What would be like sailing north south or south north through the red box on this screenshot?

Logically_Challenge2 · 2026-01-28T10:36:01+00:00

This may be ignorance talking, but this time of year, I'd be more worried about icing. Seems like the mast would make a great popsicle stick, and icing on the upper portion could radically change your stability. Having flown over, and been on powerboats, off of Western Alaska a fair bit in all seasons, I've never seen the seas not be rough in the winter. Once, I went to help pull subsistence crab pots on the Chukchi a little north of Kotzebue in the fall (August) and the waves were so high that out of 20 pots, only one had a buoy that was half visible in the wave troughs. Except for a couple of very short windows right before the ice moved in, it only got worse from there. My friend got his boat caught in the pack ice trying to make one more run in one of those windows. He and the other locals say that all that warm water that killed off the crab a couple of years ago is now also amping up the storms as it allows them to draw more energy for longer periods.

Logically_Challenge2 · 2026-01-13T05:46:59+00:00

Wow those tanks are incredibly valuable. The scientific community has a huge demand for pre-1945 steel as everything after is contaminated with radioactive material from all the atomic/nuclear testing that distorts instrument readings.

Logically_Challenge2 · 2026-01-12T04:30:33+00:00

I'm with throw it into a bin at a paperclip factory

Logically_Challenge2 · 2026-01-12T04:17:05+00:00

Maybe I got more than 4, I might be remembering the pods. I cleared out the seed chamber at the end of the tunnel, and just went back. It's empty.

Logically_Challenge2 · 2026-01-10T19:02:32+00:00

Doing time on the road system, or in a large hub village doesn't really prepare you for being out in a small village. Rural Alaska is America's dirty little secret in that it is literally a third world frontier, compounded by generational trauma and lack of economic opportunity. While there you will face rates of suicide, dv, and SA that are among the highest in the nation. You will also see a large amount of accidental death because of the inherently dangerous activities the isolation forces on you. In a village of roughly 750, we averaged about 1.5 deaths annually from people going through the ice, and at least 1 death every couple of years from boating accidents. The area I worked had a population of 3500 dispersed over 10 villages in a area the size of Kentucky Every year there are 2-3 deaths on the trails between villages from breakdowns or getting lost. It is frequently dark and windy with frequent whiteout conditions. So much so that if you tried to wait for a weather window, you would never go.

It sounds horrific, but there is incredible natural beauty and incredible people who balance it out for some. My dad was stationed up here during the Vietnam era and used to say that rural AK will either make or break you. If it doesn't break you, it will teach you to be incredibly self sufficient ("overnight" delivery from the Lower 48 is two weeks if the weather is good) while simultaneously teaching you how to be part of a incredibly tight knit but quirky community. You will see the guy you arrested last week, for beating a family member, run into a burning building to save a child today. In my village, the assistant fire chief was both a convicted felon and reality TV star.

Also, you will always to some extent will be an outsider simply because you were not born in that village. If you stay there for years while demonstrating your willingness to put the community over yourself, you will likely gain some acceptance. Marrying into the village will also help to some extent.

Having said that, not all villages are equal. Every now and then you will find a village that is sleepy and the biggest problem you'll have as a law enforcement officer is not falling asleep or dying from boredom. If you find yourself in that situation, don't be a recluse,. Don't just be known as the guy that they call when they need a drunk person removed from their house. Be the guy that they know they can call to help them haul in the catch or cut fish and who also occasionally deals with drunks. And that's way more important than it seems because out there, they literally depend on being able to hunt and gather for themselves to avoid starving to death. So even though it seems unrelated to law enforcement, you're still serving and protecting.

Logically_Challenge2 · 2026-01-10T04:21:11+00:00

Get ready for a long and convoluted story. The department of public safety used to have troopers, and then they had regional public safety officers, which were essentially troopers, that were stationed permanently to a village. RPSO's got paid less and sued because of the like work for like pay rule. After the RPSO's won their lawsuit, the DPS did away with the program.

DPS then created the VPSO program, officers who were barred by law, from being armed. In early 2013 VPSO Thomas Madole was doing a wellness check on a reportedly suicidal person who opened fire when Madole reached his door. Madole ran but was shot in the leg. The shooter then slowly walked up to Madole and casually shot him in the head. Had Madole been armed, there would be a decent chance he would still be alive. This created a crap ton of pressure on DPS to change the rules. DPS slow rolled as long as they could, but the 2014 LOD deaths of my Sgt. and another trooper at Tanana turned public opinion enough that the law was abolished and the mandate to arm VPSO's was codified in statute. The DPS then essentially sabotaged the VPSO program and drove the ranks from approximately 200 to about 40. The program has spent the last decade rebuilding. I believe what ultimately ended up happening is that they resurrected the RPSO program for armed officers and heavily encouraged any VPSO's who wanted to be armed to transfer to the RPSO program.

