A Bad Day In Duckford, One Year Later

One year ago today, a series of severe thunderstorms rolled through the Duckford area, knocking down trees and electrical power all over the city.  The third storm of the day dumped four inches of rain the space of about an hour, a deluge that caused flooding in low-lying areas (and some high-lying areas, too, come to think of it).

It also caused this:

In case you can't tell what's going on in that video, that's taken from a police cruiser's dashboard camera, and it's filming water flowing unimpeded underneath a set of railroad tracks that had had its roadbed washed away.  Twenty minutes after that video was shot, a Canadian National train pulling 110 cars, including 70 tanker cars full of ethanol, rolled over that crossing.  Eyewitnesses reported that the train was actually bouncing up and down as the track deflected under its weight.  12 cars derailed and exploded.
This accident, which occurred about a half-mile from Pond Central claimed the life of one motorist, injured a few others, and forced the evacuation of around 600 homes.  If Pond Central had been much closer to the accident site, I would have been evac'd, too.

One year later, the site of the accident is much improved.  The roadbed for the crossing has been strengthened, the pavement for the street replaced and relaid, and much of the terrain was replanted with grass.  The local fire department now trains with a few of the derailed cars, practicing for the next big fire and hoping it never comes.

But many of the trees near the derailment site still show signs of having being burned by the blaze.  And just off the tracks is a small cross, in memory of the woman who was killed in the incident, Zolia Tellez.  I drive by the site once or twice a day, and imagine what it must have been like... and count myself lucky that I wasn't there when it happened.  I could have been, and on a normal Friday I would have missed the incident by only an hour or so.

The NTSB is still investigating the accident, and their report isn't expected for another six months or so.  A rash of train crashes, including one bad one in Washington DC a few days after the one here in Duckford, has 10 NTSB train specialists working 16 cases.  The EPA has found traces of ethanol byproducts in the local drinking water, but far below any amounts that they declare to be dangerous.  The massive fish die-off that occurred a month or so after the accident in a nearby river is still completely unexplained.  And every now and again, a train comes through on the new rails.

One year later.

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That One Game

Civ 5 is scheduled to come out in the Fall, and any self-respecting strategy gamer has already written off any productivity they may have had.  The release of new screenshots for the game has done nothing to alleviate that.

Any of us who have spent too much time playing for "just one more turn", no matter if it was Civ, MOO, SimCity, whatever, have That One Game.  That One Game is the one where everything that happened led to an amazing climax... maybe it was a tense struggle against overwhelming odds, or an incredible occurrence.  Maybe it was just a well-played blowout, who knows?  But oh, it was memorable... it became That One Game.

Mine was in Civ 3, a huge map and continents.  I was playing the English, started on what I wound up calling Australia: big island, green at the coasts but arid desert in the center... and practically no resources to speak of.  After a while I learned sailing and found, just off to the west, a very big continent filled with all the luxuries and resources a civ could need.  I also found the remains of another civ... three razed cities in the worst starting locations I've ever seen (after the game ended, I discovered it was the French.  Ces't la Guerre.).  Other than the home of the French, though, what I saw looked ripe for the picking... until I found what killed Napoleon.  The Zulus... and they weren't happy I was there, declaring war on me and quickly overwhelming the exploring archer I had sent over.  I put them out of my mind, as I had a tech lead on them, and vowed to revisit Africa soon.

Some long while later, I packed up two musketmen, a settler and a worker and sent them off to found a home base on Africa.  Once I got there, though, I found that the Zulus had expanded, taking most of the good territory.  So instead of colonization, I decided to make life hell for Shaka.  I dumped the musketmen and worker off on what appeared to be the only road between northern and southern Africa, fortified one of them, and had the worker build a fortress.  The other musketman began tearing up the any roads I could find around the fortress.  Within a few turns, Shaka had had enough... and the Impi began to move.  I brought the raider back to the fortress and waited.  And waited.  Eventually, I got a cannon over to the fortress as well.

Just in time, as it turned out.  Not one, but two Stacks of Doom converged on my little fortress, one from the north, one from the west... each of them composed of nothing but Impi.  Wincing, I immediately gave the fortress the name "Rorke's Drift" and crossed my fingers.  By the end of the first SOD's defeat, one of my musketmen had been promoted from "regular" to "veteran," and the other was about to.  Both were damaged, however, and the second stack was even larger than the first.

