Crap Throwing Monkey

But again, different specs. I tend to doubt the 155 is suitable as it stands for shipboard use, at the very least for reasons of aiming. The 155 in Army use fires from a stop at a fixed point. A shipboard weapon would have to fire with consideration to the motion of the ship (pitch, roll, yaw, and lateral and transverse motion towards the target), AND potentially the true motion of the target (since shipboard weapons are still intended to be used against moving targets). Basically, the only commonality you'd achieve would be the gun barrel and ammo. And if you're going to do that...use the MLRS. I believe there's been talk (I don't know how serious, maybe little more than "Wouldn't it be neat if...") of doing something like that.

Old light cruisers used to mount 6" guns...but like JSP said, the 6" howitzer you're referring to hasn't been navalized. Nor is it likely to be, being a howitzer (high angle of flight, low muzzle velocity) and not a gun (which in the Navy are usually dual-purpose anti-air and anti-ground - another reason they rarely go above 5", as larger isn't particularly useful for anti-air work). Bottom line, though, is that the Army and Navy have vastly different requirements for artillery...enough so that a "one size fits all" solution is likely to be less cost-effective than designing two guns to the two different sets of specs.

Ah...you made it up.

Lost him? Did you check under the couch?

3000? Did the Iraqis suddenly kill 900 soilders overnight?

4000 per hour, total (combined 5" and 16" mounts) is probably pretty LOW, actually. The 5" mounts alone could put out a minimum of 8 rounds per gun per minute sustained fire, which is 4800 an hour on one side. The 16" mounts are easily another 400-500. Which also doesn't change the fact that, as a method for putting 5000+ rounds on target, the BBs are grossly inefficient. Neither is the DD(X), for that matter (and I have the ROF specs for that gun somewhere around here...the key question is whether they're going to mount one or two on a ship, though. And whether the thing will work...the BS technology might break after 100 rounds, at which point the question's moot anyway.) The bottom line is: if the Navy wants to provide the Marines with fire support, they're better off scrapping the BBs and designing a ship specifically dedicated to fire support from the keel up. Or maybe from the deck up...a Burke-class DDG hull can probably take the strain of four 5" mounts firing, and maybe even a couple 8" as well, and it's got to be cheaper than either of the BBs or the DD(X).

That'll do as well. At least it's a real language...

Jesus Christ. "r u"? Type English, loser.

If you're leading 'em, you're probably not doing it right. Ask your wife... Wait, what?

No, they were designed to fire a single broadside at once, and did when they were new. But with age, the ship's structure couldn't take the stress anymore. Now standard practice is to ripple-fire the guns (i.e. sequentially, one after another). If you look at pictures of "broadsides" nowadays, they're always firing only the outboard guns on each turret - it's the most they can fire simultaneously without over-stressing the ship, and they pretty much only do it for photo ops.

4000 rounds per minute? Not even your math's that bad; that's got to be a typo. For the record...the best any 16"-armed American battleship ever did was two rounds per minute per gun (USS Washington, in '43-'44). 18 rounds per minute, total. The standard was 1 round a minute per gun. 18 16" shells, though, is about 48 thousand pounds. The DD(X), by comparison, will probably get 10-15 5" shells off per minute per gun, two guns per ship, about 50 lbs per gun...generously, call it 1500 lbs per minute.

Not that many cruise missiles, actually. One DDG holds more. And with the Ohio SSGN conversions planned to hold a ton more...the BBs are very superfluous as cruise missile carriers. The problem with the battlewagons is that, frankly, they're old. They are a B word to maintain and operate. And while I think the ideas for replacing them in the fire support role (the new DD(X), with its rapid-fire, ultra-high-range, ultra-high-tech, ultra-accurate, ultra-expensive dual 5" guns that probably won't work as advertised, or the LCS, the weirdest idea to come out of the Navy in a LONG time) are BS, the simple fact is that keeping around 60 year old battleships running off old fuel oil boilers to push 16" of high-grade composite steel plate around the oceans, requiring heavy escort, all for the sake of carting around 9 16" guns is extremely uneconomical. The gunfire support would be nice to keep...but at this point the Navy would be better off designing a new heavy gun (heavier than that stupid 5" in the DD(X)) and a new ship around it, rather than keeping the old BBs around.

So the front office calls attention to it by suspending him - not just suspending him, but dithering over it for a few days so it gets plenty of media play and turns into a soap opera? Like I said elsewhere...even if Moulds did deserve it, that doesn't mean the front office handled it well. Of course, Don Corleone slapped Johnny Fontane and said "What's the matter with you!!" He was perfectly calm and reasonable when he told Sonny "Don't ever let somebody outside the family know what you're thinking!!" And ultimately, both Sonny and Vito Corleone were gunned down...

Well...it's not exactly right...my disagreement is that infectious agents simply exist, and have existed for centuries in their own genetic ecology with its own environmental stressors irrespective of what happens in our macro ecology and society. The two main infectious exports from Southeast Asia - cholera and influenza - have existed for centuries, long before you decided SE Asia was the world's "disease trap". Ditto HIV and Ebola (either of which can be tracked genetically to before their first epidemioligical descriptions). Ditto illnesses like Legionaire's - which "emerged" in Philadelphia - or Toxic Shock Syndrome (American midwest) or necrotizing fasciitis (Yorkshire, I believe) or Lassa (which was "discovered" because of virulent epidemics...and later found to have been causing benign "fevers of unknown origin" for years). Sanitation practices in SE Asia (and public health practices in sub-Saharan Africa) certainly don't help...but implicit in your statement is the idea that, if they cleaned up their acts, emerging diseases would somehow stop...which is patently untrue.

Is it already time for my semi-annual "I agree with that idiot stojan" post? The moral of the story is: when you freak out on an airplane and start claiming you have a bomb, don't disobey a direct and lawful order! Hell, if I ran off an airplane claiming I had a bomb and ignored the air marshalls and wasn't gunned down, my first question would be "What the hell is wrong with you idiots? Why the !@#$ didn't you shoot?" By the way, nice sig.

Okay, he's being suspended for making a public statement questioning Wile E. Coyote's game plan...him, a receiver, questioning why they didn't try to run the ball more to win the game. And for that he's suspended? Yeah, that's much better...

Uhhh..."becoming"? They have been for hundreds of years, for reasons having little to do with Chinese sanitation practices.

I think, no matter what happened, the situation could have somehow been handled better. I think. I don't know what Moulds did...and I don't really care, as this slow, gentle build-up to a suspension for reasons they won't share is BS even if the suspension is deserved.

Most politicans, actually... But then, I believe most politicians are out of their minds anyway, so you've made your point.

If Moulds is telling Mularkey to bench Losman, and Mularkey is even giving him the time of day...then no one's running the team.

Of course, Golisano bought a team in a league headed for a labor dispute and lockout. Who in their right mind would do anything in that situation?

Well...did you really hate Miami last Sunday, or did you hate the Bills more? He's only begun to turn us to the dark side...Sunday was just the start, like Anakin slaughtering the sand people...

"You a dancer?" "No, ma'am..."

"...groups like the Family Research Council say it would only lead to an increase in online porn and legitimize the industry." Retards. How in the hell does giving them their very own domain other than the ubiquitous ".com" thus distinctly separating them from the general retail and web world, legitimize the porn industry? That's kind of like saying zoning that restricted XXX theaters to a specific street away from other retail businesses would legitamize porn. It just ain't rational.

Yeah...from everything I actually heard/read about the incident, TD wasn't even remotely out of line in that situation.