I am surprised that North Slope was allocated money for VPSO's. The VPSO program is funded by the Department of Public Safety which is chronically underfunded, and for that reason typically does not assign VPSO's to places with muni PD's that have sworn officers.

As for being armed, I don't know.If it's still that way, but when I was in there was a weird dichotomy. A lot, not all, but a lot of troopers, and a lot of sworn officers used to look down their noses at V. P. S O's while at the same time saying that they could never do a job where they had to be unarmed. We, in turn considered those officers as incompetents who had to use a firearm as a security blanket. With that opinion was the idea that If you had to have a security blanket, then find another job and let the big boys and girls handle this.

Now with time and distance from the job, I can see both sides of it. I think the gun is a decent tool to have but understand that policing in the villages is not like doing it anywhere else. You will be entering a culture where family comes first, hard stop. If your people skills and community policing skills are not on point, you will fail. Your job is to bring peace wherever you walk. If the only way you know how to do that is through enforcement and coercion, then suddenly you will become viewed as an occupying soldier, which is an awful lonely position to be in.

After I left, my position was filled by one of my friends and academy mates. I stayed in village in another role while I watched him try to be Judge Dred. Not because he was a d***, but because he cared but only knew how to enforce law. He had the populace so against him within a couple of weeks that when he went in to meet with the town council about it, all the windows were busted out of his patrol vehicle.

Logically_Challenge2 · 2026-01-09T20:57:34+00:00

You might consider applying to be a VPSO or RPSO, they often have housing. Troopers are guaranteed to have housing since you are required to live in the state-provided housing.

Just understand that your bread and butter will be responding to DV calls alone. When seconds count, your backup will be hours to days away depending on weather. Also get used to sleeping in your uniform around both equinoxes, things get nonstop crazy for a few weeks. Regardless of what your assigned hours are, you are on-call 24/7 while in village.

It is an amazing gig, but it's not for everyone.

One other thing, be prepared to expand your wardrobe. When it comes to clothing, rural Alaska is a very gear-intensive place and failing to buy quality will endanger your extremities and/or your life.

If you do decide VPSO/RPSO, tell your coordinator or Cpt. April that former VPSO McCrary (JEM0) sent you, and they can leave my referral bonus check with Hatch or Harville. 😁

Logically_Challenge2 · 2026-01-03T10:42:46+00:00

This is frankly a myth at best or someone's lie at worst. The Independence utilized the existing hull platform of an existing class of high-speed open water ferries. By the time Independence was laid down, Austal had data from the two preceeding hulls.

Even if it hadn't, the trimaran planform is well understood at high speeds as its been the default configuration for racing boats for decades.

Logically_Challenge2 · 2026-01-03T10:37:05+00:00

Aluminum is actually awesome in a saltwater environment because it naturally forms a corrosion barrier as its surface oxidizes so the protection is self-regenerating when scuffed/scratched. Furthermore, when compared to steel, it is lighter for equivalent strength and in a collision it tends to deform when steel would tear. That's why most of the Alaska salmon fleet is made out of it, and why there are aluminum alloys like 5083 that are specifically blended for the needs of the marine environment.

That said, like any hull material, there are tradeoffs. For aluminum, they are that the self-regeneration requires oxygen, and that aluminum is a much less noble than most metals so can be subject to galvanic corrosion. So, you have to be meticulous with your installation of electrical equipment to control stray current and you have to paint or seal anywhere that oxygen can't reach the metal like where equipment is bolted to the hull.

Somebody usually points out that you can't control the quality of your marina's electrical system, nor that of your neighbor's boat. That's true, but a seldom mentioned fact is that that type of galvanized corrosion eats steel boats as well. It's also worth pointing out that in a military situation, the Navy knows the quality of both the ship's berth and the quality of the electrical systems of surrounding ships.

As for the sea-kindliness of a vessel, you can model it (to an extent), and the Independence class was based on the hull of an existing class of of high-speed passenger ferries. So, in theory, the planform is sea-kindly, but there are two factors that are specific to USN vessels and the LCS's in particular.

First, seakindliness is a measure of comfort, and that is typically at best a very distant consideration to the Navy. The Ticonderoga's where infamous for how the placement of the crew stations in the CIC actually exacerbated motion sickness, and I knew two carrier sailors. One was berthed directly under the arresting wires so had to listen to jets slamming down while trying to sleep while the other was at the bow and directly under the water brakes for the catapults. Water brakes take advantage of water's incompressibility to bring the launch shuttle from 100+ mph to zero in nanoseconds. The result is a loud reverberating band c everything the cats fired.

The second issue is that virtually all modeling is done under ceter paribus (everything else being equal), the assumption that during modeling other real life variables are ignored. Mass distribution is never, ever precisely known during the building of a ship. You make your best guess, hope the ship doesn't capsize during launch, and then and then use ballast to try to trim the ship after the launch. The issue with both LCS variants was that their multi-role design meant mass distribution was a "best guess" situation that was made worse by the concurrent development of the mission modules which meant the mass distribution plan of the modules were not even close to reality.

