Continental Defence Corvette

[Kirkhill]

Quite right DP. But someone mentioned the US forces in Alaska earlier. Did you know that their posting to Fort Wainwright is considered a "foreign posting" in their system, with all the extra perks that come with it?

Maybe we need to do the same for our forces North of 60.

Would that be an advantage to re-activating Bermuda? It is a relatively short sail from there to both Labrador and Europe

I don't know about the US forces but one of the Alaskan perks is Hawaii. Alaskans regularly stage through Hawaii going to and from the lower 48.

Bermudans wear shorts

 

[Navy_Pete]

I am not a naval architect, and my seagoing time was on Carnival Cruise Line, but I find it odd that there would be a single line to the controller; I'd have thought there would be some redundancy.

Depends on the piece of kit, but in a lot of cases you get redundancy by having duplicate pieces of equipment with separate controllers, that are separated on the ship, with things like all the power and control cables running on opposite sides, with switches to provide power from either switchboard and similar things like that.

In practical terms, the kind of events we're talking about take out everything in the vicinity, so just having redundant cabling doesn't really give you much, and at the micro level lot of single point of failure things.

They do the same kind of thing on commercial ships as well by doing things like physically separating generators in different compartment and doing the same kind of thing with other critical systems.

Some things you can't practically duplicate (like a rudder), but that's the kind of thing where your control system will have port/starboard control cables, with different places to control it from, but at a certain point you can't do much other than call a tug, and those open ocean salvage companies make a mint.

 

[NavyShooter]

Something we learned about the old CCS 330 (the original Combat System, not the current CMS330 suite) was that the 4x Data Bus lines were run on separate decks, on opposite sides of the ship.

That way if there was a hit on the port side, and you lost both channels, you might still have both the channels on the Stbd side online.

Then, as you did your trouble-shooting, you could re-terminate the BAS (Bus Access Set) to shorten the data bus and get some additional redundancy back online.

It was a very well shielded Tri-Axial cable that was used.

It was something that we figured out relatively late in the life of CCS.

That sort of planned redundancy was built into the Halifax Class.

With systems that have been retrofitted, or modified, or added, there may not have been that same level of engineering acumen applied. The original CIWS was definitely configured differently from the version on the ship which had a big fire that may be the one I'm thinking of impacted in this discussion.

I think back in the 70's and 80's when the CPFs were designed, the RCN had a much better depth of field in terms of naval architects than we do now, and perhaps some of the things we've rushed into operations that have become 'standard' should have had more engineering applied.

I ponder the 'engineering' that we applied as we sat on the Bridge-top of HMCS Montreal in 2005 in a foreign port in the Med trying to figure out how to install an AIS receiver. We may have been hungover. We definitely didn't have a useful instruction manual, but between 2 Comm Techs and me the Sonar Tech, we got it installed, we connected it to a GPS signal, we tied it into the Kelvin Hughes for an AIS Overlay, and we managed to get good ranges by not putting it too close to any of the emitters on the bridge-top. A few ports later, I happened to bump into an OSL guy at an airport, and he told me how to tie the AIS into SHINNADS as well - so we became the first ship in the fleet to have AIS info showing up on our SDM.

There was no redundancy....but we got it working anyhow.

(There may also have been no formal approval from anyone by the CO to the CSEO....but....)