Friday, August 9, 2013

perspective

Hmmm.

 Watching "Pacific Rim" and enjoying the hell out of it for the entertainment value, btb.

     There's a scene where the protagonists are using a ship as a handheld bludgeon. Sure- it's roughly cylindrical and resiliant and made of a lot of steel.

 From my perspective, though, a ship is much too fragile to be used as a baseball bat. To me, a ship is a fragile conveyance, might as well be made of glass as far as I'm concerned. Stretch, wrack, deflection, bending modulus and all the myriad physics issues that make my ass pucker on a daily basis. Keel cracks, shell plating fractures, spiral keel fractures... those things you can do by simply loading shit on board badly sitting against a dock. A bludgeon? Hell no. I spent enough time on deck in heavy seas, feeling the deck springing up and down like a teeter-totter, like the feeling you get on an elevated section of highway when you're stopped and a tractor trailer roars by on the far side.

   Still, seeing a giant robot beat the balls off a Godzilla monster with a bunker tanker was awesome.

3 comments:

Irish said...

Hi Paul,

What do you make of this?

http://investmentwatchblog.com/57-ships-anchored-off-shore-of-nj-mdva/

Thanks, Irish

Paul, Dammit! said...

Most of those aren't anchored. The program doesn't differentiate between anchored or underway. Some of those positions are on the far side of the continental shelf, over the abyssal plain, miles above the seafloor.
The 2nd picture shows a ship that is part of NOAA's volunteer weather reporting program. That one is the cruise ship CELEBRITY SUMMIT, 9HJC9. Those reports aren't published realtime, but you're looking at a summary report for every ship on that part of the Atlantic approaches to the MId-Atlantic who is involved in the reporting program. The distribution pattern is partially on account of the Traffic Separation schemes that govern the approaches to the major harbors.

The article confuses NOAA weather reports with AIS (Automatic Identification System) position reports- little transponders we all carry that integrate with radars and GPS units to give other vessels info about your whereabouts, course/speed/ closest point of approach, etc). AIS reports are available on Marinetraffic. NOAA reports are available from NOAA. Apples and oranges.

Irish said...

Thanks Paul. I knew you would know.