They held the line.  One of them died, and the other had one hit point left, but they held the line.  From there, the conquest of Africa was easy... almost everything Shaka had, he had thrown at Rorke's Drift, and most of them had died (some retreated). 

I left that one musketman and the cannon stationed at Rorke's Drift for the rest of the game, even after I could have promoted them to other, better things.  They remained untouched, even through the later nuclear war against the Germans.  At the end of the little fracas that they started, the three cities closest to Rorke's Drift had been turned to radioactive rubbish, along with a few others on my side, but any German city over the size of 5 took an missile. But there they stayed.

And when the spaceship to Alpha Centauri finally arrived at its destination, I knew I had just finished playing That One Game.  From then on, I have never neglected building fortifications, and I have always had a lone outpost somewhere far away from the main action... in honor of the musketmen of Rorke's Drift.

So, what's YOUR "That One Game"?

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Tech Assistance Needed, Save Squishy!

Okay, here's the story.  As you may remember, my boss went on maternity leave about a year-and-a-half ago after giving birth to a ridiculously cute baby girl, whom I call "Squishy."  Squishy's mom is an inveterate record-keeper, and has diligently chronicled Squishy's life via the art of digital photography, amassing a huge amount of pictures in the process.

Last night, their main computer coughed up a hairball and died.  The husband of my boss has some skill with computers, so he ran some BIOS checks on the system and everything reported that the hard drive and grabbed its chest and died.  Of course, this hard drive is the one that has the gazillions of Squishy photos on it, photos that they cannot replace (they have some saved in other places, but just a mere fraction of the total).  Here's the thing: the HD gave no indication there was a problem, no weird sounds, nothing.  It just stopped functioning.  A two-hour call to tech support caused nothing but frustration, of course... frustration and a deep, deep desire to cause an immense amount of physical harm to the techie on the other end of the telephone.

When my boss came in to the Duck U Bookstore today, she told me of the situation.  A quick phone call to her husband convinced me that the HD wasn't actually dead (merely pining for the fjords).  I suggested that they take it out of the computer, put it into an external enclosure, hook it up to one of their other computers and see what happens.  If it doesn't show up, then they know that the offending drive is dead enough that they'd need to take it somewhere to recover the pictures.  If it did show up, then they know that the problem may not be the drive, but the computer itself... and they'd be able to copy the drive to the laptop.

I just got a call from them.  They did put it into an enclosure, and sure enough, it appeared... well, actually, two drives appeared, at which point I slapped my forehead: of course two drives appeared, it was the boot drive from the dead system!  What they were seeing was the C drive and the drive partition where the recovery stuff was kept... which is where the unexpected problem has reared its ugly head.

Y'see, when they look at what was the C drive, there's only a few folders visible, and they don't have anything in them... at least, that's what the laptop is reporting.  What I think is happening, and please correct me if you think I'm wrong, is that the drive isn't showing anything because the copy of Windows that's on it obviously isn't booting, and thus the file system on the drive isn't functional (I may have the technical details wrong, but that's the net result).  Further, the laptop is XP and the version of Windows on the drive is Vista, which probably causes problems too.

They're copying the drive to the laptop, and I've suggested that they go to their other desktop system (which they retired), rip out that hard drive, and plug the problem drive into it.  If everything goes well, the stars align, and a choir of angelic ducks quack out paeans to the heavens, it'll boot up.  At worst, they'll be in the same boat they're in now.

The tech question I have for you, the myriad readers of The Pond, is there some way to access the data from the problem drive if dropping it into a different computer system doesn't work?  If the data was replaceable, I'd just suggest they find Windows on it, delete it, and see if that turns it into a normally-read drive, but I'm just WAGging there, and the chance that it'll turn the drive into a brick seems not insignificant.  Can they pull the data off without the "boot Windows" running?

Another related question: is there some way to boot a laptop from an external hard drive that has Windows on it, sort of a half-arsed version of dual-booting?  If they can do that, then they can save the pics to a different external drive, or burn them to DVD, or something.

Let's brainstorm, my friends.  Hopefully they'll be monitoring this thread, if not tonight then tomorrow, so they'll be able to provide specific details (what folders are showing up, for example) that I don't have, but in the meantime, let me hear your best suggestions.

