Topics

1

News and Rumors / Naval Aviation NEWS | With Timeline

« on: July 18, 2013, 03:18:27 pm »

18th of January 1911, Naval Aviation is born: Eugene Ely lands an airplane on USS Pennsylvania. First time a plane successfully lands on a ship.
(102 years, 7 months ago -or- 1231 months ago)



_____________________________________________________________

1911-2013,  102 Years of Manned Naval Aviation and Two World Wars ensue.

_____________________________________________________________


10th of July 2013, Naval Aviation Changes Forever: A drone airplane lands itself on the USS George H. W. Bush. First successful landing by an unmanned airplane on a ship.
(8 days ago)

2

General Discussion / Geography and Naval Deployments

« on: April 08, 2013, 09:57:44 pm »

I am watching the news (almost filed this under 'What Are You Watching') and it is all about Korea.

I have a couple of 'maps'* to show off which should be of interest to anybody keeping up with current naval events.

First up Korea - The Center of the World:

This is how the globe looks if the Korean peninsula is plotted at the very center. Very useful for understanding what is closest to Korea and what is under the flight path to some particular point.

Second map: A Great Circle: Korea to CONUS** (As the Tern*** Flies).

On this map a straight horizontal line across the middle would connect the Korean peninsula to the US along the shortest possible path. That path makes it clear why this:

is deployed somewhere in the Bering Sea, why Fort Greely, Alaska is where our interceptor missiles are, and why Aegis Destroyers are deployed to the Sea of Japan. All of those are waypoints on the potential flight path to the US.


*The maps came from:http://www.fourmilab.ch/cgi-bin/Earth (a nifty online globe map resource. Just plug in the correct options and generate whatever view of Earth you might want.)
** Continental United States (for anyone that doesn't know that one.)
***Crows lack the range...

3

General Discussion / Historical Resources Online

« on: December 15, 2012, 05:00:02 pm »

I found something really nice this afternoon. It is a series of essays examining Japanese woodblock prints from the Sino-Japanese war (1894-1895). I have seen one or two of these around the web before but never this many assembled all in one place:

http://ocw.mit.edu/ans7870/21f/21f.027/throwing_off_asia_02/toa_essay02.html

That link goes to the 2nd of six sections; it contains the greatest concentration of the naval prints. All courtesy of MIT.edu.

4

General Discussion / The Naming of Ships

« on: December 01, 2012, 09:39:43 pm »

Today I stumbled on something very interesting at the USNHC ( http://www.history.navy.mil/ )  It is a lengthy document that carefully explains the total confusion that is US Navy ship-naming policy. This is a serious, scholarly document: it cost 62K tax dollars. I suppose that might mean a civilian staffer in the Navy Department who gets paid 120K a year spent about 6 months putting it together [?]

http://www.history.navy.mil/download/Shipnamingreport.pdf

Turns out SECNAV is who picks the names. The conclusion in the report is that it is not a mixed up, confused mess, oh no, it all makes total sense.

Who knew?

But seriously, it is a very interesting read. Explains the names for the LCS class.

Speaking of names: USS Enterprise (one of the exceptions to: Carriers are named after former presidents...) was officially decommissioned today.

5

Historical Naval Games / The First Naval Wargame I Ever Played

« on: November 29, 2012, 01:25:33 pm »

...came from this book:



 I wondered if anyone else has a copy of this now long Out Of Print volume -and- I wondered what were other folks first naval wargame(s)?

6

Dystopian Wars / Spartan Games seems to be down this morning

« on: July 29, 2012, 11:42:11 am »

SG announced they would have a 24 hour outage. The stated date was for the 26th [?] but the outage seems to be in effect today [29th]. 

Should I have posted this in the news section?

7

Roll Call / Reporting Aboard

« on: May 04, 2012, 10:15:16 am »

Found this forum thanks to a link somebody posted on TerraGenesis of all places. (It went to Ruckdog's scratchbuilt LCM thread.) I am interested in mostly 1:1200 Naval Wargames although I have tried other scales. I can be found under this same ID on TerraGenesis, Spartan's Forum, and Lead Adventures.

• Spartan's Forum is devoted only to its 1:1200 or 1:600 games.
• TerraGenesis is all about scratchbuilding wargame tabletops.
• and Lead Adventures is a friendly forum where one can discuss any minis or gaming genre and even play games of chess.