Phanatic posted:

Seriously, e-cigarettes? They used to let you smoke on board. Real cigarettes, I mean, with tobacco and particulates and everything. It's a nuclear missile submarine, not a Class 10 clean room. Not shaving on board went out with the Kriegsmarine, back when you could sink the boat by flushing the toilet.

quote:

I heard one person joke about how he accidentally throw a weight and it nearly hit a missiles firing unit.

Ainsley McTree posted:

This may be just my civilian naïveté, but there's no way in hell that it's possible to accidentally fire a nuclear missile that easily, right?

Grand Prize Winner posted:

So, could they bathe with seawater or was that worse than not bathing?

quote:

Crew habitability ranked very low on the priority list of German U-boats. Fresh water was limited and strictly rationed for drinking, especially when they had opted to fill one of their water tanks with diesel fuel to extend their operational range. Washing and showering were not permitted, with all activities of shaving, laundry being postponed throughout the entire duration of the patrol. They were allowed only the clothes on their backs and a single change of underwear and socks. To remove salt from their skin caused by seawater exposure, crews were issued with special saltwater soap, but this was unpopular as it left a scummy film on the skin. To control body odour, a deodorant was used.

Phanatic posted:

The guy who "leaked" that information is pretty much full of poo poo on a lot of things, like thinking that the boat's maximum safe depth is 213 feet. The guy went on one patrol, didn't understand how anything worked, and freaked out.

quote:

Okay, I read most of it. I was on a Trident sub years ago and I can tell you this guy is mostly full of poo poo.

I think the problem is he was on his first patrol and freaked out about the experience. He makes a lot of assumptions about areas of the ship he knows nothing about. In addition, he turned sea stories and legends into incidents and he doesn’t even understand the ship’s capabilities. The biggest problem is he doesn’t understand how submariners are super professional yet act cavalier about things.

SECURITY - Checking IDs on base isn’t like going through TSA because an assumption is made that most people on the base has a certain level of clearance. Just because security isn’t up to his standard, doesn’t mean it’s not up to the RN’s standard.

FAULTY EQUIPEMENT - Submarines are the most fascinating pieces of engineering. Things break constantly, which is why there are two of almost everything on a boat. I can’t speak to the hydraulics bay flooding with seawater in his specific case but again, it sounds like a new guy who doesn’t know that the professionals know their hardware intimately.

CAMP - The missile compartment CAMP watch is boring as poo poo but again they know their panel really well. I remember the alarms going off all the time and the Missile Techs just blowing it off. But they knew what to blow off and what to take seriously. He doesn’t even know what the alarm was, sometimes it’s something benign like a humidity alarm.

CLASSIFIED INFORMATION - Everyone on a US sub has Secret clearance and Top Secret was for a select few who had to lock the door before breaking open the TS binder. Guess what? Sometimes they left the door open. Doesn’t mean there’s a security issue.

NON-QUALs ANNOYING PEOPLE - This is the dumbest part where he said the 31 new people were distracting the people on watch. That is how they get trained? My first day underway on the submarine they said, “hey new guy. We’re about to dive. Sit in that chair.” Before I knew what was happening, I was an idiot 18 year old submerging a billion dollar warship under the sea! I couldn’t believe it but if I screwed up they’d take over. This is how the military in general works. Learn by doing.

POOR SUB TRAINING - “That’s it?” Yes, if you ever go through submarine school, the poo poo is easy. He sounds like it was substandard but it’s just easy.

Arrath posted:

Someone should do an effortpost on the differences in amenities and comforts and general 'non-warfighting' design differences between submarines in WWII. I dunno if American subs had showers to best the U-Boats, but some of em had ice cream machines so I'll chalk that up as a win for

PittTheElder posted:

Alarms probably shouldn't be going off all the time. Or if they are there should be lots of different alarms. Of course maybe there are; it seems odd that the missile compartment of all things would be poorly engineered.

quote:

Barbara Drew, a nurse-researcher at UCSF, has been studying a similar problem, alarms in the ICU, for decades. During that time, she has seen them grow louder, more frequent, and more insistent. She has witnessed many Code Blues triggered by false alarms, as well as deaths when alarms were silenced by nurses who had simply grown weary of all the noise.