You wouldn't want to disappoint Squishy, would you?  How could you disappoint that face?

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Commit To The Indian!

The Chicago Blackhawks have won Lord Stanley's Cup, for the first time in 49 years!

And they said Chicago teams can't win championships...

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Motivation

For the past few weeks, I've been realizing that I don't have much need to write.  The F1 Update!s are becoming a chore.  Nothing in this season of anime has grabbed me and said "hey, mention me, will ya?"  I couldn't even have a topic for this year's Battle of Midway Day, despite trying for days to come up with something.

Part of it is, I'm sure, just "one of those phases" all bloggers seem to go through (or at least "thinkers" go through; I'm not sure "linkers" even need to use their brains for their blogs).  Part of it is a nascent fear that I'm on the wrong side of Sturgeon's Law.

And part of it is frustration, a particular type of frustration that again every blogger goes through at one time or another.  It's the frustration of seeing a post (or a series of posts) that you've put relatively large amounts of time and effort into... is being ignored completely.  I'm thinking of my episodic series review of Ga-Rei Zero here, but it could apply to just about anything on The Pond (with a couple of exceptions).  Nearly 26000 words and lord knows how many screencaps over 12 posts, at four hours minimum per post, and there's only 30 comments between them... and at least 10 of those are my own. 

At times like those, I just want to chuck the whole darn thing.  In Steven's "Linkers and Thinkers" post, he mentions that he was once frustrated because he was only getting "100 to 150 views" a day.  In 2002.  I look at that now and laugh... and wish I had that many hits in a week.  I see posts over at Twenty Sided that have fewer than 20 comments and the droll message "Isn't that nice," or something to that effect... and I get annoyed, because that many comments would be a huge success here, and he's so blasé about it that he makes jokes about how few there are.

Wonderduck's Pond isn't one of the big hitters like Steven or Shamus, never will be, and I'm fine with that.  I didn't start writing here because I cared if people read it, but because I wanted to write.  But everybody with a comments section wants a little recognition for their efforts; me, you, the blogger who writes about plastic daffodils, everybody.  Maybe the stuff here isn't worth commenting on... again, the fear of being on the wrong side of Sturgeon's Law... or maybe nobody sees it, or maybe nobody gives a rat's asterisk about commenting anymore.  And The Pond's five-year anniversary is coming up...

So what should I do?  What would you do?

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June 3, 1942: The Battle Begins

Conventional wisdom says that the Battle of Midway began on June 4th, 1942.  Just as the conventional wisdom that says that the Japanese carriers were five minutes from launching a devastating attack on the US carriers is incorrect, this too is wrong.  The Battle of Midway actually began on June 3rd.  To be sure, all the dramatic parts of the fight occurred the following day, but the two opponents started throwing armament at each other on the third day of June.

Nine B-17s took off from the runways of Midway's Eastern Island around 1230pm on June 3rd.  After a flight of about three hours, they found the transports of the Imperial Japanese Navy's Midway Occupation Force, tasked to effect the actual invasion of the atoll, approximately 500 miles to the west.  The B-17s claimed multiple hits on the lumbering transports, though managed none whatsoever, despite a total absence of CAP and effective antiaircraft fire.

Meanwhile, a thousand miles or more to the northeast of Midway, two light carriers of the IJN (the Ryujo and the Junyo)  launched an attack on Dutch Harbor, Alaska.  12 Zero fighters, 10 Val dive bombers and 10 Kate torpedo bombers (operating in horizontal bombing mode) lifted off from the tiny flight decks in miserable weather.  This attack caused minor damage to oil storage tanks and the local radio station, while some bombs hit the barracks of Ft Mears, killing 25 soldiers.

The attack on the Aleutian Islands has often been called a diversionary assault, intended to draw out the American fleet from Pearl Harbor.  It turns out that that is not the case.  Both the attack on Midway and the attack on the Aleutians were supposed to begin on June 3rd, but the carrier fleet tasked for the Midway part of the attack were delayed by a day by refueling problems.

Late in the night of June 3rd, four PBY flying boats of Patrol Squadron 44 took off from the seaplane base at Midway, headed for the Occupation Force.  Early the next morning, one of them put a torpedo into the bows of the fleet oiler Akebono Maru.  Damage was relatively light, and the ship continued underway with little delay.  This was the only successful torpedo attack by the Americans for the entire battle.

