England's flagship set sail for the Americas to embrace a loadout and training with the F-35B fighters and made it a good 5 miles into its Trans-Atlantic crossing 5 years after commissioning and came to a sudden and abrupt stop due, as the Admiral claimed to some sort of problem with one of the shafts. Shafts don't come to a sudden and ignominious end. They have little telltale warnings that any engineer can see and stay on top of. Let's go over some of the obvious ones.
1) shaft somehow got bent--never happens unless ship is in extended dry dock.
2) shaft bearing wiped-- easy fix, add some babbit, smooth, and roll on.
3) shaft seal--those are mostly embraced by the design and construction, easy fix= inflate shaft collar.
4) reduction gear--somebody bypassed armory type locks and threw metal in the reduction gear
4 is the killer. The first three you can fix in the middle of the Indian Ocean in 2 days. Reduction gear destruction by throwing Craftsman type tools on top of the reduction gear need a dry dock and months of repair as the shipyard cuts open the hull of the ship and every space between the reduction gears and the atmosphere outside the ship to embrace pulling the ruined gears out and replacing them.
Guess what? There are no "replacements" they have to be built from a cold standing start. That is why the reduction gear covers are locked with the same exact sort of locks that we use to lock up armories and weapons magazines. High Security!
One of the features of multi-culti is how it embraces the disaffected and God DAMN anyone who questions why people who could not pass a nuclear weapons access background investigation are allowed to destroy billion dollar warships with a wrench or a bic lighter.
You see, the thing is, in every particular case, people saw it coming but could do nothing because 'woke' attitudes rule and commonsense is not allowed, encouraged or tolerated. I think the last time I saw it was 1984 when I was legal officer on the Middle East Force Flagship and the Chief Engineer put his foot down and told the CO that none of the 11 firemen or petty officers who popped positive for drugs and were disciplined by the CO at Captain's Mast would be allowed access to the engine rooms until they were put on a plane and sent home and he didn't care if it took him to 50% manning. He'd been there before. He wasn't going to allow them to sabotage his engines which any fool or criminal could do.
If the Prince of Wales suffered reduction gear damage, it's going into dry-dock for a year or more. You see, the thing that none of us CHENGs ever gave any real thought to was that our Chiefs, LPOs and supervisors would tolerate a disaffected punk who could take a couple minutes with a hacksaw and file away industriously on a high security hasp lock a few minutes every watch until it parted under the continuous illicit filing and the bad guys gained access to the reduction gear oil sump because those locks get opened once or at most twice a year for the CHENG to shine a light in them and roll the reduction gear to look for signs of wear, gear lash, etc.
When those ports are opened the old Maintenance Requirement was the CHENG personally checking the gears with all devices and insignia removed and any tools wired so they could not fall into the sump. We regarded it as a major undertaking because it was a killer inspection in all respects.
No comments:
Post a Comment