The guy who thought up the bigass wrench was obviously on a ship that didn't have one and thought, "Gee, it'd be real nice if we had something to do other than sit here being shot at while we sail around in circles."
I've got this "sneaking suspicion" that the wrench was all about simply checking off another box... and that NO ONE expected it to work... but it met a requirement... so they plopped that wrench on its hangers and laughed their asses off.
Chief: The design committee has voted that we need at least 5 separate ways to control steering. We've got 4 and you're not going home until we've got 5. E4 Mafia: Umm. What if we buy an huge wrench and tell them we'll turn the rudder by hand. It's cheap and makes the snipes sound like badasses. It might even work. Chief: You had me at cheap.
or more likely a highly respected admiral suggested it and everyone else thought it was stupid but never spoke up out of respect and now it's just Navy tradition? cus why not?? lolz and right about now I probably have a SAILOR wanting to yell at me saying "son, without tradition what are we??" well ya got me, yer seamen, happy now?? there is a joke attached but naww...
I'd imagine how it'd work is similar to how my Sea Scout ship did it. They'd put the wrench on and then use blocks and lines to heave the wrench to either side.
Honestly? I've heard of folks on warships 'improvising' repairs and basic functionality of rudders back in world war two, getting their rudders out of a turn and having to rely on engine steering, before taking yet another she'll and having to repair driveshafts to restore a semblance of steering performance. I presume in the event of a conflict. The wrench would not be good. But with ropes, and a few pulleys out of damage controls collection, they could improvise something that takes a couple lengths of rope and a dozen men to drag the rudder sufficiently left or right to turn the ship away from combat and make her way back to port for more productive repairs. Because when things get desperate, cutting open a wall or two to make room to ensure your survival isn't really a big deal.
Here's the scenario: You and your homies are on duty and hydraulics fail and you three turn a ship with thousands of tons of displacement by hand. That's the stuff of legends, fuel for stories for decades.
And then you wind the anchor chain of a UK destroyer in your portside propeller AND break the starboard rudder while winding up the chain, the turbine powering the shaft shuts down because of somethings wrong with the shaft, your a couple 100 yards from the breakwater with BF 11 gusts pushing you onto that heap of rocks and you're happy they have three tug boats in the harbor to push you away from those rocks for the next six hours. Oh, the towing line broke, too. As did the other towing line. And the tug trying to tow you. That's what I call a bad day! It took about 30 minutes for me to stop swearing and start praying and another 15 to get back to swearing in three languages.
@@VolkerHett Well theirs a reason "swears like a sailor" exists. And honestly, I can't blame you. Everything that COULD go WRONG did, you kinda entitled to a little profanity at that point.
When all steering fails and you're caught in the gravity well of an astral body it is good to remember the last words of the Kodan Armada commander in the Last Starfighter when asked what they should do in just such a situation... "We die!"
I liked the escape hatch in our forward engine room. It emptied into medical. And yes, the docs did not appreciate a random hole to hell appearing in their spaces, so they put a large potted plant over the hatch. Unfortunately for them, the escape hatches could fit 3 sailors easily, and up to six if you squeezed. Well, take 3-6 hot, angry, and most dangerously, board mechanics who are determined to cause mischief, and well, there where quite a few broken pots. ( Best part was that we never got in trouble, because we were " removing an obstruction to the operation of mission critical safety equipment.")
"Is there any Red Port Left" was the one I was taught a long time ago. Red being the colour of Port wine, the colour of the Port side light and the Left side of the ship.
return red right... but that's something else. I guess if you have been around these concepts long enough though, port and starboard are as (or more) natural as left & right
726 class isn't very exciting, just a single lever and indicator arm... push lever right until desired number of degrees and let go the lever.... repeat as instructed by helmsman....
Non SOP use for "Large Wrench". Percussive Maintenance of "Organic Cognatators". Works great for "Tightening" a loose nut behind the wheel. Actually happened: Bridge signals Engine Room "Emergency Stop, Full Reverse" in middle of shipping lane. Reason given Helmsman(Green as grass) thought they were about to hit an underwater obstruction. Ship was vintage WW2 "Emergency Stop" on main shaft was a "Large Inflatable Tire" that when inflated gripped the tunnel. Lots of NOISE!, lots of SMOKE!. Pissed Captain (He did an imitation of a bingo ball in his cabin), PISSED! Engine Room.
I always found port/starboard quite useful, as it eliminates the "NO! I mean MY left" thing, since port is "left" as you face the BOW. It's inherently subjevtive, yes, just like "my left", but using a common reference frame (the ship, or helo, or track, or car, or whatever).
@@SkylerLinux right up until you're communicating with someone on another ship... or worse, on Land. It's less variable, possibly even less subjective, but objective it is not.
That's kind of like in theater, where Stage Left and Stage Right are from the perspective of on stage facing the audience, and House Left and House Right are from the perspective of the audience facing the stage. "Stage Right" is "House Left" and vice versa.
Unfortunately, none of those back ups, nor the primary, include surge protection. Because powering the console with plasma piped directly from the reactor with no cut outs is apparently brilliant.
Another mnemonic I use is that port is shorter than starboard, left is shorter than right, and red is shorter than green (for navigation lights). - The closest water-ships get to space ship steering is the technology of azipods and lateral bow thrusters - I recently watched a video by Drachinifel where he tours the HMS Unicorn, and he shows the aft steering mechanism and the massive lever that a team of men would have to grunt at to steer the ship when the powered steering was wrecked.
Please do a video on the horrible idea of non-haptic feedback aboard ships/aircraft. The video could even extend to Holographic Control Display Thingies in Sci-Fi. It’s one of my personal naval pet peeves, along with “Maritime COIN”, the DDG-1000, and the LCS. I mean, come one! Even the display screens on the F-35s use buttons for menu navigation! Either way, good video. It was great to hear your opinions as a former helmsman. The wrench had me laughing. Controlling a 12-footer dinghy with a tiller rod is already tiring in high seas. I can’t imagine controlling a 450-footer the same way. Fair winds, -J P.S-Love the KSP images being used for reaction wheels / RCS
The only kind of good reason for a hologram is for showing something in 3d. They should never ever be used as the primary interface for anything, because they essentially have all the downsides of touchscreens, but they also have terrible background contrast (assuming the common transparent versions, not the ones from Star Trek)
@@thatstarwarsnerd6641 Really the only way a "Hologram" is a good interface is if the system is tied by some deep madness into the users nervous system somehow. Which is a whole other can of potential worms. At that point you aren't really dealing with a true hologram anyway, hence the air quotes. They may look fancy and futuristic but suffers from being a horribly complex probably tetchy way of doing something really simple.
@@thatstarwarsnerd6641 the F35 and the rafale .... i think .. i know there are two planes, that have this furiouly STUPID "pressure" joystick that doesn't move tho i believe the pilots forced the designer to implement some movement for feedback hologram combat flying is the stupidest thing ever, even for the people who define "evasive" as turn into the enemy fire and present the biggest target ....
@@daral9217 a hologram is possibly quite useful as a navigation or tactical display on a space ship, depending on the specifics (humans are kind of bad at translating between 2D and 3D) ... but in no sane world is a regular standard hologram a usable INPUT device.
@@laurencefraser Yeah that was the air quotes in my comment were for. You have a display and some madness to give it feed back, or a false sense of interaction. The calculations alone to try and parse what qualifies as interacting with the hologram would be extensive, let alone the fudge factor, and betting your life on it all working right. Oh heck no. You might get it to work as a mental link display but those are even more theoretical than a functional hologram.
The advantage of RCS is that the sheer number of thrusters needed by the system would provide its own redundancy. If you have dozens or hundreds of thrusters, it's pretty hard to knock them all out at once, and you lost some, you would still have limited steering on whatever thrusters are left. The only real vulnerability is the fuel supply, but even then you could distribute the fuel tankage throughout the ship to protect it.
USS Sacramento(AOE-1) did have a big, BIG wrench. It was near 13' long, open end, 1000+ lbs. and not used for steering. You never would have gotten it into aft steering without a torch cutting a hole into aft steering. For some God awful reason the powers that be saw fit to give older ships w wrench to remove the screw in anywhere, you know, just in case. I only saw it off the bulkhead once, in drydock. Just to make sure it still fit. Then it was sandblasted, painted and put back on the bulkhead. The other drydock time, it never left its holder.
There is not an Oliver Hazard Parry class Frigate that is a museum, yet. However, there is a museum in Erie, PA that is working on adding one of the OHP frigates in the next year or so. At this time the ship that is most likely going to be the former U.S.S. Haliburton FFG-40.
THANK YOU. Few, if any Sci-Fi ship have real backups. Enterprise, no matter the number, loses control of the helm or the engines every few weeks. And there is no backup helm. I've always bitched that there should be a person on Starfleet Ships whose entire job is to stand watch on a set of MANUAL valves so that when the Warp Reactor go out of control he can vent the plasma into space, shut down the deuterium flow, and stop a WC Breach. Call it EMSSW or Emergency Stop System Watch. Just a little room buried in Engineering with the valves, a chair, sound powered phone, and a hard wired alarm. Perfect duty for Ens. Crusher or Lt. Barkley. Keep them off the holo-deck and away from engineering where they tend to foul things up.