The opening volleys of the most decisive naval victory in history had been fired; the next day would belong to the carriers.

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Uh-Huh. Exactly.

So.  Hi.

How are you?

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Wolverine!

War.  War never changes.  In 1942, war was raging and the US Navy had a problem.  It was obvious that the aircraft carrier was going to be the deciding factor in the Pacific, and a major player in the battle for the Atlantic.  A gazillion carriers were going to be coming out of the shipyards, and they would need squadrons upon squadrons of planes and pilots to fill their hangars.  While there wouldn't be a problem building the planes, the pilots would be another thing altogether.  There would be hordes of men wearing the wings, certainly, and they would have plenty of training in how to fly their planes, but naval aviation is a different type of beast... because of the aircraft carrier.

When the Army Air Forces taught a man how to fly, they were able to assure their pilots that, at the end of a mission, they would have a nice long runway (or a well-manicured meadow) to come home to.  On the other hand, most Navy pilots would be in training for carrier aviation.  This meant they'd have to put their plane down on a small (at least in comparison to AAF runways) flight deck somewhere in the middle of an ocean... that was moving.  That's a problem, because you can't simulate that on land.  To be sure, you can paint a flight deck on a runway to give an idea of the size.  You can put a Landing Signal Officer at the end on the runway to teach a pilot how to follow his instructions.  You can even put arresting wires across the runway to give the rookie pilot a taste of the stresses involved with landing on a carrier.  But you can't duplicate the rolling and pitching, the winds, the turbulence off the island, and the sense of scale involved (even a big carrier is very, very small in comparison to the ocean).

Prior to the start of WWII, the US Navy trained their neophyte pilots on carrier landings by landing them... on carriers.  That sounds obvious and it surely is, but what do you do when it's going to take all of your current CVs just to hold the line... and they're only barely accomplishing that?  Throw in the threat of submarines, and even if you had a spare carrier lying around you couldn't operate it in a manner that would make training a rookie pilot easier.  Then there's this little problem with rookie pilots (and trained pilots, for that matter), in that they crash.  Over and above the tragedy involved, a violent crash could cripple a carrier at a time when every flight deck mattered.  But sending a squadron of pilots out to war with practically no experience on landing on a carrier deck is a recipe for disaster. 

In March of 1942, the US Navy came up with an answer.


more...

Posted by: Wonderduck at 11:03 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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Name That Ship!

As most of my regular readers know, I have a deep interest in WWII, with an emphasis on the Pacific Theater, and have had for many, many years.  For much of that time I've been drawn to the more obscure bits of hardware used by the various armed forces.  Everybody knows about the Mustang, the Spitfire or the Flying Fortress, and for good reason.  Even the Buffalo is well-known, if for all the wrong reasons.  But who champions the little guys, the Vindicators of the world?  Or, really, who cares about the nigh-on forgotten things?  I do, for I am as fascinated by the "backstage" people as much as the main characters, if not moreso.  Heck, a couple of days ago I discovered that there was a floatplane version of the F4F built and tested (charmingly called the "Wildcatfish") and was tickled pink. 

So you can only imagine my joy when I first learned about this ship:

Except I'm not going to tell you anything about it.  Yet.  Instead, I want to see if any of my readers know the name of this surprisingly influential vessel, or if not the name, what you can tell me about her.  Leave your guesses in the comments, and no cheating!

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What In The World?

I just don't... huh?

Gaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh...

Posted by: Wonderduck at 03:02 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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*Headtable*

-Sora no Woto, ep01

I'm going to have to admit to being not exactly motivated to blog these days.  It just... sort of feels like work at the moment.  I've had these feelings in the past, and they usually pass quickly, generally when I stumble over something interesting or I'm distracted by something shiny.  For all I know, I'll be back tomorrow... or next Monday, to prepare for the GP of Turkey.

But when Formula 1 is getting to be a chore, and it is, that's when I know I need to take a break, no matter how long it's for. 

So sit tight, maybe leave me a comment saying that you can't stand to see me go (*snort*) or wanting a question answered ("Was the Wildcat used throughout WWII?" for example), and I'll come back sooner or later.

Posted by: Wonderduck at 07:55 PM | Comments (9) | Add Comment
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I Am Amuse

Nothing important or even pressing to discuss, so here's a picture of Picard with a bucket on his head.