A 2011 investigation by the Boston Globe identified at least 216 deaths in the U. S. between January 2005 and June 2010 linked to alarm malfunction or alarm fatigue. In 2013, The Joint Commission, the main accreditor of American hospitals, issued an urgent directive calling on hospitals to improve alarm safety. The ECRI Institute, a nonprofit consulting organization that monitors data on medical errors, has listed alarm-related problems as the top technology hazard in healthcare in each of the last four years.

There are many reasons for false alarms: misprogrammed thresholds; dying batteries; loosening of an electronic lead taped to the patient’s chest. But plenty of alarms are triggered by the activities of daily hospital living. Liz Kowalczyk, who led the investigation for the Globe, spent a morning in the cardiac unit at Boston Children’s Hospital. She observed:

"The nurse hurried into Logan’s room — only to find a pink-cheeked, kicking 3-month-old, breathing well, cooing happily. Logan was fine. His pumping legs had triggered the crisis alarm again.

The red alarm is the most urgent, meant to alert nurses to a dangerously slow or fast heart rate, abnormal heart rhythm, or low blood oxygen level. But on this morning . . . infants and preschoolers activated red alarms by eating, burping and cutting and pasting paper for an arts and crafts project."

In the face of growing nationwide concern about alert fatigue, Barbara Drew, the UCSF researcher, set out to quantify the magnitude of the problem. For a full month in early 2013, she and her colleagues electronically tapped into the bedside cardiac alarms in UCSF’s five intensive care units, which monitored an average of 66 patients each day. Mind you, this is just the bedside cardiac monitor, which follows the patient’s EKG, heart rate, blood pressure, respiratory rate, and oxygen saturation. It does not include the IV machine alarms, mechanical ventilator alarms, bed exit alarms, or nurse call bell. Nor does it include any of the alerts in the computer system, such as the Septra overdose alert that Jenny Lucca overlooked.
Drew’s findings were shocking. Every day, the bedside cardiac monitors threw off some 187 audible alerts. No, not 187 audible alerts for all the beds in the five ICUs; 187 alerts were generated by the monitors in each patient’s room, an average of one alarm buzzing or beeping by the bedside every eight minutes. Every day, there were about 15,000 alarms across all the ICU beds. For the entire month, there were 381,560 alarms across the five ICUs. Remember, this is from just one of about a half-dozen systems connected to the patients, each tossing off its own alerts and alarms.

And those are just the audible ones. If you add the inaudible alerts, those that signal with flashing lights and text-based messages, there were 2,507,822 unique alarms in one month in our ICUs, the overwhelming majority of them false. Add in the bed alarms, the ventilators, and the computerized alerts . . . well, you get the idea.

...

I wanted to see if medicine might learn from other professionals who need to perform their tasks in a swirling, often confusing, high-stakes environment. The aviation industry seemed like a natural place to look, so I spoke to Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, the famed “Miracle on the Hudson” pilot. “The warnings in cockpits now are prioritized so you don’t get alarm fatigue,” he told me. “We work very hard to avoid false positives because false positives are one of the worst things you could do to any warning system. It just makes people tune them out.” He encouraged me to visit Boeing’s headquarters to see how its cockpit engineers manage the feat of alerting pilots at the right time, in the right way, while avoiding alert fatigue.

I spent a day in Seattle with several of the Boeing engineers and human factors experts responsible for cockpit design in the company’s commercial fleet. “We created this group to look across all the different gauges and indicators and displays and put it together into a common, consistent set of rules,” Bob Myers, chief of the team, told me. “We are responsible for making sure the integration works out.”