At least most star trek ships have a secondary (battle) bridge, so that's Something. They're almost never used in the shows, but they do exist. Also, technically speaking, at least as of TNG, EVERY console on the bridge is backup for every other one, and with the correct authorisation codes a fair bit can actually be controlled from consoles in Engineering, or a number of other random duty stations with consoles around the ship, to a lesser extent, too. It's... kind of a large part of the point of LCARS, actually. of course, this is conveniently forgotten whenever the plot calls for it, and very frequently the failure is on the other side of the computer system (and There is where there's a distinct lack of backups for a lot of functions, or at least unslavagable failure states).
In short, Aft Steering is for when the bridge says 'What we have heah... is a failure... to communicate.' As far as the various control systems, it's 'tryin this' and 'tryin that' and 'hey ship, how's your hull?' At the end, talking about the need for redundant systems, I couldn't help but think of the song "Ballad of a Spaceman' by Julia Ecklar.
I've always thought that if I did the whole "non-physical control thing," there'd be an infodump scene where somebody explains that while the visuals are holographic, the system incorporates tractor/presser systems so you're actually "manipulating" something. And, there's hardened controls for the circumstances where you need a physical control.
@@SacredCowShipyards But, touchscreens "look futuristic" and "sexy" and might be the point where some government procurement official gets enough of a chubby to actually pay for the rest of the ship around the touchscreen.
Ork philosophy is simple: 1. How much dakka? (How many and how big of guns can I strap to this thing?) 2. Make it faster! (Strap on as many engines as possible, theoretically pointing in useful directions but thats optional, also paint it red) 3. Get close to the enemy, for boarding, accuracy, ramming and crew morale. 4. More Dakka (where can I add more guns?) 5. How many grots and mechboyz do you have at your disposal?
The US is putting frigates back into service. They just laid down a new class of them, named for the USS constellation. The original USS constellation is a great ship, I’d definitely recommend visiting it if in the Baltimore area.
Are they following the trend and thus functionally destroyers in everything but armament? (modern destroyers would generally be identified by random observers as under-gunned crusiers if you dropped them into ww2, for example).
@@laurencefraser They're only undergunned in the most literal of senses, in that the only guns on board are sidearms and CIWS, since they've finally stopped putting the interwar-era 5"/38s on them. MIssiles, on the other hand...
"They" is a bit of a strong term. They've contracted it out to people who've been making the hull successfully for quite some time now, which is a far sight better than what happened with the Little Crappy Ship.
@Laurence Fraser it's 7.3 thousand tons, according to inter-war/ww2 standards its a cruiser. But there is no set size for destroyers, frigates and cruisers in the modern age, everything overlaps. Some have suggested to base it on roles but these also overlap... I personally agree with the modern rating system proposal (by Robert O. Work) inspired by the British age of sail rating system but instead of being based on the number of guns it is based on the number of battle force missiles*: -1st rate battle force ships (battleships): 100+ battle force missile cells. -2nd rate battleships: 90-99 battle force missile cells. -3rd rate battleships: 60-89 battle force missile cells. -4th rate battleships: 48-59 battle force missile cells. -5th rate (great) frigates: 20-47 battle force missile cells. -6th rate frigates: multi-role ships with less than 20 battel force missile cells. -7th rate sloops/brigs: single role ships, usuelly with only terminal defense weapons (ie no battle force missiles) The Constellation class would be a 4th rate battle(force)ship under this system, due to having 48 battle force missile cells {32 mk41 VLS & 16 RGM-184}. *battle force missiles being mission support capable missiles, the altentuave being defensive terminal missiles (missiles only capable of defending the host ship)
There's that weird thing from Gundam: Active Mass Balance Auto-Control (AMBAC). If your ship is variable geometry enough you can "steer" by moving the geometry around. Kinda like skydivers getting into the right position or cats landing on their feet. I have no idea if physics really allows for this the way they think it does.
Wing- warping airplanes come to mind. Airplanes also move fuel around to keep trim. That might work on a ship- move ballast, lean to one side and start a turn in that direction... Or make it an adjustable katamaran/ outrigger boat? Rudders are basicly variable gometry, though... Also, cats work by being two reaction wheels (ok, just legs with mass) stuck together with a spine. Bend the spine, and you can shift angular momentum around between two semi- independent masses at a semi- right angle (front and back legs) to control where your feet land.
The thing is in space you might be able to shift mass around to change the attitude of the ship and point the nose in a direction, but you still need to apply thrust to actually cause a change in direction of travel. Course if main engines still work, then your good to go.
That only works if you are travelling through a medium, such as air, that is resisting the force. In space, there is no medium to push against your movement. Variable geometry steering would not work in space, for the same reason aelerons amd rudders are useless.
you can make that "big ___ing wrench" work! you need three comealongs . . . two attached to the end of the handle with wall mounts left and right to pull against . . . the third attaches at the wrench center of gravity and is connected to a spot on the ceiling over where the wrench CG will be when deployed. note: do not attempt in any condition other than flat calm!
Same for the Imperial Navy but with added Prayers for removing the holy Wrench from it's shrine, fixing it in place and having the Servitors turn it. Thinking of it they probably have a special Wrench Servitor (size of an Ogryn with extra slabs of vat grown muscles and Cybernetics) just for that one purpose.
@@Alex-xt1rr Remember, this is the same Imperial Navy that sends crewmen into lethally radioactive reactor cores as part of routine refueling operations!
@@randlebrowne2048 as the dogma of the Cult Mechanicus states "the flesh is weak". At least those, pressganged hivescum/prisoners, got redemption by dieing in service for the Imperium. The lucky ones are those that do die as the leathal irradiated "survivers" will be turned into Servitors in order to keep them "alive" cause "only in death does duty end". If only the Astartes would not keep all suits of Terminator armour for themselves ...
@@sdoo-ou2ni um Eldar crafts use solar sails so once those are gone all they can do is either abandon ship or pray that their Crystal Singers can pull of a miracle at fixing the sails.
I love this channel :-) Also I would say that any designer of anything more complex than a club should consider inviting Murphy over for a drink before he shows up uninvited later on when it is to late...
The aft steering station on HMS Caroline always pops into my head in this context. WW1 era light cruiser of around 4k tons of displacement, with a wheel like that of Warrior but buried deep in the aft section, in its own little room that is nothing more than a box. I forget if it was manned by 8 or 16 people, but my takeaway was "wow, I didn't think I would dislike anything more than engine spaces".
Okay, hear me out... Giant wrench hanging on the bulkhead. Cap screw to secure it to the rudder shaft hangs beside it. Eye hooks on the bulkheads on either side of the compartment. A couple of big ol' chain hoists hanging from those eye hooks with heavy chains already attached. All of it normally secured, of course. Hydraulics go down, set the wrench, screw on the cap nut so the wrench will stay put without some poor swab having to hold it in place. Hook the chains to the wrench. One or two sailors on each hoist chain. Profit. All mechanical, no electronics to go bad, exponential increase in power. Only an additional two relatively simple machines to maintain.
I suppose if you had a sufficiently long bar with a sufficiently heavy duty box wrench attached to an auxiliary vector thruster then it could maybe be used by a sufficiently huge crew member to give some degree of left and right as well as up and down? It would, of course, need to be set up 'above' a hemispherical floor to maintain contact and need suitable up/down/left/right sign posting.
Star Trek uses RCS engine failure even comes up as a plot point every once in a while. 😆 Also this video planted the seed of a short skit in my head and I've decided to share. Humi1: Main drive is down! backup in progress. I swear to all the gods I will commit a war crime if they make us use the tiller wrench. Humi2: now, now ... well all explode before it gets to that. Humi3: jinx
A great example of this is in the film 'The Battle of River Plate' where the bridge of HMS Exeter is shot to pieces and the captain conns the ship from the the aft superstructure relaying commands to aft steering by a string of sailors relaying the message.
Hey the Imperial Corvairin Navy has our own equivelent to the huge wrench, We have assault shuttles latch onto the fore and aft aspect of the hull and use their backup fusion torch thrusters for last ditch emergency steering.
An interesting thing about the little bubbles created during cavitation. The inside of those little bubbles are as close as it is possible to get to 100% reflective. There is also the possibility that Nanoscale cavitation bubbles can be used to utilize the casimir effect to produce energy. "Hope I spelled that right?" There was a plumber in Southeast United States who designed and built a water heating system for a firehouse. This water heating system produced overunity energy. Quite a few physicists came through to look at and figure out how it worked most of them left scratching their heads. One physicist theorized that the system he created was producing nanoscale bubbles through cavitation. He also stated that it's possible quantum photons were bouncing off of the inside of the bubbles before they disappear adding mechanical energy into the system.
Any ship that has no backup for a backup is something questionable. Even old wooden boats had huge loads of stuff which only purpose it was to either help create the backup or be the backup. Of course backup systems can fail so you plan around that. Any spaceship in a half way realistic setting where travel through the stars takes a significant amount of time instead of being over in half a day will require enough backup that from a near total construction you are able to safely either limp back to a friendly "port" or at least call for help and have somewhere safe to wait for said help to arrive. And touchscreen for steering is the typical we need to be modern stuff that shows that whoever was implementing that never did steer anything significant let alone something of the size of a ship.
