an armed foe. Like the Somali apes and pigs, they depend on leftypig media for cover.
I disagree. Some of those “cowards” are already riding around in speedboats in front of whaling vessels, which doesn’t sound like the actions of those who cower from a fight. Others (not necessarily associated with Greenpeace, but…) are already attacking whaling ships in harbors. I doubt there’d be a huge number of volunteers for any Greenpeace Navy, but there’d still be one.
And where did the “leftypig media” provide cover the Somali pirates? Aside from some very few stories about how fishermen in Somalia were devastated by commercial overfishing in unregulated Somali territory, I haven’t seen much that is even slightly sympathetic toward Somali pirates anywhere. Also, “apes and pigs”? You might consider getting fitted for a new hood, since the old one is too tight, making you irritable, and is starting to show even over the internet.
And I meant to say, “there’d still be some” rather than “there’d still be one”. Damn sleepiness.
If whales are in danger of extinction, save them the way we saved the buffalo. I can order buffalo meat in at least two restaurants in my podunk little town.
Only wildlife is ever endangered — livestock never is.
The buffalo was saved not because it was so tasty, but because private landowners didn’t kill all of theirs while the “Tragedy of the Commons” scenario allowed for overhunting. Still, I think a you-tag-it you get it policy could work for whales: they’d get killed only when their numbers are going up, we’d know where they are, and Greenpeace could compete with the few countries that actually hunt whales (sorry, it’s not hunting, it’s “scientific research” of some sort.)
I’m not against all hunting and killing and such, but I am against unregulated hunting and killing since it has traditionally led to poor results. Whether it’s fur, whale oil, or even non-animal things such as lumber: ownership tends to lead to responsibility. The question then and always is, who decides who owns what? But that’s another argument. But one worth having in this regard.
And livestock sometimes becomes endangered. Too much reliance on single crops, single breeds of domestic animals, and excluding less-desirable breeds has and does lead to problems. For instance, bananas and bees are in trouble. The way we raise chickens and hogs has led to problems. And there are other examples, some of which seem trivial but all of them are in the realm of possibility. Still, I agree that livestock has a better chance than wildlife in many if not most instances.
I also love that coyotes roam my alley, but I’m weird in that according to my neighbors. Fucking cat people.
We have red foxes in my neighborhood. I think if a coyote showed up the foxes would decamp pretty quickly, and there are a few roaming housecats we’d hate to see disappear (though we’d hope they were merely converted to indoor cats like ours have always been).
I’ve seen coyotes in our general area so I know they could show up. And there were reports a few months ago of a bobcat in a subdivision not too far from here.
A lot of environmentalists complaining about habitat loss from human sprawl overlook the benefit to wildlife that comes from sprawl, which is that hunting by humans becomes much rarer as soon as an area gets a high enough human population. And most people become much more interested in preserving wildlife if they actually get a chance to see some once in a while.
Coop everybody up in high-density cities and the enviros would lose a great deal of grass roots support for that reason alone.
The purpose of the high speed is pursuit: following speedboats with terrorists or pirates. That speed is a weapon to be used against the very enemies that now cause us great frustration. The purpose of the shallow-draft hull and light design is following them into shallow water where they can escape from heavier vessels. The purpose of the small seakeeping crew is to hold down costs and allow for mission specialists, accompanied by the “mission packages” of equipment that will let the vessel serve as a minesweeper, a guided missile frigate, or in roles not yet imagined.
Which is not to say that damage control is not a concern. It is a great concern. This is an experiment. The dreadnaught was an experiment. The submarine was an experiment. The aircraft carrier was an experiment. All of the advances, great and small, in naval warfare were once experiments. If you don’t experiment, you don’t advance. If you read the strategypage.com article to which this article links, you will find that the sailors and officers on the LCS are cross-training to a degree not known on ‘large’ naval vessels, partly to avoid boredom and partly in response to concerns about the small crew size.
Remember that one great strength of the aircraft carrier is that it is a platform whose weaponry can be upgraded at a fraction of the cost of replacing the ship.
It would be nice if we could have a navy composed entirely of dreadnaughts whose long-range weapons never means that they have to go in harm’s way, and that they never face risks to themselves. But whenever you try to do that, whether in equipment, doctrine, or law, the enemy finds a way around it.