I sat inside the dazzling cockpit of a 777 simulator with Myers and Alan Jacobsen, a technical fellow with the flight deck team, as they enumerated the hierarchy of alerts that pilots may see. They are:

* An impending stall leads to red lights, a red text message, a voice warning, and activation of the “stick shaker,” meaning that the steering wheel vibrates violently. “The plane is going to fall out of the sky if you don’t do anything,” Myers explained calmly.
* Further down the hierarchy are “warnings,” of which there are about 40. These are events that require immediate pilot awareness and rapid action, although they may not threaten the flight path. Believe it or not, an engine fire no longer merits a higher-level warning because it doesn’t affect the flight path. (“Fires in engines are almost nonevents now,” said Myers, because the systems to handle them are so robust.) The conventions for warnings are red lights, text and a voice alarm, but no stick shaker. Impressively, the color red is never used in the cockpit except for high-level warnings — that’s how much thought the industry has given to these standards.
* The next level down is a “caution,” and there are about 150 such situations. Cautions require immediate pilot awareness but may not require instant action. Having an engine quit in a multiengine plane generates only a caution (again, my jaw drops when I hear this), since the pilot may or may not have to do something right away, depending on the plane’s altitude. A failure of the air-conditioning system — which ultimately can lead to a loss of cabin pressure — is another caution event. With cautions, the lights and text are amber, and there is only one alert modality, usually visual.
* The final level is an “advisory,” like the failure of a hydraulic pump. Since jets are designed with massive redundancy, no action is required, but the pilot does need to know about it, since it might influence the way the landing gear responds late in the flight. Advisories trigger an amber text message — now indented — on the cockpit screen, and no warning light.

For every kind of alert, a checklist automatically pops up on a central screen to help guide the cockpit crew to a solution. The checklists are preprogrammed to match the problems that triggered the alert.

And that’s it. I asked Myers and Jacobsen how, with more than 10,000 data points recorded on every flight, they resist the urge to warn the pilots about everything, as we seem to do in healthcare. “It’s a judgment call,” Jacobsen told me. “We have a team of people — experts in systems safety and analysis — who make that judgment.” Because of this process, the percentage of flights that have any alerts whatsoever — warnings, cautions, or advisories — is low, well below 10 percent.

I wondered whether the designers of individual components sometimes advocate for their own favorite alerts. Myers chuckled. “It’s funny, you’ll get some young engineer whose responsibility is the window heat system. He comes in with this list of 25 messages that he wants us to tell the pilot about his system: it’s on high, it’s on medium, it’s on low, it’s partially failed, you can’t operate it below 26 degrees. . . . He comes out of the meeting — a meeting in which the pilots say, ‘We don’t care!’ — and he’s like [Myers affects an Eeyore voice], ‘This is my job, this is my life, and it doesn’t even make it onto the flight deck.’”

Like many of aviation’s safety solutions, the parsimonious approach to alerts came from insights born of tragedies. “The original ‘gear down’ warning was linked to the throttle,” recalled Myers, meaning that it went off, falsely, every time the pilot slowed the plane. “So the pilots’ learned response was throttle back, disconnect the alert.” Predictably, this led to accidents when pilots ignored this alert even when there truly was a problem. Another example: in the early days of the Boeing 727, some alerts were so frequent and wrong that pilots yanked the circuit breakers to quash them.

When I told the Boeing engineers about my world — not only the frequency of computerized medication alerts, but also the ubiquity of alarms in our intensive care units — they were astonished. “Oh, my goodness,” was all Myers could say.

LeadSled posted:

US boats also had air-conditioning and refrigerators.

On the flip side German torpedoes tended to, well, work.

Arrath posted:

Yeah good point, that would seem to be more important to a submarine's whole reason to exist. But hey, at least the guys were halfway comfortable so they weren't completely mutinous when they got back home with an empty torpedo room and no kills to show for it

PittTheElder posted:

LeadSled posted:

US boats also had air-conditioning and refrigerators.