I actually know exactly what you're talking about with that wrench. Back when I was a sea scout in California we had an old 1950s Ex-army T-boat called the Gryphon. On the stern we had this red orange yard-and-a-half or so long steel tiller-like item on the transom, as well as a circular plate secured with flathead screws. I had no idea what those were for till we were on a cruise and Skip called a loss of steering drill. We took the plate off, lifted the heavy ass tiller up, put it on the nut that was beneath the plate, then secured lines and blocks to rings on both sides of the tiller and split the crew up to port and starboard. It was... certainly an experience, but to be quite honest I found it kinda fun in a weird way. If I was still in California I'd be able to take a picture of it, but alas I'm in michigan, and none of the photos of the Gryphon that I have show the wrench. Still, felt I should bring this up as it is one of my many fond memories of Sea Scouts
Suggestion for any fictional ship with multiple crew and multiple RCS units for story telling purposes. Ship has a failure (flight control linkage, cut wires, battle damage, jackass driving panics and tries to put too much force on the joystick and it snaps off...) BUT instead of "aft steering) each RCS unit has a manual control, either manned in engineering or if ALL the control wiring is fragged, a station inboard of each unit. That way you could have SOME kind of emergency steering (directing each crewman by suit radios, especially, or even some hard wired, plugged into their suit sound powered phones)
Honestly, the old wrench on the Tiller bar works surprisingly well if you have enough people... though usually they tie ropes to the other and and pas them around the rails, or hydrolics,... or whatever won't cut the ropes and then play tug-a-war with the tiller. This way if the current did grab the rutter, it would yank the rope out of one teams hands rather then say... cut them in half or toss them accross the room, plus the ropes could be tied off to hold a heading.
Manually cranking thousand tonne reaction wheels and using the spin gravity section ‘on manual’ for roll…. Running to the back or bottom of the ship to go manually operate the hydraulics on the thousand tonne gimbals for the main exhaust nozzles… HAND CRANK THE FTL DRIVE LIKE ITS A JACK IN THE BOX…. RELEASE THE SOLAR SAILS MAKE HEADING FOR ALPHA CENTAURI
If I could send a suggestion back in time: to compliment this tiller, there should have been a pair of bumper-jack style jacks. I love the bumper jack. There are some for farm use that can both pull and push. If you had two people with one jack each on each side of the tiller, the job of moving that tiller would be a bunch easier, if slower.
@@jaywerner8415 I served on a Spru Can. We had two screws so none were onbaard. But when I served on Tugs we had a large beam we could use as a tiller in emergenies.
A manual wheel and rudder angle indicator are mandatory. Even if its in an electronic system you need those to be nice and simple, and in the words of a Scottish Russian "things in here react poorly to bullets"
Why was there a giant spanner in the aft steering section of a ship? Probably a bet. You can just imagine the conversation happening between two designers during the planning of the aft steering room. "So we have four (or however many) ways to steer the ship during a failure in steering." "Five bucks says that I can convince the Navy to have a giant spanner as a back-up." "That's just stupid. Ten bucks if you can make it longer than six feet." This is the only reason I can think as to why the machine gun housing on the Australian Sentinal tank looks like that.
In the setting I’m writing, main drives are typically fusion torches for sublight speeds and an Alcubierre style system for FTL fed by a combination of magnetically contained matter/antimatter reactors, fusion reactors, and auxiliary fission batteries(emergency power). RCS is provided by diverting a fraction of main drive power through a vernier system across the ship. And waste heat is cycled through liquid coolant radiator strips that can be ‘buttoned up’ during combat or vented (ejected) to space in an emergency
The idea is that the fission batteries (RTGs) are used to charge traditional batteries in order to provide the startup power for the auxiliary/secondary fusion reactors on board ship, which in turn supply the immense power required to safely start the primary M/AM reactors on the largest ships like carriers (SCV) battleships (SBB), and heavy/ armored cruisers (SCA). ships classed as light cruisers (SCL), destroyers (SDD, SDDR, and SDDA), as well as frigates/heavy corvettes/system patrol cutters (SFFG, SFFD, SFFP) typically run a pairs of fusion reactors or fission/fusion combination reactors and have a number of thermocouples in line with the primary cooling systems to take advantage of waste heat while engaging the less friendly and cooperative elements. Also, they lack the surface area and overall mass to efficiently bleed heat passively and therefore have to make up for inefficiencies any way possible. Also, in my OC universe, ships massing less than 15k metric tons cannot independently make use of the FTL drives in canon, which means ships below frigate class are strictly in system or must “catch a ride” with a sufficiently large vessel (SCL or higher). Anyhoo, love your content, always look forward to seeing what is coming from the harbor master next
Redundancy for redundancy is the best sort of redundancy you could have especially for a warship and more especially for one in space where everything wants you to be not alive
The wrench could be a good idea IF instead of using people to push it around you rigged a block and tackle system. A proper set up would be a lot safer and would require fewer people to run it. As for the escape trunk, that one looked pretty damned nice. I toured the USS Lexington a few years ago and what she had just didn't look pleasant. I do like the idea of rungs on two sides so your shipmates can have a passing lane in case you're not escaping fast enough.
"...maybe you'll end up under the ship, maybe you'll end up in a parallel dimenson." The kids call that place the "aft-rooms" these days. Also, any time I hear someone drop "but on the gripping hand" into a discussion without pause or explanation, it's a good day. You're awesome.
Thanks for this video. I can only imagine Capt. Evans aboard the USS Johnston DD557 standing on the fantail shouting course corrections down the hatch to the aft steering in the middle of active combat during the Battle Off Samar in 1944.
Having manned aft steering on a Destroyer, I can verify the wrenches still exist, albeit in a slightly different fashion. On a ship with multiple rudders, should you lose all hydraulics for one rudder you lock it out with a pair of giant nuts on a 4" diameter lead screw. The key here is you need to maintain either constant thrust or zer thrust while locking it out. The one time we ever had to do that for real, some idiot officer on the bridge decided to shift what shaft was trailing while I had guys locking out one rudder. Damn near crushed someone. CO was pissed when she came down 5 minutes later and heard about it from us.
Locking out the rudder makes perfect sense. Percussive maintenance on the person responsible for the course change with the wrench in question also makes perfect sense.
The song Sam Jones on the albums Carmen Miranda’s Ghost and Finity’s End is about what happens when you loose your thruster control at three-quarters c. It’s a great song, and I highly recommend it.
the tillage wrench hangs from a winch (not wench) from the upper, gets lowered onto the nut and 2 (one on each side) hook between it and the walls and you hand crank each to stear the ship. it works.
You know what I want to see? Someone tied to the 8 foot wrench. Because I guaran-damn-tee you, some sailor, at some point, lost, dropped or otherwise mislocated something of sufficient value or importance that his Chief had him lashed to the wrench. You know, so he wouldn't forget next time. I would bet folding money that that shit happened.
Before the napolionic wars, port was actually called Larboard and the starboard side was always called starboard for the reasons SCS gave, larboard only became port in 1844 when the Royal Navy admiralty ordered its use to reduce confusion for sailors of the landlubbers variety pressed into service.
So what to do if there are a catastrophic failure on the bridge causing the stearing problems? I have certain memories of a Super Star destroyer crashing into the second Deathstar...
one of my favorite anime scenes in cowboy bebop is when they used manual control over the RCS thrusters to adjust the course in order to deactivate a satellite
I do like glass cockpits, but I'll not buy a boat that lacks a wheel. But given my love of redundancy, I for one would prefer hydraulic steering with a backup tiller and dual autopilot (or atleast a COMPLETE second autopilot system in storage ready to be swapped out if needed.) Every so often I find a video I managed to miss the first time around. Excellent rant as always. Tiller for a friggit... better include a LOT of block and tackle.
Do surface ships not use hydraulic accumulators? We have those on submarines exactly for loss of hydraulics. It's basically a reservoir of hydraulics fluid attached to a pressurized air tank that provides a limited supply of hydraulic power to maneuver. I guess it's more important on submarines as we need hydraulics to maintain depth control, where a surface ship its less severe.
I forgot Netflix apparently remade Lost In Space. Haven't seen enough of the original black&white tv show to remember much of it, but I do have a VHS tape of the prequel movie, which was at least a good watch as a kid trying to wrap their head around time travel shenanigans. Guess I'll have to rewatch it to notice whether it had any redundant systems, or if any that existed were all destroyed by Robot...
Cavitation is caused by the water effectively boiling due to low pressure. It is loud, violent, and causes noise and damage, but it also robs the ship of power and in the case of rudders, control authority. I also had to take a minute to admire those screws and not just the curved rudders... you know they're putting out some power when they have to angle shafts downward like that, though I dunno if that was a "clear waterflow" issue, a "center of thrust" issue, a "make room for sufficiently large propellers" issue, or some combination thereof. Addendum: Ships exist in this world without backups and redundancies, and they DO say something. "Your environment, your success in your endeavors, and your very life are not as important to us as our bottom line. We literally don't care whether you live or die so long as your check cleared. And if it didn't, we'll just bill your next of kin."
this is the IRL equivalent of the scifi trope of main engineering taking over from the bridge. which is something that pops up a lot in star trek, at least. (and the BSG reboot, in season 4)
The whole wrench thing honestly sounds like something you could potentially use to limp to port if you're stranded at sea and cannot steer for any reason. I can't see it working in an actual combat or tight navigation scenarios.
