Tired of the commute (in the Metro DC area, escpecially)? Don’t like flying? The train is still too slow (and almost as expensive as flying?

If you answered yes, then….fear not, scientists are working for you!

Objects have now been teleported CNN reports today.

Well, maybe telephone booth sized teleporting booths won’t quite make it by this December, it looks like “Star Trek” and other science fiction, wasn’t off the mark with teleporting, and one day, you’ll maybe find one next to the Christmas tree with a large red bow tired around it…

Don’t forget to check out this other “Just in Time for Christmas” offering…

I missed the “anniversary” of this in posting days, as the incident discussed here happened on October 2nd, but come the beginning of next year, the same number of years ago, I became involved in the incident where the mid-watch (0000-0400) team on USS SARATOGA (CV-60) made a terrible mistake and launched two NATO Sea Sparrow RIM-7 missiles into the former US GEARING Class destroyer, then the TCG Mauvenet. Some of the details are here.

Three Admirals are named in the Wikipeida notes, two of which I personally worked with during my career, and the third I knew of. One of my shipmates from a training command was working for Admiral Dur that night, and was present earlier in the evening when the SARATOGA Operations Officer came into the Flag Watch Command Center and mentioned they were going to play in the exercise using their NATO Sea Sparrow system (NSSMS). The reported response from Admiral Dur was “Yeah, right!”

The NSSMS was derived from the successful air-launched Sparrow AIM-7 series, brought “down” to serve on ships as a “point defense” system. This means it was designed to be used against threats coming at the platform where the missile system was located. It was by no means an “area” defense system, as it had a very limited capability against “crossing” (read headed for another target) threats. The first installations were Frankenstein like conglomerations of a F-4 Phantom II radar system, mounter on a stanchion for manual aiming and targeting by a sailor on the open deck, which would then fire a missile from an eight celled launcher, adapted from the Anti-Submarine Rocket (ASROC) system. The system, in this configuration, was the Basic Point Defense System (BPDMS – pronounced Bee-Ped-EMus in verbal reference). It was a start, but the operator, strapped to the send and receive antennas mounted on the station on the open deck, had to be verbally pointed in the direction of the target, then he would sweep the area of sky where the target is supposed to be, while listening to the audible return signal of the radar, which would tell him when he had acquired the inbound target by a change in pitch. He also had the firing key for the system, as he was the only one who had the ability to judge if he was on target or not.

More later, but this will be presented in series, as once I get through the technology involved, then it will be on to the investigation.

Valour-IT isn’t just for Memorial and Veteran’s Day. Our young (and some not so young) citizens, who stepped up to the plate and have been injured can use a little help.

Matt of Black Five reminds us to not forget those who have given so much. There’s the Valour-IT logo on my sidebar, there’s one on my Charities page, or you can click HERE on the Soldier’s Angels site if you feel you haven’t found a link to get to the place to donate a few bucks (or many).

This program, I’m convinced, will not only be a great morale booster to our injured troops, but will pave a road for many disabled, be it in the military or at their job on a construction site somewhere, in and out of the United States, setting a process to model for a long time to come. Join in a be a part of something bigger than you can imagine by helping soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines communicate with their families, their “shipmates” and others in their lives.

Also: Fellow Bloggers, military related or not, please consider passing this info along via your readership. Link here, link to Black Five, link to Soldier’s Angels, but….please just link it!

Thank you for your consideration.

Trackbacked/Crossposted to:
Diane’s Stuff

Get them before they sell out faster than Tickle Me Elmo dolls….

Get one for yourself and all your loved ones to prevent the repetitive stress injuries of too many rotations of the wrist late at night….

The story begins here.

The Tidewater Apple Worms (TAW) club opened up an entire new world. They produced a newsletter, bought large quantities of 5 1/4″ floppies, then split them up as people had ordered them. The tutorials were excellent, as members who had owned Apples freely shared their knowledge of hardware and software. Far better than the salespeople in the few computer stores around the area, it was drinking from a firehose, but I gulped as hard as I could, and it paid off.

Byte Magazine was about all there was to read, unless you were a real hobbist in the computer field and built your own “home brew” systems using empty chassis and adding your own processor and interface cards. That was too deep for me, even while on shore duty. Much of the education I focused on was programming the computer, and I spent many hours typing in program listings in assembler and Apple BASIC languages. By entering these listings from Byte and a few other sources, mostly for games, I picked up the programming concepts. In addition to the programming to get some games to play, I also spent time with the EZ Write Pro word processing software. My wife picked up some typing jobs, and was able to make the computer make money, certainly, I wasn’t at the beginning.

I “flew” my first flight sim on the Apple. It prvided an X/Y/Z readout on the screen, as you used keys to steer and accellerate/decellerate, while consulting the map in from a page in Byte. I guess I began “flying” IFR, before progressing the the VFR stuff later, when the still surviving early version of Microsoft Flight Simulator came out.