LeadSled posted:

On the flip side German torpedoes tended to, well, work.

Phanatic posted:

Yes, that's not ideal, and people die because of alarm overload, but remember this is the RN, which when it comes to things like naval reactors and nuclear missiles has a long-standing institutional policy of THOU SHALT PAY ATTENTION TO EVERY SINGLE THING AT EVERY SINGLE TIME, and human interface design is *hard*.

G1mby posted:

In one of the nuclear fuel reprocessing buildings at Sellafield there's an alarm that's constantly on. It's purpose is to warn of a loss of power in certain parts of the system so it only stops when theres a power failure.

PittTheElder posted:

I don't know poo poo about subs, but this part in particular struck me as odd. Alarms probably shouldn't be going off all the time. Or if they are there should be lots of different alarms. Of course maybe there are; it seems odd that the missile compartment of all things would be poorly engineered.

Klaus88 posted:

That's a lot of firepower on one AFV.

hogmartin posted:

It was crowded, but not cramped, I guess is the best way to describe it. There were lots of dudes, some of them foul-smelling, foul-mannered, or just foul, occupying the same space, but the space itself wasn't particularly close. There are some brief glimpses in videos like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4UzD6edY_8

MrMojok posted:

The USS San Francisco was said to be travelling somewhere around 30 knots when it hit that undersea mountain:



I was wondering, aside from trying to evade a torpedo, under what circumstances would a sub actually be going that fast, even in post-cold war times? Couldn't it have been heard from a long, long ways off, which is just plain bad?

Also, does the 688 generally cruise around with the towed sonar array spooled out? (I know San Francisco wasn't at that speed)

Frostwerks posted:

lmfao This is the guy who was in charge of this boat. I'm honestly surprised he didn't see it coming.

G1mby posted:

I's one of those design choices. In one of the nuclear fuel reprocessing buildings at Sellafield there's an alarm that's constantly on. It's purpose is to warn of a loss of power in certain parts of the system so it only stops when theres a power failure.

Lord Tywin posted:

Mattias Gallas built the foundation for his family to be part of the highest echelons of the Bohemian nobility for 300 years with the money he made.

Keldoclock posted:

So, why did you choose to do this? I never understand why anyone would willingly choose to eat a military ration. Even when they were provided to me for field ops I always just brought the sort of food I'd eat backpacking instead. I had a friend once, who, when told to bring 3 days of food for a trip into the mountains, chose a menu composed entirely of beef jerky, trail mix and canned ravioli

Military rations are not designed with the purpose of being eaten. They are designed with the purpose of ensuring the soldier has something to eat. Even the RILC, which is the closest thing to what I'd actually choose to eat, is still inferior to any assortment of readily available foods immediately assembled before the trip. It's just that, if you're willing to accept into consideration foods that have a shorter shelf life (i.e. a few weeks or months rather than years) you can get a much more palatable result. Likewise if you are OK with doing a little bit of cooking, just a bit of boiling, although of course baking and frying are possible too if you can accept a few grams more weight.

PittTheElder posted:

mlmp08 posted:

It was fun doing report printouts to see how many thousand times I'd hit that switch during a 60 minute evaluation.

SeanBeansShako posted:

Was it an old dotmatrix style printer?

Frostwerks posted:

I was pretty surprised at how palatable they were.

chitoryu12 posted:

My friend and I were wondering if someone knowledgeable in Soviet/Russian armored warfare could help with a question. Basically, what are the usual commands given in Russian for ordering an attack on a target with a tank? Like in the American military you've got "Gunner, HEAT tank" to order the gunner what ammo to use on the desired enemy target and "On the way" is shouted by the gunner before they fire. What gets used in Russian tanks?