In ancient times Sailors stared their ships by following the stars, primarily the north star, so when they would head west the north star was to the right side of the ship. This became the stearage side so the helmsman could see the north star or starboard. The port side was always the leftside for bumping the dock.
The only reason redundancy isn't a thing in modern sci-fi, if it existed the story couldn't happen. Which is one of the major reason i dislike most modern sci-fi. Kind of like how cell phones make most story plots impossible. Or, ya know, if the characters had the intelligence of a squirrel. AND, i'm with tom paris, give me knobs and switches over a screen i constantly have to look down at to figure out where the hell the "Nuke target" button is.
It's a good thing that the gravatic version of inertial dampeners can be tuned into a gravatic thruster. Just don't go too fast without the crew strapped in.
"If the compensator failure was minor, And your diet is typical warship fare, you will probalby understand perfectly how it got the nickname 'gravy gun'"
My second ship was a DDG USS O'Kane DDG-77, I was an HT. Well one night I was on watch the ever-favorite 0000-0400. Part of that watch was security/ roving so eventually I'm down in aft steering. During the watch the Bridge comes up on my radio and asks me to contact them when I make my way down there. "Aft steering, bridge" "Go aft steering" "Umm you wanted me to hit you guys up when I got down here, well I'm here." "We need you to do a rudder swing test" So I do the required steps to take local control "Okay just need a little side to side" "Roger that standby" I should add to this I was normally considered a nice stand up guy and I was but learned you have to be a bit of an asshole sometimes to not get walked on and there were a few people blissfully asleep that had pissed me off. So an abrupt jerk to starboard followed by abrupt jerk to port, that was the night several people went from sleeping peacefully to being propelled out of their racks. "Whoops first time doing that guys wow that thing is sensitive...."😅
Funny story: I could never remember which was port and starbord, until a character in a book I read said that port has four letters, same as left, and ever since then, I've never forgotten. The book was Deathlands #54 Judas Strike by James Axler if anyone is interested. Edit: I wrote this before this very thing was mentioned in the video.😳
One of the advantages that the RCN has is only three platforms, two of which will use the same control system when the new destroyers start to come online.
While not a frigate, do you think the DD-951 U.S.S. Turner Joy (Forrest Sherman class) would be old enough to have the giant wrench? That one has been a museum piece in Bremerton, WA since 1992. You might be able to get one of the museum staff to snap a photo for you (I'm pretty sure Aft Steering isn't open to the public).
So, on small wooden boats, if the motor went out and you had a tiller, you could potentially waggle the tiller like a fish-tail to get some forward motion. Has anyone tried that with 'the Wrench' on a warship? I can't imagine it worked.
5 men can lift a ton or two with some effort, but no way in hell can you move it with any accuracy or whilst in a moving vessel. I base this on moving steel beams by hand as a young man with a few friends, damn near lost a finger due to the fact that you can't really choose where it goes with any accuracy.
Or it also was a heavy ass wrench but with a plate on it that calls "Unless your the Hulk, You're officially fucked!" This wrench "solution is my new favourite "sounds good on paper but actually sucks" idea.
They did have a secondary bridge! But the officers there were lower ranked and (not realizing the main bridge was gone) didn't want to risk offending the higher ranked officers by correcting course (until it was too late).
Sacred cow shipyard. Not sure y'know but ryan szymanski of the new jersey(second of the iowas bb 62) has a wrench that you could have used for a psuedo replacement. Its nerves a different purpose but the size is comparable
Story I'm working on , off & on has gravitic drives (primarily for ftl, & exploited for artificial gravity), bow & stern sublight drives, rcs, & ai running each ship that at the absolute minimum can use their radiators as a very inefficient solar sail. The biggest management issue for any ship is their heat. All the weapons generate heat, the shields can block just about anything... & generate heat. The drives generate heat. Every ship has capacitors to store said heat ... to an extent. But every ship has its limit at which point one of three things happens. The vessel turns into an easy bake oven. (Worst case scenario.) Or the ai vents heat In one of two ways. Extends her radiators, ( which are obscenely fragile compared to the rest of the hull and are probably glowing like a star at this point) or dumps it Into the freezing cold realm of fold space. (Announcing to anyone bothering to look within several billion light years where they are with the thermal bloom) the panic button option is to jettison the whole capacitor bank (which unregulated is probably going to explode) & pray they can limp along back to friendly space on the emergency capacitors or have help turn up. . Theirs a reason crotch rocket space fighters aren't a thing in setting & the smallest open space run about has about the same volume as the air forces BUFF. & ships tend to behave like 1940s naval ships. They travel in groups because wandering off by yourself will inevitably be when you get in trouble. No star trek enterprise trips here. Anyone trying it is going to have a very unpleasant encounter with a shipping containers worth of brass assuming they get home in one piece. It's an on & off project& I have no idea if it's a setting anyone would want to read about. But these videos give me plenty of little detail ideas.
I can imagine that huge wrench being wrestled into place using chain falls or an overhead gantry. Actuating that wrench could be done with block and tackle. I would bet appropriately positioned pad eyes are easy enough.
This is exactly right. Iowa class aft steering has block and tackle provisions just for that purpose. BB NJ's channel has a good video on their aft steering spaces
@@michaellazorchak8175 I never got to see the steering gear spaces on USS Eisenhower CVN69. I was too busy in Main Machinery spaces making fresh water, heating steam, electricity and propulsion. Steering gear belonged to A-Gang, not M-Div.
Whoever suggested touchscreen steering on a warship has never been shot at by so much as a paintball gun, let alone another warship, and it shows
they haven't even tried to use one in the car apparently
🙄
Part of the US military's obsession with super high tech everything instead of KISS.
Touch screens are squishier than squishies.
The same genius that created the blue camo pattern for sailors.
It's not stupid it's advanced
The guy who thought up the bigass wrench was obviously on a ship that didn't have one and thought, "Gee, it'd be real nice if we had something to do other than sit here being shot at while we sail around in circles."
HMS Warspite laughs: You could shoot back!
@@species3167 Warspite had Plot Armor, though, modern ships don't even have a belt.
*Sad Bismarck noises*
I've got this "sneaking suspicion" that the wrench was all about simply checking off another box... and that NO ONE expected it to work... but it met a requirement... so they plopped that wrench on its hangers and laughed their asses off.
Chief: The design committee has voted that we need at least 5 separate ways to control steering. We've got 4 and you're not going home until we've got 5.
E4 Mafia: Umm. What if we buy an huge wrench and tell them we'll turn the rudder by hand. It's cheap and makes the snipes sound like badasses. It might even work.
Chief: You had me at cheap.
or more likely a highly respected admiral suggested it and everyone else thought it was stupid but never spoke up out of respect and now it's just Navy tradition? cus why not?? lolz
and right about now I probably have a SAILOR wanting to yell at me saying "son, without tradition what are we??" well ya got me, yer seamen, happy now?? there is a joke attached but naww...
I'd imagine how it'd work is similar to how my Sea Scout ship did it. They'd put the wrench on and then use blocks and lines to heave the wrench to either side.
@@pacifist11 As an engineer, I can almost guarantee this is how it went.
Honestly? I've heard of folks on warships 'improvising' repairs and basic functionality of rudders back in world war two, getting their rudders out of a turn and having to rely on engine steering, before taking yet another she'll and having to repair driveshafts to restore a semblance of steering performance.
I presume in the event of a conflict. The wrench would not be good. But with ropes, and a few pulleys out of damage controls collection, they could improvise something that takes a couple lengths of rope and a dozen men to drag the rudder sufficiently left or right to turn the ship away from combat and make her way back to port for more productive repairs.
Because when things get desperate, cutting open a wall or two to make room to ensure your survival isn't really a big deal.
Here's the scenario: You and your homies are on duty and hydraulics fail and you three turn a ship with thousands of tons of displacement by hand. That's the stuff of legends, fuel for stories for decades.
And then you wind the anchor chain of a UK destroyer in your portside propeller AND break the starboard rudder while winding up the chain, the turbine powering the shaft shuts down because of somethings wrong with the shaft, your a couple 100 yards from the breakwater with BF 11 gusts pushing you onto that heap of rocks and you're happy they have three tug boats in the harbor to push you away from those rocks for the next six hours. Oh, the towing line broke, too. As did the other towing line. And the tug trying to tow you.
That's what I call a bad day! It took about 30 minutes for me to stop swearing and start praying and another 15 to get back to swearing in three languages.
@@VolkerHett holy hell, how bad did you piss the sainted god murphy off that day?
@@VolkerHett Well theirs a reason "swears like a sailor" exists. And honestly, I can't blame you. Everything that COULD go WRONG did, you kinda entitled to a little profanity at that point.
@@VolkerHett did you break the mirror under the ladder with a black cat? Because seriously dude.