That is all.

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Wetdock

According to the Halifax Chronicle Herald, a floating drydock... well, stopped floating this past Saturday.  The Scotia Dock II went down in about 50 feet of water as it maneuvered into position to hoist a tugboat inside for repairs. 

Geoff Britt, spokesman for the company that owns the Scotia Dock II,  refused to say that it sank, instead suggesting that it "dropped below normal operating levels."  Underwater for pretty much any ship that isn't a submarine should be considered "below normal operating levels," yes.

Once they figure out how to raise the wetdock, they'll be able to figure out just exactly why it went down.  I suspect that once they can get down to the bilges, they'll find this:

Oops.

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Pacific War Pics

I had to work late tonight, but when I got home there was a present of sorts in my e-mail box.  The latest edition of the Battle Of Midway Roundtable had come out, and contained therein was a link to a Denver Post blog.  "So what," I hear you asking.  Well, that particular blogpost has 110 pictures from the Pacific War, starting at Pearl Harbor and finishing at Tokyo Bay.  And they aren't all the usual pics, either.  For example, I give you this:

That's the wreckage of a Japanese B5N ("Kate") being fished out of Pearl Harbor shortly after Dec 7th.  Or this:

That's flak over Yontan Airfield, Okinawa, sometime in March of 1945.  Lots more where these came from, so go take a look.  It's unsafe for dial-up users, though, as all 110 pics are inline to the post, not thumbnailed or linked.

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April 29th, 1983: The Greatest Press Conference Ever

On April 29th, 1983, the Chicago Cubs lost to the Los Angeles Dodgers.  Afterwards, during post-game press conference Manager Lee Elia, frustrated by the fans booing the team's 5-13 record, unleashed what became the greatest tirade in baseball history.

Best line:  Eighty-five percent of the bleepin' world is working. The other fifteen come out here.

Amazingly, he wasn't immediately fired... that happened in August.  But he went down in history nevertheless.

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Zoom Player Help?

Chiyo-chan's fully recovered from her bout with the sniffles, but I need some help.  Zoom Player is my primary media program, I'm quite fond of it, but after reinstalling it everything starts up at 640 x (whatever) resolution.

How in the world do I make Zoom Player start playing a video at its native resolution???  I know there's a way to do it, I just can't find the right combination of thingies to make it happen and it's driving me crazy!

Okay, crazier.

Posted by: Wonderduck at 10:16 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
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Viruses Suck

So I came home from work, booted up my computer, and went into the bathroom.  When I came back, my antivirus programs were screaming bloody murder.  Oh, merde.  Immediately, I tried to start Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware program... and got an error message.  Trend Micro?  Error message.  Anything?  Error message.  Rollback?  Error message.  Crepe.

Then other, random, error messages began to pop up.  As in, my video card no longer had drivers, for example.  Time to break out the reinstall disc and the Flash Drive Of Doom!

Four hours later, Chiyo-chan is fresh and new again. 

Viruses suck.

UPDATE:  Yes, I know what caused it, and yes, I'm an idiot.

Posted by: Wonderduck at 09:05 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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Hercule

Where Rumpole was basically my cat, his counterpart Hercule was Ph.Duck's kitty.  Together, the two of them were a more furry version of Laurel and Hardy.  Where Rumpole was a big, dumb, lovable galoot, Hercule was the epitome of what one thinks of when you think of a cat... aloof, independent, reserved, dignified, dexterous yet capable of extreme moments of silliness.  All of it in a small fur-covered frame.  I always called Hercule a medium-hair; his fur was too long to be a shorthair, but too short to be a longhair.  Still, it always seemed like he was mostly fur... the biggest he ever got was 12 pounds, where Rumpole nearly reached twice that size (muscle for the most part). 

When Rumpole died two years ago, Hercule lost a bit of his zip... which was understandable, as they'd been together for 15 years or so, ever since Hercule was one.  Shortly after Momzerduck passed away last September Hercule, then nearly 18 years old, got very ill.  His kidneys weren't working well, and amongst other things, Ph.Duck had to "top off his tank" every day with an IV bag so Hercule would be hydrated.  He was down to 6 pounds, moving kinda slow as you'd expect an 18-year-old cat to do, but still (mostly) happy.  Just a couple of weeks ago he was (slowly) chasing after a laser pointer and nomming catnip.

