A Small Pet Peeve, Naval Fire Control And Battleship Paintings
What is wrong with this picture?
Maritme
From Breakbulk To The Container
The shipping container, the vessels that carry them and the land vehicles that carry them represent a revolution in the way cargo gets moved across the world. The full impact of that revolution is still being felt. The one thing that is certain is, that like it or not the world is going to be more connected than it has ever been in history as getting stuff from point “A” to point “B” has never been cheaper. To understand the full impact of the revolution We need to start at the beginning.
The First Battle Of The Atlantic
It was far closer than it should have been. The modern submarine was a development of the boats invented by John Phillip Holland around the turn of the last century.
The Great Triumph And Tragic End Of France’s Greatest Ship, Normandie
In the 1930’s the French Line felt the need to augment the SS Paris and the SS Ile De France, the Line’s premier ships on the transatlantic ferry route. The line would commission the largest and perhaps the most beautiful ship that the nation of France would build up to the 1930’s. That ship would be Normandie.
Shifting Cargo Sinks Ships
A couple things showed up in my timelines today. First was this rather dramatic video of a large container ship rolling 40 degrees to one side in a noreaster in the North Atlantic.
Living At Sea
This showed up in my twitter timeline recently.
http://gizmodo.com/the-techno-islands-that-may-replace-the-maldives-1704872022
Now I don’t actually believe that the Maldives are being submerged by rising sea levels caused by global warming. Still the idea of repurposing old drilling platforms as seasteads is interesting. They might interesting places to live. Though living would be, by necessity, be confined in some ways. Larhe apartments and spaces are going to be rare, for instance.
http://www.seasteading.org/community/contests/design-contest-winners/
http://www.wired.com/2015/05/silicon-valley-letting-go-techie-island-fantasies/
https://reason.com/blog/2013/12/27/seasteading-new-nations-becomes-a-practi
Still there aren’t really any showstoppers. Huge ocean structure are already being fabricated for oil drilling and production. People live on them for long periods of time. It’s likely that offshore structures for various activities are going to get larger in the near future.
https://theartsmechanical.wordpress.com/2016/03/29/building-the-largest-structures/
http://www.shell.com/about-us/major-projects/prelude-flng.html
Not just oil and gas, but mining as well
https://theartsmechanical.wordpress.com/2015/09/21/about-that-ocean-mining/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_sea_mining
http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/3240156.htm
New technologies are making possible to grow vegetables very efficiently.
http://weburbanist.com/2016/02/02/veggie-factory-worlds-first-vertical-farm-fully-run-by-robots/
People are also developing new ways to farm the ocean.
Who knows where it’s going to lead. Even without the supposed AGW catastrophe seasteading might become no different than any other minerals town. It might even move like the town in Gargantia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gargantia_on_the_Verdurous_Planet
http://www.fandompost.com/2014/07/04/gargantia-on-the-verdurous-planet-ova-gets-first-promo-images/
http://suisei-no-gargantia.wikia.com/wiki/Hideauze
With advancing genetic and regeneration technologies they might even reinvent themselves to better suit the ocean environment, though I doubt that they would turn themselves into giant space squids.
Living at sea has some exciting potentials and the possibility of a new kind of living. Only though if we create the fertile ground that lets pioneering like this happen. Otherwise we risk the kind of world like the one that Poul Anderson came up with in Orion Shall Rise.
A Life Underwater
A great documentary.
This is a man who’s lived his life on the edge.
Battleship
There are very few things more impressive than the Iowa Class battleships. They were the pinnacle of the gun at sea at the same time the gun as main weapon was more or less obsolete.
Building The SS America
I was digging through my library for blogfodder and I came upon this book about ship fitting.
I was going to post about how ships were designed and built when I realized that in some ways the book was a building diary for the SS America, built at Newport News Shipbuilding just before WW2.
Taking the lines off the model
Starting the frames and plating.
Floor plating
Lower bulkheads
Second deck.
Main deck.
Adding bulkheads and superstructure
Almost complete.
Preparation for launch.
Fitting out.
Trials
And delivery to the owners.
A video on the ship’s timeline
Some links.
http://united-states-lines.org/history-2/
http://laststandonzombieisland.com/tag/ss-america/
http://www.ssaustralis.com/enter.htm
http://www.ssamerica.bplaced.net/index-en.html
Fairly recent article from the Newport news Daily Press.
British Pathe news service on the launch
When The US Built Ships
The US has, by and large, given up on shipbuilding. Which is sad because the rest of the world uses the techniques in this video.
Somehow the greatest generations didn’t seem to function with the same limitations that we have to live with.
The Arts Mechanical 