When all steering fails and you're caught in the gravity well of an astral body it is good to remember the last words of the Kodan Armada commander in the Last Starfighter when asked what they should do in just such a situation...
"We die!"
[inserts whir of the helmet monocle...] 🙂
Death blossom!
thank you for reminding me of that movie.
I liked the escape hatch in our forward engine room. It emptied into medical. And yes, the docs did not appreciate a random hole to hell appearing in their spaces, so they put a large potted plant over the hatch. Unfortunately for them, the escape hatches could fit 3 sailors easily, and up to six if you squeezed. Well, take 3-6 hot, angry, and most dangerously, board mechanics who are determined to cause mischief, and well, there where quite a few broken pots. ( Best part was that we never got in trouble, because we were " removing an obstruction to the operation of mission critical safety equipment.")
I’m surprised y’all’s Skipper let the plant slide since that’a like a genuine problem in an emergency
"Is there any Red Port Left" was the one I was taught a long time ago.
Red being the colour of Port wine, the colour of the Port side light and the Left side of the ship.
return red right... but that's something else.
I guess if you have been around these concepts long enough though, port and starboard are as (or more) natural as left & right
@@stanislavkostarnov2157 red right returning from my experience, and red right wrong when your friend fucks it up
We'll get to red right reaving at some point.
'Port and Left' are both four letter words is the way I remembered it (for no particular reason :-)
The port side was originally called larboard, as in loading side, before it was changed to port
Aft steering on the 212 A submarines is pretty "fun" as you use a series of levers and a chart to control the x-plane rudders.
726 class isn't very exciting, just a single lever and indicator arm... push lever right until desired number of degrees and let go the lever.... repeat as instructed by helmsman....
Non SOP use for "Large Wrench". Percussive Maintenance of "Organic Cognatators". Works great for "Tightening" a loose nut behind the wheel. Actually happened: Bridge signals Engine Room "Emergency Stop, Full Reverse" in middle of shipping lane. Reason given Helmsman(Green as grass) thought they were about to hit an underwater obstruction. Ship was vintage WW2 "Emergency Stop" on main shaft was a "Large Inflatable Tire" that when inflated gripped the tunnel. Lots of NOISE!, lots of SMOKE!. Pissed Captain (He did an imitation of a bingo ball in his cabin), PISSED! Engine Room.
LOL, a Nimitz class giant wall wrench would have mrdrd him
I always found port/starboard quite useful, as it eliminates the "NO! I mean MY left" thing, since port is "left" as you face the BOW. It's inherently subjevtive, yes, just like "my left", but using a common reference frame (the ship, or helo, or track, or car, or whatever).
I don't agree it's Subjective, as it's outside of you, me, everybody. The ship is the "global" reference for everybody on board.
@@SkylerLinux right up until you're communicating with someone on another ship... or worse, on Land. It's less variable, possibly even less subjective, but objective it is not.
That's kind of like in theater, where Stage Left and Stage Right are from the perspective of on stage facing the audience, and House Left and House Right are from the perspective of the audience facing the stage. "Stage Right" is "House Left" and vice versa.
This is why in the words of O'Brian star fleet requires 2 back ups, incase the first goes down.
Unfortunately, none of those back ups, nor the primary, include surge protection.
Because powering the console with plasma piped directly from the reactor with no cut outs is apparently brilliant.
Another mnemonic I use is that port is shorter than starboard, left is shorter than right, and red is shorter than green (for navigation lights).
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The closest water-ships get to space ship steering is the technology of azipods and lateral bow thrusters
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I recently watched a video by Drachinifel where he tours the HMS Unicorn, and he shows the aft steering mechanism and the massive lever that a team of men would have to grunt at to steer the ship when the powered steering was wrecked.
Cruising is nothing but fixing things in pretty locations
Please do a video on the horrible idea of non-haptic feedback aboard ships/aircraft. The video could even extend to Holographic Control Display Thingies in Sci-Fi. It’s one of my personal naval pet peeves, along with “Maritime COIN”, the DDG-1000, and the LCS. I mean, come one! Even the display screens on the F-35s use buttons for menu navigation!
Either way, good video. It was great to hear your opinions as a former helmsman. The wrench had me laughing. Controlling a 12-footer dinghy with a tiller rod is already tiring in high seas. I can’t imagine controlling a 450-footer the same way.
Fair winds,
-J
P.S-Love the KSP images being used for reaction wheels / RCS
The only kind of good reason for a hologram is for showing something in 3d. They should never ever be used as the primary interface for anything, because they essentially have all the downsides of touchscreens, but they also have terrible background contrast (assuming the common transparent versions, not the ones from Star Trek)
@@thatstarwarsnerd6641 Really the only way a "Hologram" is a good interface is if the system is tied by some deep madness into the users nervous system somehow. Which is a whole other can of potential worms. At that point you aren't really dealing with a true hologram anyway, hence the air quotes. They may look fancy and futuristic but suffers from being a horribly complex probably tetchy way of doing something really simple.
@@thatstarwarsnerd6641 the F35 and the rafale .... i think .. i know there are two planes, that have this furiouly STUPID "pressure" joystick that doesn't move
tho i believe the pilots forced the designer to implement some movement for feedback
hologram combat flying is the stupidest thing ever, even for the people who define "evasive" as turn into the enemy fire and present the biggest target ....
@@daral9217 a hologram is possibly quite useful as a navigation or tactical display on a space ship, depending on the specifics (humans are kind of bad at translating between 2D and 3D) ... but in no sane world is a regular standard hologram a usable INPUT device.
@@laurencefraser Yeah that was the air quotes in my comment were for. You have a display and some madness to give it feed back, or a false sense of interaction. The calculations alone to try and parse what qualifies as interacting with the hologram would be extensive, let alone the fudge factor, and betting your life on it all working right. Oh heck no. You might get it to work as a mental link display but those are even more theoretical than a functional hologram.
The advantage of RCS is that the sheer number of thrusters needed by the system would provide its own redundancy. If you have dozens or hundreds of thrusters, it's pretty hard to knock them all out at once, and you lost some, you would still have limited steering on whatever thrusters are left. The only real vulnerability is the fuel supply, but even then you could distribute the fuel tankage throughout the ship to protect it.
Oh thank goodness, I watched enough old SCS videos that it's appearing in my recommended feed again!
USS Sacramento(AOE-1) did have a big, BIG wrench. It was near 13' long, open end, 1000+ lbs. and not used for steering. You never would have gotten it into aft steering without a torch cutting a hole into aft steering. For some God awful reason the powers that be saw fit to give older ships w wrench to remove the screw in anywhere, you know, just in case. I only saw it off the bulkhead once, in drydock. Just to make sure it still fit. Then it was sandblasted, painted and put back on the bulkhead. The other drydock time, it never left its holder.
There is not an Oliver Hazard Parry class Frigate that is a museum, yet. However, there is a museum in Erie, PA that is working on adding one of the OHP frigates in the next year or so. At this time the ship that is most likely going to be the former U.S.S. Haliburton FFG-40.
THANK YOU. Few, if any Sci-Fi ship have real backups. Enterprise, no matter the number, loses control of the helm or the engines every few weeks. And there is no backup helm. I've always bitched that there should be a person on Starfleet Ships whose entire job is to stand watch on a set of MANUAL valves so that when the Warp Reactor go out of control he can vent the plasma into space, shut down the deuterium flow, and stop a WC Breach. Call it EMSSW or Emergency Stop System Watch. Just a little room buried in Engineering with the valves, a chair, sound powered phone, and a hard wired alarm. Perfect duty for Ens. Crusher or Lt. Barkley. Keep them off the holo-deck and away from engineering where they tend to foul things up.
At least most star trek ships have a secondary (battle) bridge, so that's Something. They're almost never used in the shows, but they do exist. Also, technically speaking, at least as of TNG, EVERY console on the bridge is backup for every other one, and with the correct authorisation codes a fair bit can actually be controlled from consoles in Engineering, or a number of other random duty stations with consoles around the ship, to a lesser extent, too. It's... kind of a large part of the point of LCARS, actually. of course, this is conveniently forgotten whenever the plot calls for it, and very frequently the failure is on the other side of the computer system (and There is where there's a distinct lack of backups for a lot of functions, or at least unslavagable failure states).
In short, Aft Steering is for when the bridge says 'What we have heah... is a failure... to communicate.'
As far as the various control systems, it's 'tryin this' and 'tryin that' and 'hey ship, how's your hull?'
At the end, talking about the need for redundant systems, I couldn't help but think of the song "Ballad of a Spaceman' by Julia Ecklar.
I've always thought that if I did the whole "non-physical control thing," there'd be an infodump scene where somebody explains that while the visuals are holographic, the system incorporates tractor/presser systems so you're actually "manipulating" something. And, there's hardened controls for the circumstances where you need a physical control.
Holodeck-style "physical" controls would be a /marked/ improvement over a touchscreen.
@@SacredCowShipyards But, touchscreens "look futuristic" and "sexy" and might be the point where some government procurement official gets enough of a chubby to actually pay for the rest of the ship around the touchscreen.
I really want cow shipyards to try and explain the hilarious but insane ships of the Orks from warhammer 40k.
What is there to explain? Orks (and the Warp) work on the power of belief; the tek boyz figure it should go and it does.