Earlier this week, Hercule jumped off Ph.Duck's bed and... well, we're not sure exactly.  What we do know is that for a couple of days, his right front paw was, for all intents and purposes, dead.  Maybe he sprained it, maybe he threw a small blood clot, maybe it was a pinched nerve.  It came back, though, and we sighed a sigh of relief.  This afternoon, as Ph.Duck and I were watching the GP of China, Hercule started yowling.  When Ph.Duck went to check on him, he found Hercule on the screened-in porch, dragging himself using his front legs.  His hind legs and tail were no longer working... much like the front paw earlier. 

We bundled him up and took him to Dr Kathleen, the vet that's cared for all of the family's pets for 30 years or so.  The Doc performed a quick but in-depth examination, and made it clear that it might clear up... or it (more likely) might not.  Either way, it was agonizingly clear that Hercule was no longer the happy cat he had been and was no longer enjoying his time here.  And so we put him to sleep, and hopefully he's bossing Rumpole around for the amusement of Momzerduck.

It's been a bad two years.

Posted by: Wonderduck at 09:23 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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42?

Today is the Day of Independence for the Conch Republic.  Soyuz 1's ill-fated flight was launched today in 1967.  The Chinese People's Liberation Army Navy was established on this date in 1949.  In 1989, Baywatch premiered on April 23rd.  NHL Hall of Fame member Tony Esposito was born in 1943, and Howard Cosell died on this date in 1995.

And in 1968, in a hospital somewhere near Wrigley Field in Chicago, a Wonderduck was hatched upon an unsuspecting world.  Nothing would ever be the same again.

I'm amazed that I'm 42.

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USS Wasp: The Worst US Carrier In The Pacific

When you think of aircraft carriers from WWII, which do you think of?  The stately Lexington class?  Maybe you flash to the carriers that held the line in the Pacific, the Yorktowns?  Perhaps you think of the Essex class, some of whom stayed in service into the '70s and one of which lasted until 1991?  Or maybe your thoughts tend towards the Japanese Kaga and Akagi?  One can't forget the first aircraft carrier lost to air attack, the British Hermes, and their Illustrious class is an interesting type of ship indeed.

In fact, most people would think of many, many ships before their thoughts headed to the seventh carrier commissioned into the US Navy, the Wasp. 

And to be brutally honest about it, there's good reason for this lack of recognition.  To say that her career was lackluster would be on the charitable side of accurate.

The USS Wasp was designed and laid down while the US Navy was still under the constraints of the Washington Naval Treaty, which placed limits on the maximum tonnage of new naval builds.  The maximum allowable tonnage for the US's aircraft carriers was 135000, with no single carrier able to exceed 27000 tons at full load (an exception was made for two ships converted per nation; for the US, these were the USS Lexington and Saratoga.  Their weights were still counted against the total, however).  As the two Lexingtons ate half the limits on their own, and the Yorktown and Enterprise, both in the process of being built, were showing signs of being overweight, the Wasp's designers were under incredible pressure to cut weight whenever possible.  It quickly became obvious that she was shaping up to have many of the same traits as the USS Ranger (CV-4) which, like the Wasp, was constructed to get the most use out of the treaty limits.  In short, she was going to have to be small.

There is nothing inherently wrong about the concept of a small carrier; the later Independence-class CVL proves that quite well.  The problem arises when the carrier being designed is a full-fledged fleet carrier, but it has to be shoehorned into a size completely unsuitable for the task, which is what happened to the Wasp.  The Yorktowns came in at about 26000 tons at full-load; the Wasp wound up being nearly 7000 tons lighter, but was still expected to carry almost the same size air group (76 planes for the Wasp, 90 for the Yorktowns). 

To do all this on a smaller hull, compromises had to be made.  She wound up about 85 feet shorter (741 feet vs 824 than the Yorktowns) in overall length.  Of course, this made both the flight deck and hangar smaller as a result.  This made life cramped for the air group, even though it was reduced to begin with. 