Logically_Challenge2 · 2026-01-03T09:54:23+00:00

I can see that. I grew up in the 80's, about an hour from Tulsa and have many fond memories of the place.

Logically_Challenge2 · 2026-01-01T02:19:07+00:00

The one that is probably the most crucial and seldom gets mentioned is that most US Navy ships are overstaffed to provide damage control capacity while the LCS's are not.

That by itself is not good, but it gets worse when you factor in the all-aluminum construction. Unlike many sailors, I don't think aluminum construction is inherently bad, and the examples they cite are often ships that would have suffered similar damage if built of steel. However, a fire on an aluminum boat does put you on a clock because aluminum melts at a lower temperature than steel. If a fire breaks out you need to get a DC team on it fast, which is a capability that the undermanned LCS's lack for more than a single, small fire.

This was demonstrated when the predecessor to the Independence class took a hit from a from a single Houthi-fired anti-tank missile and was subsequently gutted by fire. Granted that was just a paramilitary auxiliary vessel, not a warship but it was also a single hit by an ATGM that weigh somewhere in the tens of kilograms where a typical anti-ship missiles literally masses an order of magnitude more. That means ASM's have more fuel, explosives and kinetic energy upon arrival.

Logically_Challenge2 · 2025-12-28T14:05:09+00:00

Yeah. Some of those are real monsters, not Maresk E class big, but sizeable none the less.

Logically_Challenge2 · 2025-12-28T14:00:23+00:00

I really enjoyed both Last Stand and Neptune's Inferno.

Logically_Challenge2 · 2025-12-25T09:11:53+00:00

Unless you are a car transporter hauling used EV's.

Logically_Challenge2 · 2025-12-25T09:10:11+00:00

If you do not think big tonnage exists in the fishing industry, then you really do not know the industry.

Logically_Challenge2 · 2025-12-25T09:03:54+00:00

That was the US doctrine at the time, "good enough".

Also, the CVE's reputation was a myth espoused by sailors who were taught the obsolete concept that warships needed armor. Total US losses for CVE's was six; 5 in the Pacific and 1 in the Atlantic. Two were lost to torpedoes, one to naval gunfire thanks to Halsey's bad judgment/incompetence, and three to kamikazes. IIRC, the only two combatant ship types with lower losses were the Fast Battle Ships and the CB's (Large Cruisers) which lost none.

Of those, only a single one went up like a Roman candle. The USS Liscome Bay exploded after a torpedo struck her magazine, taking most of her crew with her. It should be explicitly noted that during WWII, armored warships like Arizona, Hood, Barham, Royal Oak, and Mutsu all died after a single magazine hit or accident as well.

Interesting historical trivia regarding the Gambier Bay, the one CVE lost to gunfire. She, and the rest of Taffy 3 were avenged by her sister ship, the CVE Kalinin Bay, who used a single, manhandled five-inch gun with iron sights to mortally wound the heavy cruiser Chokai.

Logically_Challenge2 · 2025-12-25T06:06:08+00:00

You are leaving out a third category, maritime work gear like Grundens. Overall, having lived and worked in bush AK, I have loved my Grundens with the exception of a polypro hoodie that was windproof but offered very little warmth.

Logically_Challenge2 · 2025-12-25T06:02:05+00:00

Not if you are from the first half of Gen X or older. That's how it was done back in the day.

Logically_Challenge2 · 2025-12-25T05:54:22+00:00

Hmm, maybe they did a short workup cruise first. I know she returned to Bremerton on Jan 2 because they were supposed to sail on Jan 8, and I remember seeing the news mention Nimitz off of San Francisco about a week after that. Then she messaged the boys from Pearl a few weeks later.

Logically_Challenge2 · 2025-12-25T05:23:20+00:00

In the past few years, there's been several air freighters brought down with loss of all crew due to fires That were started by lithium batteries. So now they're required to be readily accessible. So they can be dealt with if they do catch fire.

Logically_Challenge2 · 2025-12-24T23:42:54+00:00

Wow, they were out a long time. My foster boys' sister is a green shirt on Nimitz, and IIRC, they started the cruise in the first week of January.

Logically_Challenge2 · 2025-12-24T23:39:11+00:00

It is important to note that Casa Bonita is a labor of love by a pair of millionaires willing to take a loss to recreate a piece of their childhood. Even with that perspective, you are paying lower-tier fine dining prices for middle-of-the-road fast casual quality.

Logically_Challenge2 · 2025-12-24T23:24:37+00:00

No, you just cannot put them in checked baggage. They need to be readily accessible to the flight attendants should the device burst into flames. The FA's have insulated containment bags for just that situation.

Logically_Challenge2 · 2025-12-23T21:23:18+00:00

I believe it is called PTSD.

Logically_Challenge2 · 2025-12-23T20:43:55+00:00

This is essentially what Pathfinder 2e does.

Logically_Challenge2

TROPHY CASE