He's said that the physics jankery of the Honorverse gives him a headache. Orks might give him a stroke.
Ork philosophy is simple:
1. How much dakka? (How many and how big of guns can I strap to this thing?)
2. Make it faster! (Strap on as many engines as possible, theoretically pointing in useful directions but thats optional, also paint it red)
3. Get close to the enemy, for boarding, accuracy, ramming and crew morale.
4. More Dakka (where can I add more guns?)
5. How many grots and mechboyz do you have at your disposal?
The US is putting frigates back into service. They just laid down a new class of them, named for the USS constellation. The original USS constellation is a great ship, I’d definitely recommend visiting it if in the Baltimore area.
Are they following the trend and thus functionally destroyers in everything but armament? (modern destroyers would generally be identified by random observers as under-gunned crusiers if you dropped them into ww2, for example).
@@laurencefraser They're only undergunned in the most literal of senses, in that the only guns on board are sidearms and CIWS, since they've finally stopped putting the interwar-era 5"/38s on them.
MIssiles, on the other hand...
"They" is a bit of a strong term. They've contracted it out to people who've been making the hull successfully for quite some time now, which is a far sight better than what happened with the Little Crappy Ship.
@Laurence Fraser it's 7.3 thousand tons, according to inter-war/ww2 standards its a cruiser. But there is no set size for destroyers, frigates and cruisers in the modern age, everything overlaps. Some have suggested to base it on roles but these also overlap...
I personally agree with the modern rating system proposal (by Robert O. Work) inspired by the British age of sail rating system but instead of being based on the number of guns it is based on the number of battle force missiles*:
-1st rate battle force ships (battleships): 100+ battle force missile cells.
-2nd rate battleships: 90-99 battle force missile cells.
-3rd rate battleships: 60-89 battle force missile cells.
-4th rate battleships: 48-59 battle force missile cells.
-5th rate (great) frigates: 20-47 battle force missile cells.
-6th rate frigates: multi-role ships with less than 20 battel force missile cells.
-7th rate sloops/brigs: single role ships, usuelly with only terminal defense weapons (ie no battle force missiles)
The Constellation class would be a 4th rate battle(force)ship under this system, due to having 48 battle force missile cells {32 mk41 VLS & 16 RGM-184}.
*battle force missiles being mission support capable missiles, the altentuave being defensive terminal missiles (missiles only capable of defending the host ship)
There's that weird thing from Gundam: Active Mass Balance Auto-Control (AMBAC). If your ship is variable geometry enough you can "steer" by moving the geometry around. Kinda like skydivers getting into the right position or cats landing on their feet. I have no idea if physics really allows for this the way they think it does.
Wing- warping airplanes come to mind.
Airplanes also move fuel around to keep trim.
That might work on a ship- move ballast, lean to one side and start a turn in that direction...
Or make it an adjustable katamaran/ outrigger boat?
Rudders are basicly variable gometry, though...
Also, cats work by being two reaction wheels (ok, just legs with mass) stuck together with a spine.
Bend the spine, and you can shift angular momentum around between two semi- independent masses at a semi- right angle (front and back legs) to control where your feet land.
goot point. you don't even need to change the shape of the ship. if you can change the center of mass to either side of a function thruster.
The thing is in space you might be able to shift mass around to change the attitude of the ship and point the nose in a direction, but you still need to apply thrust to actually cause a change in direction of travel. Course if main engines still work, then your good to go.
AMBAC is about shifting your center of mass relative to your center of thrust
That only works if you are travelling through a medium, such as air, that is resisting the force. In space, there is no medium to push against your movement. Variable geometry steering would not work in space, for the same reason aelerons amd rudders are useless.
you can make that "big ___ing wrench" work!
you need three comealongs . . . two attached to the end of the handle with wall mounts left and right to pull against . . . the third attaches at the wrench center of gravity and is connected to a spot on the ceiling over where the wrench CG will be when deployed.
note: do not attempt in any condition other than flat calm!
Pretty much what I was thinking.
Personally being a gentleman I remember port being left as that's the hand you use to pass the bottle of port at dinner parties! As I'm sure SCS does
That wrench in aft steering is also the same wrench to remove the drive screws.
Seriously? Well i suppose its BIG enough.
the one about the wrench sounds like something that the Orcs would do from Warhammer 40K
Same for the Imperial Navy but with added Prayers for removing the holy Wrench from it's shrine, fixing it in place and having the Servitors turn it. Thinking of it they probably have a special Wrench Servitor (size of an Ogryn with extra slabs of vat grown muscles and Cybernetics) just for that one purpose.
@@Alex-xt1rr now what would the Elder do
@@Alex-xt1rr Remember, this is the same Imperial Navy that sends crewmen into lethally radioactive reactor cores as part of routine refueling operations!
@@randlebrowne2048 as the dogma of the Cult Mechanicus states "the flesh is weak". At least those, pressganged hivescum/prisoners, got redemption by dieing in service for the Imperium. The lucky ones are those that do die as the leathal irradiated "survivers" will be turned into Servitors in order to keep them "alive" cause "only in death does duty end".
If only the Astartes would not keep all suits of Terminator armour for themselves ...
@@sdoo-ou2ni um Eldar crafts use solar sails so once those are gone all they can do is either abandon ship or pray that their Crystal Singers can pull of a miracle at fixing the sails.
I love this channel :-)
Also I would say that any designer of anything more complex than a club should consider inviting Murphy over for a drink before he shows up uninvited later on when it is to late...
so that's why we have so many night club fires, they haven't invited Murphy for a drink!
@@stanislavkostarnov2157 Well he can be a right mean one at times ;-)
We must always pay homage to the sainted god murphy.
Otherwise, he's going to kick us straight in the nuts.
Some clubs have stone heads or spikes driven into them, in which case the same applies.
The aft steering station on HMS Caroline always pops into my head in this context. WW1 era light cruiser of around 4k tons of displacement, with a wheel like that of Warrior but buried deep in the aft section, in its own little room that is nothing more than a box. I forget if it was manned by 8 or 16 people, but my takeaway was "wow, I didn't think I would dislike anything more than engine spaces".
Okay, hear me out... Giant wrench hanging on the bulkhead. Cap screw to secure it to the rudder shaft hangs beside it.
Eye hooks on the bulkheads on either side of the compartment. A couple of big ol' chain hoists hanging from those eye hooks with heavy chains already attached. All of it normally secured, of course.
Hydraulics go down, set the wrench, screw on the cap nut so the wrench will stay put without some poor swab having to hold it in place. Hook the chains to the wrench. One or two sailors on each hoist chain. Profit.
All mechanical, no electronics to go bad, exponential increase in power. Only an additional two relatively simple machines to maintain.
I suppose if you had a sufficiently long bar with a sufficiently heavy duty box wrench attached to an auxiliary vector thruster then it could maybe be used by a sufficiently huge crew member to give some degree of left and right as well as up and down? It would, of course, need to be set up 'above' a hemispherical floor to maintain contact and need suitable up/down/left/right sign posting.
As a backup to the rocket fuel, we used the cargo consisting of 250 tones of beer to get us to the station well-lubricated in the nick of time.
I understood that refrence
The Vipers & Raptors in the "new" Battle Star Galactia series used the rcs systems for their controls
Star Trek uses RCS engine failure even comes up as a plot point every once in a while. 😆
Also this video planted the seed of a short skit in my head and I've decided to share.
Humi1: Main drive is down! backup in progress. I swear to all the gods I will commit a war crime if they make us use the tiller wrench.
Humi2: now, now ... well all explode before it gets to that.
Humi3: jinx
You know the first thing that came to mind when he mentioned reaction wheels? I bet you could make one of those hand-cranked.
@Oracle of Space "Great minds think alike", and so do insane ones. But that's besides the point.
A great example of this is in the film 'The Battle of River Plate' where the bridge of HMS Exeter is shot to pieces and the captain conns the ship from the the aft superstructure relaying commands to aft steering by a string of sailors relaying the message.
"How do you steer your space ship?"
In many cases, outgassing. IE, it farts.
Hey the Imperial Corvairin Navy has our own equivelent to the huge wrench, We have assault shuttles latch onto the fore and aft aspect of the hull and use their backup fusion torch thrusters for last ditch emergency steering.
An interesting thing about the little bubbles created during cavitation. The inside of those little bubbles are as close as it is possible to get to 100% reflective.
There is also the possibility that Nanoscale cavitation bubbles can be used to utilize the casimir effect to produce energy. "Hope I spelled that right?" There was a plumber in Southeast United States who designed and built a water heating system for a firehouse. This water heating system produced overunity energy. Quite a few physicists came through to look at and figure out how it worked most of them left scratching their heads. One physicist theorized that the system he created was producing nanoscale bubbles through cavitation. He also stated that it's possible quantum photons were bouncing off of the inside of the bubbles before they disappear adding mechanical energy into the system.
That sounds very interesting, any reccomended further reading on that? Im having difficulty finding anything.
