Comments on: Chapter 4 p. 120

By: Insectoid

Insectoid — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 06:55:38 +0000

Think of it as a polite suggestion from that disembodied voice…

By: Tara

Tara — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 02:29:38 +0000

Hmmm… is that a request?

By: Insectoid

Insectoid — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 21:37:29 +0000

Perhaps Fusella will make a Halloween cameo.

By: J. Wilde

J. Wilde — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 02:15:21 +0000

Eh, believe me, you have no idea how over-engineered the Navy’s reactors are. The reactor was orders of magnitude more reliable than say, our air conditioning plants… The Navy’s steamed more than 100,000,000 miles on nuclear power with no reactor accidents. And I got less radiation exposure at sea on nuclear power than I did in port with the reactor shut down.

By: Stewart

Stewart — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 16:56:20 +0000

Stewart, Tara, and company: it’s worse than you think. Ticonderoga class missile cruisers have(had) their propulsion plants run on Windows NT. About ten years ago someone goofed a decimal place and literally shut down their ship for two hours while they figured out what went wrong.

I actually remember hearing about something like this in a Computer Science class I once took. Of course, the professor pronounced it “Windells,” but …

Shipboard nuclear reactors sound like brown trousers time to me, as well.

By: Fusella

Fusella — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 16:29:55 +0000

Insectoid: Thank you for remembering I exist, even if I haven’t had my fair share of screen time lately! Don’t mind me, I’m only a disembodied voice over a com link. Just because I’m wearing a track in the newly polished bridge floors, pacing and worrying about my crew down there on this wierd Earth-look-a-like planet. General Nelson can’t POSSIBLY take as good care of them as I would!

By: J. Wilde

J. Wilde — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 15:09:55 +0000

Nate: Well, it would depend on the nature of the unhappiness. Fires, steam leaks, and primary coolant leaks are all pretty bad. Hopefully you are in port and shutdown so that you can go in there and deal with a fire like you would any other shipboard fire (the exception being that you’d have to do a whole body radioactive contamination survey of yourself and everything you brought inside with you before you could leave the RC). A steam leak can be dealt with remotely by blowing the contents of the leaking Steam Generator overboard – the valves to do this are safely outside the shielded volume of the Reactor Compartment. A primary coolant leak is hopefully in a part of the system you can isolate, and that too can be discharged overboard or to onboard retention tanks from outside the RC. If not, the provision exists to keep the core covered with water up to and including the point where you flood the entire compartment up to the top of the reactor vessel – but at that point the boat’s probably a write-off…

By: Nate

Nate — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 10:54:28 +0000

J. Wilde: Neat! I’ve always been fascinated by US naval reactors. What happened – hypothetically speaking – if you looked inside through that eight-inch-thick window and found things weren’t so happy?

I think if I lived on a nuclear submarine I would need new pants regularly.

By: Insectoid

Insectoid — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 05:38:34 +0000

Tara: I totally knew that; I must be suffering from page-a-week-itis!

Also: hi, Wendy! We’ll see Fusella again sometime soon I hope.

J. Wilde: Okay, that’s scary.

By: J. Wilde

J. Wilde — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 04:57:03 +0000

It’s probably a good idea to keep esoteric things like FTL systems as vague as possible just on general principal. But for an example of how you deal with a critical space you can’t go into, the reactor compartment back on the Ustafish had several windows you could use to look inside and make sure everything looked okay. Now, because you couldn’t have a direct line of sight to the reactor (for obvious reasons), your window was eight to ten inches thick leaded glass that looked at a mirror that you could tilt and traverse around. We also had remote sensors like bilge alarms and an air sniffer that constantly sampled the air from the RC for radioactivity. Even though this was effectively 1960s technology, it is reliable, and more importantly, not reliant on computers/software built by the lowest bidder.