In EZ Writer, if you wanted to make a part of your text bold, you would “mark” the text with a (I can’t get them to just plain print here) set of characters we now know and love as HTML. Same for italizied and larger print for headings. So, in 1981, I was using HTML, not realizing it would come back to me in 1996, when I was asked to take over webmaster for my company.

I also learned how to *ahem* secure my investments by archiving programs. Copy ][+ and Locksmith seem to come to mind as some programs that were useful. Given there were no well stocked software stores, it was useful to know if a program, despite the writing on the box, would do the job. On the other hand, one of the assets of the TAW was the “public domain” library of programs.

Back in the day, people actually would write software and publish it in the public domain. Read: FREEWARE, and mountains of it. The Washington, DC and Dallas Apple clubs were well developed and also had amassed very large software libraries. The clubs would graciously share their stuff, if you shared yours. It didn’t matter too much that you couldn’t provide the same volume or quality, but if you were making an effort, you got help. There were many programs, some very polished, some that worked fine, so long as you didn’t strike a wrong key, and some that was just plain buggy beyond belief. But, people shared their work and it wasn’t until many, many years later I came across the term “shareware.”

In that first year of ownership of a “PC,” I learned much in the weekly Saturday meetings. I actually felt bad, for I was taking all this help, and really didn’t know enought o reciprocate. Part way thru the year, the newletter editor announced they had to resign. I looked at the spouse and said: We can do that. She agreed. I volunteered us to take the duty.

Next episode: Davy Jones and the Manpower Auditors meet Stoneware

“It has to do more than play games” was the admonition from the now Ex.

Two guys in my shop owned Atari computers. One had the 400 and one the 800 model. Sometimes they brought them in and we’d fire them up at lunch and play “Star Raiders.” Even now, for such a small amount of RAM and a slow processor, the graphics were pretty good 3D effects…in B&W, of course. So, I had the bug.

The spouse agreed we could get a computer but, (see opening sentence) it would perform a number of tasks. We began the journey to find the best computer to allow me to stop wandring into game arcades and going thru a handful of quarters, as well as have some money making ability. The options we shopped were: The TRS-80 series, the Atari 400/800, and the Apple ][+. I had no idea there was an IBM PC out there, but a few months ago, seeing a note about the anniversary of the IBM PC, I now realize it pre-dated the Apple ][ series.

Our analysis was:
The TRS-80 was good for business related stuff, but sucked for games (my priority).
The Atari series sucked for business, but was great at games (her priority).
The Apple ][ series, was adequate at both, but not superior at either (seemed like the best bet).

So the Apple ][+ it was, sometime in October, 1981. We found the Byte Magazine, and the local computer stores and began shopping for the best price, knowing Apple was the most expensive choice. We finally bought it and here were the specs:

Apple ][+, 6802 1 Mhz processor, 48K RAM.
We added:
Two 5 1/4″ floppy drives, capacity 134K, unless it was used as a system boot disk, then it held 143K on a single side.
80 Column video card, the Videx Videoterm, specifically for word processing tasks
Zenith 12″ green screen monitor
C.IOTH StarWriter daisy wheel printer with parallel interface.
EZ Write Professional (I may have this title wrong)
and we had a printer interface cable made (I had no clue as to standard interfaces, so I paid $89 for the education).

Total outlay, in 1981 dollars from an O-3’s household budget: $5400.

We still had a free bedroom, one being set aside for the pending arrival of the first born, so the computer was placed then, upstairs and I went to work learning the seeming magic of electronics. We talked to some of the computer store salespeople (most of who couldn’t answer any questions, but would let you go and play with the display models by yourself) and found out there was an Apple club in the area. The Tidewater Apple Worms (TAW) met every Saturday in one of the large classrooms at the Naval Amphious School on the Little Creek, VA base. We wandered in to see how we might learn…..

(to be continued)

Part IV

Sorry, I got distracted, but I continue on the journey. Just so you know, along the way between parts Iv and this one, I typed this up: Why We Shelved TASMs. That post details much of what the falout of the report we generated, but also some dealing I had years later, as a result of this exercise 20 years ago this past August.

We arrived back in Norfolk, and returned to our digs on the ground floor of Building “Whiskey-5” (“W5” as the sign on the building said). As usual, our plate was full and I looked at the Ops Boss and asked when we were going to get to work on the tactical analyis. He said he had the next operation to plan (he did) and went back to sorting through the large stack of daily messages. Being the Ops Boss, he owned the two operations types, OSCS(SW) Koch and RMCS(SW) Rumbaugh, and they were put to work. Oh, well, off to the small shared conference room I went, hauling box after box, after box of raido logs, DRT traces, radio-telephone (R/T) logs, weather reports, intel messages and much more. For quite some time, I would sit in there, with charts, dividers, logs and notepads, piecing together engagements from first detection to simulated impact.

I managed to pull a total of 59 complete engagement sequences out of the piles of data. This data not only included the track of the intended virtual, constructive or cooperative target reckoned by the shooters and search aircraft, but the overlay of the actual tracks. While the times of position didn’t always match, I plotted the ded-reckoned tracks to allow some degree of checking apples to apples. For the flight of the simulated TASMs, I plotted the ded-reckoned tracks, based on the engagement plans, printed for final approval by the CO before the simulated firings. During this, I read the tactical signal logs between the shooters and reviewed any other available data.