Any ship that has no backup for a backup is something questionable. Even old wooden boats had huge loads of stuff which only purpose it was to either help create the backup or be the backup. Of course backup systems can fail so you plan around that. Any spaceship in a half way realistic setting where travel through the stars takes a significant amount of time instead of being over in half a day will require enough backup that from a near total construction you are able to safely either limp back to a friendly "port" or at least call for help and have somewhere safe to wait for said help to arrive.
And touchscreen for steering is the typical we need to be modern stuff that shows that whoever was implementing that never did steer anything significant let alone something of the size of a ship.
I actually know exactly what you're talking about with that wrench. Back when I was a sea scout in California we had an old 1950s Ex-army T-boat called the Gryphon. On the stern we had this red orange yard-and-a-half or so long steel tiller-like item on the transom, as well as a circular plate secured with flathead screws. I had no idea what those were for till we were on a cruise and Skip called a loss of steering drill. We took the plate off, lifted the heavy ass tiller up, put it on the nut that was beneath the plate, then secured lines and blocks to rings on both sides of the tiller and split the crew up to port and starboard. It was... certainly an experience, but to be quite honest I found it kinda fun in a weird way.
If I was still in California I'd be able to take a picture of it, but alas I'm in michigan, and none of the photos of the Gryphon that I have show the wrench. Still, felt I should bring this up as it is one of my many fond memories of Sea Scouts
Granted the Gryphon was nowhere near the weight of an OHP at only 80 tons, but I'd imagine it'd work the same way on there
Its crazy to think we still have that as a "just in case" system of TURNING. Like these ships are HUGE and HEAVY.
Suggestion for any fictional ship with multiple crew and multiple RCS units for story telling purposes. Ship has a failure (flight control linkage, cut wires, battle damage, jackass driving panics and tries to put too much force on the joystick and it snaps off...) BUT instead of "aft steering) each RCS unit has a manual control, either manned in engineering or if ALL the control wiring is fragged, a station inboard of each unit. That way you could have SOME kind of emergency steering (directing each crewman by suit radios, especially, or even some hard wired, plugged into their suit sound powered phones)
Honestly, the old wrench on the Tiller bar works surprisingly well if you have enough people... though usually they tie ropes to the other and and pas them around the rails, or hydrolics,... or whatever won't cut the ropes and then play tug-a-war with the tiller. This way if the current did grab the rutter, it would yank the rope out of one teams hands rather then say... cut them in half or toss them accross the room, plus the ropes could be tied off to hold a heading.
As A MasterHelmsman...after steering was chill & mostly nap time...but ears listening & ready to take over control.
Manually cranking thousand tonne reaction wheels and using the spin gravity section ‘on manual’ for roll…. Running to the back or bottom of the ship to go manually operate the hydraulics on the thousand tonne gimbals for the main exhaust nozzles… HAND CRANK THE FTL DRIVE LIKE ITS A JACK IN THE BOX…. RELEASE THE SOLAR SAILS MAKE HEADING FOR ALPHA CENTAURI
If I could send a suggestion back in time: to compliment this tiller, there should have been a pair of bumper-jack style jacks. I love the bumper jack. There are some for farm use that can both pull and push. If you had two people with one jack each on each side of the tiller, the job of moving that tiller would be a bunch easier, if slower.
To remember which side is port and what colour light it is, the saying “Is there any Red Port Left in the bottle” helps
Former US Navy Engineman here. One of my duty stations was in aft steering during certain evolutions.
Any GIANT WRENCHS to report of? And....how the heck would they even USE that?
@@jaywerner8415 I served on a Spru Can. We had two screws so none were onbaard. But when I served on Tugs we had a large beam we could use as a tiller in emergenies.
A manual wheel and rudder angle indicator are mandatory. Even if its in an electronic system you need those to be nice and simple, and in the words of a Scottish Russian "things in here react poorly to bullets"
Why was there a giant spanner in the aft steering section of a ship?
Probably a bet.
You can just imagine the conversation happening between two designers during the planning of the aft steering room.
"So we have four (or however many) ways to steer the ship during a failure in steering."
"Five bucks says that I can convince the Navy to have a giant spanner as a back-up."
"That's just stupid. Ten bucks if you can make it longer than six feet."
This is the only reason I can think as to why the machine gun housing on the Australian Sentinal tank looks like that.
The short words go together - port, left, red (lamp) and the long words go together - starboard, right, green (lamp).
In the setting I’m writing, main drives are typically fusion torches for sublight speeds and an Alcubierre style system for FTL fed by a combination of magnetically contained matter/antimatter reactors, fusion reactors, and auxiliary fission batteries(emergency power). RCS is provided by diverting a fraction of main drive power through a vernier system across the ship. And waste heat is cycled through liquid coolant radiator strips that can be ‘buttoned up’ during combat or vented (ejected) to space in an emergency
The idea is that the fission batteries (RTGs) are used to charge traditional batteries in order to provide the startup power for the auxiliary/secondary fusion reactors on board ship, which in turn supply the immense power required to safely start the primary M/AM reactors on the largest ships like carriers (SCV) battleships (SBB), and heavy/ armored cruisers (SCA). ships classed as light cruisers (SCL), destroyers (SDD, SDDR, and SDDA), as well as frigates/heavy corvettes/system patrol cutters (SFFG, SFFD, SFFP) typically run a pairs of fusion reactors or fission/fusion combination reactors and have a number of thermocouples in line with the primary cooling systems to take advantage of waste heat while engaging the less friendly and cooperative elements. Also, they lack the surface area and overall mass to efficiently bleed heat passively and therefore have to make up for inefficiencies any way possible. Also, in my OC universe, ships massing less than 15k metric tons cannot independently make use of the FTL drives in canon, which means ships below frigate class are strictly in system or must “catch a ride” with a sufficiently large vessel (SCL or higher). Anyhoo, love your content, always look forward to seeing what is coming from the harbor master next
"Welcome to the Thruster Control Station 11-4-3R. Hope you brought your lead shield with you."
Redundancy for redundancy is the best sort of redundancy you could have especially for a warship and more especially for one in space where everything wants you to be not alive
The wrench could be a good idea IF instead of using people to push it around you rigged a block and tackle system. A proper set up would be a lot safer and would require fewer people to run it. As for the escape trunk, that one looked pretty damned nice. I toured the USS Lexington a few years ago and what she had just didn't look pleasant. I do like the idea of rungs on two sides so your shipmates can have a passing lane in case you're not escaping fast enough.
"...maybe you'll end up under the ship, maybe you'll end up in a parallel dimenson." The kids call that place the "aft-rooms" these days.
Also, any time I hear someone drop "but on the gripping hand" into a discussion without pause or explanation, it's a good day. You're awesome.
Thanks for this video. I can only imagine Capt. Evans aboard the USS Johnston DD557 standing on the fantail shouting course corrections down the hatch to the aft steering in the middle of active combat during the Battle Off Samar in 1944.
As a Texan and a HUGE fan of US battleships, I have to give you a giant high five for supporting the conservation of the Texas!!!
"Have you seen those Redguard ships? They have curved rudders. Curved. Rudders."
Having manned aft steering on a Destroyer, I can verify the wrenches still exist, albeit in a slightly different fashion. On a ship with multiple rudders, should you lose all hydraulics for one rudder you lock it out with a pair of giant nuts on a 4" diameter lead screw. The key here is you need to maintain either constant thrust or zer thrust while locking it out.
The one time we ever had to do that for real, some idiot officer on the bridge decided to shift what shaft was trailing while I had guys locking out one rudder. Damn near crushed someone. CO was pissed when she came down 5 minutes later and heard about it from us.
Locking out the rudder makes perfect sense.
Percussive maintenance on the person responsible for the course change with the wrench in question also makes perfect sense.
The song Sam Jones on the albums Carmen Miranda’s Ghost and Finity’s End is about what happens when you loose your thruster control at three-quarters c. It’s a great song, and I highly recommend it.
the tillage wrench hangs from a winch (not wench) from the upper, gets lowered onto the nut and 2 (one on each side) hook between it and the walls and you hand crank each to stear the ship. it works.
One could summerise the entire electronic-to-mechanical-to-hydraulic steering rig as a _sail by wire_ system
You know what I want to see? Someone tied to the 8 foot wrench.
Because I guaran-damn-tee you, some sailor, at some point, lost, dropped or otherwise mislocated something of sufficient value or importance that his Chief had him lashed to the wrench. You know, so he wouldn't forget next time.
I would bet folding money that that shit happened.
Before the napolionic wars, port was actually called Larboard and the starboard side was always called starboard for the reasons SCS gave, larboard only became port in 1844 when the Royal Navy admiralty ordered its use to reduce confusion for sailors of the landlubbers variety pressed into service.
Oh Larboard actually comes from old english meaning loading board, i.e: the side the ship is loaded from
I figured we could only burden your jello CPUs with so many new words.
So what to do if there are a catastrophic failure on the bridge causing the stearing problems? I have certain memories of a Super Star destroyer crashing into the second Deathstar...
one of my favorite anime scenes in cowboy bebop is when they used manual control over the RCS thrusters to adjust the course in order to deactivate a satellite
Though that was more to hide from a satellite's sensors than due to a failure, if I remember right.
I do like glass cockpits, but I'll not buy a boat that lacks a wheel. But given my love of redundancy, I for one would prefer hydraulic steering with a backup tiller and dual autopilot (or atleast a COMPLETE second autopilot system in storage ready to be swapped out if needed.)
