The previous post is Notes At Sea (Friday, March 30).
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Notes At Sea (Saturday, March 31) · Apr 6, 04:11 PM

1815 EDT — I woke Dennis and we nervously entered the control room at 0230. Ed has been up here since midnight. The con is the ships brain. The Officer of the Deck (OOD) stands in the center. Fire control, navigation, helm, dive, and engineering are stationed around him. Sonar is seated in an adjacent compartment, usually kept dim. There are about 15 people involved, a mix of officers and enlisted.

Signals flow in through the ship’s sensory organs — GPS, inertial navigation, sonar arrays, periscopes, etc.. The appropriate stations process, compress, and translate these signals into meaningful information, then pass along this information to high-level command function nodes via a highly formalized robust communication protocol. Goals are reviewed, plans are created, and more communication back down to the ship’s actuators — propulsion, rudder, dive planes, weapon systems, etc..

All of this intrigues me; it’s an excellent man-machine mating. Banks of servers and compute nodes crunch a torrent of data — computers doing well what they are best at. Men discern patters, make decisions, and adapt to variable conditions based on sparse, noisy, and incomplete information.

Anyhow, the first test event was like clockwork.

The medical officer issues radiation dosimeters and briefs all riders on radcon safety. There is a reactor on board, you know, but he tells us to expect very little exposure. Going aft to use the treadmill may increase our exposure, so I’ll be sure to stay away, but I’ve seen the Captain and several crew walk past the crew’s mess in workout attire. I’m not sure how they find time.

The ship is tightly packed — passageways are narrow, beds are small, and there’s only two showers in the enlisted quarters. Every square inch of space is packed with equipment, pipes, gauges, cables, valves, stowage, documents, and tools. Time is compacted the same way — everyone is always working: standing watch, studying, cleaning, eating, washing, and even sometimes sleeping.

If there were any extra space? More equipment. Extra time? More work. It’s a tight ship.

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  1. I’ve really enjoyed how this is unfolding so far. I can’t wait to read more.

    — giveawayboy    Apr 9, 02:26 AM    #

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