I don’t recall how many total engagements were run. Some were disgarded for the fact that not all elements of the detection and tracking process were there. Some were not written down, some were not included in the records, most likely to not being packaged up properly. In any case, for 4 dedicated days, an average of almost 15 engagements a day wasn’t too bad for extracting some meaningful info.

In order to manage the data, I hauled in my new toy, a Macintosh 512K, to the office, and ran Excel as my database manager. The data was all kept on 800K 3.5″ floppies, as internal hard drives weren’t a common thing with home computers yet. I seem to recall the printed out data was a 8 page wide by 2 page high form, which I peeled apart (tractor feed paper in an ImageWriter ][ dot-matrix printer) and taped together to show the Commodore. Included in the spreadsheet (which wasn’t even available for the IBM PC yet), was my first serious work in making calculations using spherical geometry. It took a bit of reading in Bowditch, then dusting off the college level trig, and spending quite a bit of time making sure the parenthesis were placed properly to do computations between two fixes. I also did a lot of testing of the formulas, just to make sure I’d get the right answers. This was done so for every fix of the target, I would compare the “miss distance” between the apparent position (from the shooter’s track files) to “ground truth” (the target’s navigational files, which were assumed to be accurate in any case). The speadsheet would indicate the azimuth and distance of miss all along the sequence to engagement.

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Capt Lex, enroute a permanent appointment with CIVPAC/LANT/Wherever, is up to his eyeballs in real world work (building resume entries).

He issues this tasking:

Insanely busy. Irrationally so. Firing on all synapses. Every sinew a-twitch.

Busy.

So. Talk amongst yourselves. As though you needed any encouragement from me.

Suggested topic: Close Air Support. How very hard it can be to deliver warheads on foreheads when those forehead are in close proximity to other foreheads whom you are actually trying to protect. And who need it bad, or else they wouldn’t be asking for you to drop 500 pound bombs over the top of them, because really, who needs the stress?

But only they’re locked in mortal combat, like. In the beatin’ zone, but with the roles of beater and beatee not yet clearly defined. But whose situation is not improved if in fact you mid-ID the target or otherwise drop short.

It made me connect two stories of my life from 20 years ago and almost 20 years ago now. Lots of details, but at the end of the real world operations in 86 off Libya, and as a result of playing out tactics later the same year, we (my staff) forwarded our report up the chain in early ’87. I know now, in the aftermath of all of that, the Tomahawk Anti-Ship Missile (TASM) began a fairly quick exit from bag of weaponry for the Surface Warfare community.

It revolved around the same points as Lex asked us to discuss in his moment of high focus regarding Close Air Support during a “Danger Close” (more like “Danger ‘Coz We’re Grappling with Each Other”).

If you need to catch up, I talked about the operations in the vicinity of Libya (an how I never got to have a beer on DGAR) back in “A Journey Into History” series. Part I is here, and it has links to walk you to the end of the posts on the subject.

That group of posts highlighted a particular incident in March ’86, which was the outcome of the volumes of civilian (“White”) shipping that cluttered our surface picture. We didn’t have any TASM equipped units in any of the three battle groups that made up Battle Force “Z,” but we often talked among ourselves in the staff watch space, of how wonderful it would be to have the new “wonder weapon” at our disposal, how more mighty we would be on the bounding main….

This, too, was at the time I first met Adm Harry Harris, now of Guantanamo Bay and Detainee fame. I came to know LCDR Harry Harris, of the USS SARATOGA (CV-60) Operations Department, when he stopped a briefing to Adm David Jerimiah I was giving and said: “We can’t do that!” Me: Why not? Him: “We can’t have aircraft flying on an alerted target!” Me:… That, readers, is fodder for tomorrow’s Ropeyarn Sunday “Sea Stories” and Open Trackbacks. Now, back to my regularly scheduled ramblings:

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HT: Glenn Beck’s radio show…

Well…I wonder how many liberals are hauling one of these around? What will they think of next for the pet rock purchasing crowd?

C’mon…like this will give you more of a clue than the big fireball in your vicinity? Oh, yeah…maybe one of your fellow travelers is packing a suitcase nuke as a carry on, and you (without a parachute as your carry on) want to know.

Glenn said this is a favorite inside the Beltway accessory.

I’m thinking a e-coli detector you can hold above your mixed green salad would be a hot seller right now….

OH, and the best part (to rip off Glenn), if there is a nuke and it does go off, and you didn’t get enough warning…it’s not like you will be around to sue them in a class action suit. On top of that (we return now to original thought), which of your neighbors has a calibrated “source” out on their tool bench that, while you’re over for a beer on Saturday afternoon, is available to do preventative maintenace checks on your key fob?

Hey…it’s only $160….(or $145/ea if you buy one for your significant other at the same time) mere pocket change for the DC crowd…