Every so often I find a video I managed to miss the first time around. Excellent rant as always.
Tiller for a friggit... better include a LOT of block and tackle.
Do surface ships not use hydraulic accumulators? We have those on submarines exactly for loss of hydraulics. It's basically a reservoir of hydraulics fluid attached to a pressurized air tank that provides a limited supply of hydraulic power to maneuver. I guess it's more important on submarines as we need hydraulics to maintain depth control, where a surface ship its less severe.
It might also depend on the age of the ship.
I forgot Netflix apparently remade Lost In Space. Haven't seen enough of the original black&white tv show to remember much of it, but I do have a VHS tape of the prequel movie, which was at least a good watch as a kid trying to wrap their head around time travel shenanigans. Guess I'll have to rewatch it to notice whether it had any redundant systems, or if any that existed were all destroyed by Robot...
Cavitation is caused by the water effectively boiling due to low pressure. It is loud, violent, and causes noise and damage, but it also robs the ship of power and in the case of rudders, control authority.
I also had to take a minute to admire those screws and not just the curved rudders... you know they're putting out some power when they have to angle shafts downward like that, though I dunno if that was a "clear waterflow" issue, a "center of thrust" issue, a "make room for sufficiently large propellers" issue, or some combination thereof.
Addendum: Ships exist in this world without backups and redundancies, and they DO say something. "Your environment, your success in your endeavors, and your very life are not as important to us as our bottom line. We literally don't care whether you live or die so long as your check cleared. And if it didn't, we'll just bill your next of kin."
this is the IRL equivalent of the scifi trope of main engineering taking over from the bridge. which is something that pops up a lot in star trek, at least. (and the BSG reboot, in season 4)
The whole wrench thing honestly sounds like something you could potentially use to limp to port if you're stranded at sea and cannot steer for any reason. I can't see it working in an actual combat or tight navigation scenarios.
In ancient times Sailors stared their ships by following the stars, primarily the north star, so when they would head west the north star was to the right side of the ship. This became the stearage side so the helmsman could see the north star or starboard. The port side was always the leftside for bumping the dock.
Presumably they sailed east periodically.
Steering board... because steering plank didn't catch on and its a bit too worked and shaped to be called a log!
Thank you for;
Breaking Naval steering down barney style
for those who do not know how this stuff works
Just one of the many services we provide.
The only reason redundancy isn't a thing in modern sci-fi, if it existed the story couldn't happen.
Which is one of the major reason i dislike most modern sci-fi.
Kind of like how cell phones make most story plots impossible.
Or, ya know, if the characters had the intelligence of a squirrel.
AND, i'm with tom paris, give me knobs and switches over a screen i constantly have to look down at to figure out where the hell the "Nuke target" button is.
It's a good thing that the gravatic version of inertial dampeners can be tuned into a gravatic thruster. Just don't go too fast without the crew strapped in.
"If the compensator failure was minor, And your diet is typical warship fare, you will probalby understand perfectly how it got the nickname 'gravy gun'"
Don't lie, dockmaster. You'd be geeking out as much as me if you were offered the opportunity to helm a ship like HMS Victory.
My second ship was a DDG USS O'Kane DDG-77, I was an HT. Well one night I was on watch the ever-favorite 0000-0400. Part of that watch was security/ roving so eventually I'm down in aft steering. During the watch the Bridge comes up on my radio and asks me to contact them when I make my way down there. "Aft steering, bridge" "Go aft steering" "Umm you wanted me to hit you guys up when I got down here, well I'm here." "We need you to do a rudder swing test" So I do the required steps to take local control "Okay just need a little side to side" "Roger that standby"
I should add to this I was normally considered a nice stand up guy and I was but learned you have to be a bit of an asshole sometimes to not get walked on and there were a few people blissfully asleep that had pissed me off. So an abrupt jerk to starboard followed by abrupt jerk to port, that was the night several people went from sleeping peacefully to being propelled out of their racks. "Whoops first time doing that guys wow that thing is sensitive...."😅
On a submarine, we use a yoke for steering just like on a heavy lift aircraft.
Funny story: I could never remember which was port and starbord, until a character in a book I read said that port has four letters, same as left, and ever since then, I've never forgotten. The book was Deathlands #54 Judas Strike by James Axler if anyone is interested.
Edit: I wrote this before this very thing was mentioned in the video.😳
Funny, that.
One of the advantages that the RCN has is only three platforms, two of which will use the same control system when the new destroyers start to come online.
Standardization is good.
While not a frigate, do you think the DD-951 U.S.S. Turner Joy (Forrest Sherman class) would be old enough to have the giant wrench? That one has been a museum piece in Bremerton, WA since 1992. You might be able to get one of the museum staff to snap a photo for you (I'm pretty sure Aft Steering isn't open to the public).
It's technically olde than the OHPs, so it might be more likely. I can ask.
Well, since the fact is that most sci-fi series have taken on a naval tradition, they carry on a lot of the naval seen the nautical themes
So, on small wooden boats, if the motor went out and you had a tiller, you could potentially waggle the tiller like a fish-tail to get some forward motion.
Has anyone tried that with 'the Wrench' on a warship? I can't imagine it worked.
Got to tour the USS Midway a couple weeks ago, and I was rather surprised to see a traditional ships wheel on the bridge.
Ships used to have style and class.
@@SacredCowShipyards they really did. I made sure to give that wheel a good spin or two….or five…. It was extremely satisfying.
Having steered with a steering board, it sticks in one’s head.
A touchscreen sounds like an absolute nightmare to steer anything I mean that is even worse then a keyboard and mouse.
It was originally "larboard and starboard" in English. It was changed to avoid confusion.
I was trying to get to aft steering. Got lost and now I live in the Dockyard's underworks.
See? Silly escape trunks.
5 men can lift a ton or two with some effort, but no way in hell can you move it with any accuracy or whilst in a moving vessel. I base this on moving steel beams by hand as a young man with a few friends, damn near lost a finger due to the fact that you can't really choose where it goes with any accuracy.
“Steering failure” = Bridge Blows up. During the battle of Endor the Executor apparent didn’t have aft steer manned… if they had it at all.
😁
Or it also was a heavy ass wrench but with a plate on it that calls "Unless your the Hulk, You're officially fucked!"
This wrench "solution is my new favourite "sounds good on paper but actually sucks" idea.
They did have a secondary bridge! But the officers there were lower ranked and (not realizing the main bridge was gone) didn't want to risk offending the higher ranked officers by correcting course (until it was too late).
Sacred cow shipyard. Not sure y'know but ryan szymanski of the new jersey(second of the iowas bb 62) has a wrench that you could have used for a psuedo replacement. Its nerves a different purpose but the size is comparable
Wow. Ship master noticed me. That's new. (Dont compress my space battleship please. I have payment here)
Story I'm working on , off & on has gravitic drives (primarily for ftl, & exploited for artificial gravity), bow & stern sublight drives, rcs, & ai running each ship that at the absolute minimum can use their radiators as a very inefficient solar sail. The biggest management issue for any ship is their heat. All the weapons generate heat, the shields can block just about anything... & generate heat. The drives generate heat. Every ship has capacitors to store said heat ... to an extent. But every ship has its limit at which point one of three things happens. The vessel turns into an easy bake oven. (Worst case scenario.) Or the ai vents heat In one of two ways. Extends her radiators, ( which are obscenely fragile compared to the rest of the hull and are probably glowing like a star at this point) or dumps it Into the freezing cold realm of fold space. (Announcing to anyone bothering to look within several billion light years where they are with the thermal bloom) the panic button option is to jettison the whole capacitor bank (which unregulated is probably going to explode) & pray they can limp along back to friendly space on the emergency capacitors or have help turn up. .
Theirs a reason crotch rocket space fighters aren't a thing in setting & the smallest open space run about has about the same volume as the air forces BUFF. & ships tend to behave like 1940s naval ships. They travel in groups because wandering off by yourself will inevitably be when you get in trouble. No star trek enterprise trips here. Anyone trying it is going to have a very unpleasant encounter with a shipping containers worth of brass assuming they get home in one piece.
It's an on & off project& I have no idea if it's a setting anyone would want to read about. But these videos give me plenty of little detail ideas.
Heat is the one big problem for any space-based science fiction story, which is why so many stories don't even try to touch it.
a big pocking wrench fixes a lot of problems.
as a viking reenactor i know why port and starboard are named as such. ya' sure , you betcha
The image of the RCS thruster is from Kerbal space program also the reaction wheel is the 0.625m reaction wheel
Well, yes.
I can imagine that huge wrench being wrestled into place using chain falls or an overhead gantry. Actuating that wrench could be done with block and tackle. I would bet appropriately positioned pad eyes are easy enough.
This is exactly right. Iowa class aft steering has block and tackle provisions just for that purpose. BB NJ's channel has a good video on their aft steering spaces
@@michaellazorchak8175 I never got to see the steering gear spaces on USS Eisenhower CVN69. I was too busy in Main Machinery spaces making fresh water, heating steam, electricity and propulsion. Steering gear belonged to A-Gang, not M-Div.