In an attempt to alleviate some of the congestion caused by the reduced topside real estate and to counterbalance the weight of the full-size island starboard, the flight deck and hull was bulged to port.  While this improved traffic flow on the flight deck, it did have some consequences.  This bulge gave the Wasp the same beam as the larger Yorktown class.  However, in a weight-saving measure, her machinery spaces were smaller, producing 75000 shaft horsepower (shp).  Comparing this number to the Yorktowns' 120000shp and the substantially smaller Independence class' 100000shp is educational to say the least.  As a result of this unfortunate combination of decreased power and wide hull, the Wasp could only make 29.5 knots at full steam, considered too slow for operations with the main fleet.  Another problem with this speed, combined with the truncated flight deck, is that there was very little room for error for a fully-loaded torpedo plane (at the time, the hideously underpowered TBD Devastator) during takeoff.  This was recognized early in the design process, however, and as a result the Wasp was not built with the specialized facilities required for torpedo planes.  Of course, this was considered acceptable in the name of weight savings.

In another attempt to save weight, she was constructed with only two elevators, fore and aft.  The midships elevator was replaced by an innovative design that after the war became commonplace: a deck-edge elevator.

Unlike those on modern carriers, though, this one was a skeletal framework that had a socket for the tailwheel to sit in, positions for the main gear, and moved the plane in a semicircle up to the flight deck.  This was the first ever deck-edge elevator, and is probably the one shining part of the Wasp's overall design.  Still, all the weight saving was successful in that she slotted nicely into the Washington Treaty tonnage limits.

Like the similarly undersized Ranger, it was thought that the Wasp was unsuitable for operations in the Pacific.  At the onset of war, she served primarily as an airplane ferry, taking two loads of Spitfires to Malta for the British.  A month after the second of these runs, the Battle of Midway left the US Navy with only three operational carriers in the Pacific, with one of them (the Saratoga) still suffering the scars from a submarine-launched torpedo.  It was decided that the Wasp would be transferred as it was marginally more capable than the Ranger.  Carrying TBF Avengers (a torpedo plane, which she wasn't truly able to handle), Dauntlesses and Wildcats, she was part of the covering force at Guadalcanal that was withdrawn by Admiral Ghormley, which put the entire operation at risk.  The next month or so was spent patrolling and providing cover for convoys heading to 'Canal, until she was sent south, missing out on the Battle of the Eastern Solomons.  That battle cost the Navy the use of the Enterprise as she was badly mauled.  Shortly thereafter, the Saratoga proved to be a torpedo magnet of the first rank.  As she was sent to the West Coast for repairs, that left only the USS Hornet and the Wasp covering the entire Pacific.

In mid-September, however, she was engaged in flight operations when the Japanese submarine I-19 performed the greatest feat of marksmanship by a submarine ever.  The I-19 fired a full spread of six torpedoes at the Wasp, three of which hit.  Two others passed ahead of the carrier, one of which struck the destroyer O'Brien as she maneuvered to avoid the other.  The O'Brien sank shortly thereafter.  The sixth torpedo apparently passed underneath the stern of the Wasp, narrowly missed the USS Landsdowne, then proceeded on for another seven minutes before striking the USS North Carolina, a wound that required a month in Pearl Harbor to fix.

One of the worst decisions the Wasp's designers had made in their quest to save weight was the deletion of just about any armor plating.  While this would have been normal for most Japanese carriers and was considered the price of speed for them, the lack of armor for the Wasp extended to her having absolutely no torpedo protection whatsoever.  Further, her two engine rooms were grouped close together instead of being separated (to be fair, this was a failing common to US carriers at the time).  Another strike against her was that, when the torpedoes struck, she was engaged in flight operations.  Her avgas system was in full use, in other words, with predictable results when she was hit.

45 minutes after the torpedoes hit, the fires onboard had consumed most of the forward part of the hangar deck and were raging out of control.  Abandon ship was called, and the Landsdowne was detailed to scuttle her.  At approximately 9pm on September 15th, 1942, she finally sank in a pool of blazing gasoline.

A victim of terrible design choices, she never really got a chance to prove herself in battle (the Guadalcanal landings notwithstanding) and has thus faded into obscurity.  A shame, as she could have been an outstanding "medium carrier" if designed just a couple of years later, when such things were recognized as being feasible.  That's all hindsight, however.  In use as she was actually designed, she was unfortunately the worst US aircraft carrier in the Pacific... and the unluckiest.  To be fair, no carrier on the planet at that time would have survived taking three torpedoes at once.

Posted by: Wonderduck at 09:24 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
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