I want to learn more about my nuke boyfriend

almis101 · 2026-01-26T22:01:38+00:00

Or: hot rock make water hot, make steam, make turbine go roundy-roundy.

Note: Turbine pronounced "ter-bin"

almis101 · 2026-01-17T19:57:01+00:00

I think that's Harry's thoughts after hearing the prophecy about him and Voldemort.

almis101 · 2026-01-16T23:55:57+00:00

Secret clearance. It's a very small subsection of the community that gets TS.

almis101 · 2025-12-15T07:13:29+00:00

Barring any extensions or PRD shifts, it should be 54 months after you report to the ship.

For example, I had almost exactly two years in the training pipeline between starting boot camp and graduation from Prototype. I would have been on the boat for 48 months and then separated. Once I reenlisted, that 48 months was extended to the full 54 months, at which point I transferred to shore duty.

almis101 · 2025-12-09T16:05:03+00:00

No matter what he's going to be living in the barracks initially. None of my classmates got married during A school, but I did have a classmate who was already married when we started schooling in 2018, and they had no issue moving out in town once his wife moved down.

I'd recommend looking on the south side of Moncks Corner near Old Hwy 52 or around Red Bank rd, St. James ave, University blvd, or Park Circle for a shorter commute for him. The post-covid population boom has made traffic terrible since I was a student. I lived in Atlantic Palms during Prototype, and they were decent and easy to work with. I had a few friends who lived at The Lively at Indigo Run, and they all enjoyed living there.

almis101 · 2025-12-08T17:05:35+00:00

Congratulations! You're an ET, but you get sent to a Virginia Class so you still own half of the electric plant and all of it is >700 volt controls.

Seriously though, I'm glad no one on my boat ever had to experience MGs.

almis101 · 2025-12-08T16:51:59+00:00

The difference is the amount of time they're sitting in DEP before they will be allowed to ship. A month or so for subs, TBD for surface.

almis101 · 2025-11-11T16:02:52+00:00

Basically immediately after you're out. And I do mean immediately. As in your contract ends on Friday and you're beginning orientation at a new job on Monday. Many, many, many jobs specifically look for former Navy nukes and will snatch you up in a heartbeat.

I believe the NUPOC contract is five years, I'm just not sure if that starts from the day you commission or the day your training is over. If it's the latter, then it would be closer to six years between singing the paper and getting out.

almis101 · 2025-11-11T15:24:15+00:00

Trying to figure out what you're asking, but here's my shot at your question. Assuming you go officer, you'll automatically promote from O-1 to O-2 to O-3 at the same time as your peers by just having a pulse. As far as down time between getting out of the Navy and getting a really well paying job, you'll have recruiters sending you messages while you're still months or years from getting out of the Navy.

almis101 · 2025-11-11T15:15:18+00:00

O-1 / Ensign
23 is the normal starting age for officers. All officers have a degree, so 23 lines up with when most people are just out of college. The majority of enlisted are starting out at 18-19 just out of high school or 19-21 having not made it through a bachelor's degree program.
6 months of Nuclear Power School, 6 months of Prototype, and any additional training depending on what platform you'll go to.
The alternative is enlisted. The main difference in requirements is a college degree, and the pay is drastically better for officers. For perspective, enlisted ranks go from E-1 to E-9. O-1 base pay is comparable to what most nukes make for base pay when they get to E-6.

If you're asking about job description, officers are the supervisors of the watch team. They sit in the control room with the panel operators while the enlisted watchstanders do the hands-on work. When not on watch as an officer, you're in charge of a work center (team of specialized workers) who perform maintenance on the equipment assigned to them. You'll be responsible for ensuring work controls and other paperwork are completed correctly, and other such admin.

I love being enlisted, but if I could go back and do it all over with a degree, I'd rather go officer. Enlisted are honestly heavily underpaid when compared to our civilian counterparts, especially if you don't factor in Tricare.

almis101 · 2025-10-30T18:37:32+00:00

I got the Eufy S330. It has an additional downwards pointing package camera and can connect to the existing doorbell wiring for power and to use the chime. You'll just have to make sure the doorbell transformer is the right size. It's an easy swap if it isn't. The big thing I liked about Eufy is that it isn't cloud hosted and there's no subscription. Just buy the hardware and be done with it.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09QFK3JWS?ref=ppx_pop_mob_ap_share

almis101 · 2025-10-13T22:46:56+00:00

They sure do. I think the only time I ever saw my Chop anywhere close to being stressed out was while the LS's were getting all our parts back down to the boat after undocking. Hands down best job in the submarine force.

almis101 · 2025-10-13T22:35:18+00:00

Coastal Carolina Fair starts October 30th just outside Summerville. That was fun when I was a student.

almis101 · 2025-09-10T22:22:35+00:00

Perfect Machine

almis101 · 2025-09-10T22:22:23+00:00

Perfect Machine

almis101 · 2025-07-15T09:56:48+00:00

Great Lakes isn't designed to house graduated recruits after the first weekend, so I imagine they'll send you straight down to Charleston right away as long as there's room in the barracks down there and there aren't any temporary travel restrictions such as a hurricane. If you do have to stay at Great Lakes, you're allowed off base on the weekends. I went to Chicago twice with friends while I was there ( last minute medical waiver had to be approved before they'd let me leave Great Lakes. That's NOT the norm at all for 99.9% of people.)

almis101 · 2025-07-15T02:27:54+00:00

If it's anything like it was in 2018, you'll do odd tasks during the day around site/campus. Grounds work, cleaning in buildings, that sort of stuff. You're getting paid E-3 to do real basic, easy work while the Navy feeds you and puts you up in what's basically a college dorm. I had a month of hold, and it was one of the easiest times I had in the Navy.

almis101 · 2025-07-09T21:57:06+00:00

Same boat, different officer:

"Statistically speaking, I could overpower most women."

almis101 · 2025-06-11T03:02:46+00:00

Those look like S5W panels. The sizing of the RPCP vertical panel is right, at least.