Keldoclock posted:

Oh sure, they're edible. But so is burnt canned ravioli Really, that's about the standard I'd put the good (read: british american french. Bafflingly, NOT the IDF. They are still running with 1970s style combat rations, but they have halva. I'd take a 100% halva ration and eat it for weeks) combat rations, about as good as canned food. Certainly it beats iron rations, but it isn't going to be better than rehydrating meals I have myself prepared at home and packing in fresh food as far as feasible.

Why not eat something that is actually delicious, right? Why put up with mediocrity? That's been my attitude, anyways. I've just seen youtube videos and stuff of people sampling various combat rations like faux-gormets and I can only react with

The MCW/LRP is basically as good as it's going to get for military rations, and I wouldn't expect anything better from the militaries of the future, but as an individual, on short operations I'd rather have fresh food and on long operations I'd rather just have an assortment of ingredients(ready-to-eat or otherwise, with shelf lives based on how long the operation will be) I can mix and match to my tastes- The main problem with the MREs as they are is that soldiers don't eat the whole ration, and freely trade or throw away the parts they don't want And that's of course, assuming it is impossible to just buy stuff from the locals or roast up the wildlife

Keldoclock posted:

Oh sure, they're edible. But so is burnt canned ravioli Really, that's about the standard I'd put the good (read: british american french. Bafflingly, NOT the IDF. They are still running with 1970s style combat rations, but they have halva. I'd take a 100% halva ration and eat it for weeks) combat rations, about as good as canned food. Certainly it beats iron rations, but it isn't going to be better than rehydrating meals I have myself prepared at home and packing in fresh food as far as feasible.

Why not eat something that is actually delicious, right? Why put up with mediocrity? That's been my attitude, anyways. I've just seen youtube videos and stuff of people sampling various combat rations like faux-gormets and I can only react with

The MCW/LRP is basically as good as it's going to get for military rations, and I wouldn't expect anything better from the militaries of the future, but as an individual, on short operations I'd rather have fresh food and on long operations I'd rather just have an assortment of ingredients(ready-to-eat or otherwise, with shelf lives based on how long the operation will be) I can mix and match to my tastes- The main problem with the MREs as they are is that soldiers don't eat the whole ration, and freely trade or throw away the parts they don't want And that's of course, assuming it is impossible to just buy stuff from the locals or roast up the wildlife

Xiahou Dun posted:

3) Is no one gonna comment on how he called Afghanis 'hadjis'? Like, I don't care for the dog-piling on Keldoclock (despite him being an idiot and everything wrong with teenagers), but like, seriously. Hadjis?? Is he gonna talk about wogs and octoroons next?

Xiahou Dun posted:

2) If you mean why are soldiers given that to eat instead of, as you mentioned, preparing their own food? The obvious problems of handing off food supply to all your soldiers in a long campaign with ???? chance of getting food. Maybe it's not palatable, but you won't die. Also discussing getting grunts to eat it and the methods involved is really cool.

chitoryu12 posted:

a random hodgepodge of meat, cheese, bread, fruit, and vegetables.

chitoryu12 posted:

The obvious downside (apart from, you know, all the extra work by each individual soldier) is that everyone ends up having to carry their own cooking tools. The average Roman soldier carried about 30 kilograms of equipment, easily on par with many modern soldiers, and their mule trains carried even more crap.

Frostwerks posted:

I'm just saying dude I would absolutely take some of the good MREs on a backpacking trip rather than subsist on jerky, trail mix and canned ravioli, if for no other reason than variety.

Xiahou Dun posted:

1)

2)

3)

Keldoclock posted:

My point is that this may in many cases be superior to other, more modern rations. Not in combat, certainly, but there are many, many other situations in which canned or retort-packed rations are used, where a field kitchen truly would be more suitable, and there's no reason for you to not take your morale into your own hands.

quote:

3.Yes, it's an ironic, tounge-in-cheek ethnic slur.

The Lone Badger posted:

Are you of the opinion that modern militaries don't set up field kitchens and serve freshly-prepared meals? Because they most certainly do. Rations are for situations where they are needed, not "the only thing our soldiers will ever eat."