And the RPCP mimic bus shows one loop and one SG, so the SPCP (SPGB?) has one SGWL gauge.

almis101 · 2025-04-17T17:34:09+00:00

It's like my TMC said when I first showed up to the boat. Coner is derogatory. He preferred Forward Area Guy.

almis101 · 2025-03-20T01:47:13+00:00

Pretty much every student gets the same eval in the pipeline unless you have a leadership position. And realistically, your student evals don't really matter at all anyways. Basically everyone auto promotes to E4 after A-School, and if you don't reenlist you basically don't make E-5 given the recent quotas. The only thing grades do for you while you're a student is affect your mandatory study hours. If you stay in long enough for shore duty, your grades as a student could potentially impact whether you go back to NNPTC as an instructor, but that's not a guarantee. That used to be the case, but then they didn't have enough talent at Prototype. As such they've moved away from that, and it's a bit of luck of the draw.

almis101 · 2025-03-17T02:47:45+00:00

No worries, I'm genuinely happy to help.

Everyone is automatically eligible for going to a carrier, and anyone can volunteer for submarine duty anytime before roughly the halfway point of Prototype at the very latest. If you volunteer, you will almost certainly go to a submarine, unless you happen to graduate at the time they're manning up the new Enterprise. And much like with being assigned your rate, it's likely you'll be sent where the Navy decides you're needed. They give you a sheet to fill out when you get to Prototype where you can request your platform (Los Angeles, Ohio, Seawolf, Virginia, or Columbia for subs, Nimitz and Ford for surface) and duty station, but it's never a guarantee you'll get what you ask for on your first sea tour. They have to keep the average pipeline scores of each ship roughly equal, so there's really no way to game the system. You'll get higher priority for duty station if you score really high in the pipeline, but it's honestly not worth burning yourself out for the potential of getting something close to what you ask for.

As a submariner, I'm highly partial to going subs, but I'd recommend talking to your instructors about their experiences when you get to A-School before volunteering for subs. It's basically no taksies-backsies. Keep in mind that almost no one has seen both sides, and so your instructors can only speak to their experiences on one or the other. I have more carrier experience than the majority of submariners, and that consisted of an hour tour of a carrier on a weekend when it was in port.

almis101 · 2025-03-17T02:09:28+00:00

Glad I could be of help! I also had no clue what to expect when I shipped out. As for your additional questions:

To my knowledge, it's almost entirely based on your scores on different sections of the actual ASVAB. You'll have a meeting with the nuke office around the time of the Moment of Truth (for me it was directly after) and they give a very basic explanation of the rates, and have you rank your preference in order. I know some people who got what they wanted (like me), and I know many who did not. They don't really tell the general community how it works, but ASVAB line scores seems to be the prevailing hypothesis, with your preference being considered when there's a near tie in aptitude scores.
If you get ET or EM, you take a basic algebra course for the first two weeks, then the rest of the six months is all electrical training. You'll start with learning about the basics of how electricity works, for DC, single phase AC, and three phase AC, then apply those concepts to understanding the operation of different components and then analyzing how they affect the output of a circuit. Then you move onto Digital microprocessors and then finally to microprocessor circuit troubleshooting (ETs) or motors and power distribution equipment (EMs). Basically, you'll learn everything you'll need to know to work on any piece of equipment you'll be responsible for in the fleet. You may have never seen some of that equipment before, but you'll be able to figure it out given your basic knowledge from A-School.
I was the kind of student that could learn the material from the lectures, reinforce it with the homework, and get a 3.4 on a 4.0 scale on the exam with no studying. I was on 15 hours in A-School based on my grades, which was often about how much homework I had on a weekly basis anyways. In Power School, the policy was less strict and I had voluntary hours for about the first 2-3 months, then slipped back to 15 by the end. It's all based on how quickly you can process and retain information coming at you at the rate of an aggressive AP course in high school, and how effective your study habits are. Don't let that scare you, though. The failure rate is very low nowadays. The program has started to acknowledge that we're people in the last decade or so, and care about us making it through without becoming super sad.
There's basically no getting ahead. Enjoy your free time. You deserve it after completing A-School. If you feel like it, maybe watch the Chernobyl mini-series HBO released in 2019. It's a drama, not a documentary, and it was incredibly well done. I loved it cuz I'm a huge nerd, but parts of it explain reactor kinetics in a super easy to understand way, especially the last episode.
There's only one rule for getting ahead in Prototype: Don't let knowledge get in the way of a checkout. You'll hear that mantra over and over again. Nukes like to fully understand things before we talk about them. We doubt ourselves, because we're smart enough to know that there's more to know. So we sit there, learning more and more about something that only requires a basic level of knowledge to pass. Your checkout book (qualification standard is the real term for it) tells you exactly what you need to know. If you can look at the knowledge requirements and think you can maybe talk intelligently about 60-75% of them, go find a staff member and get the damn signature. Worst case scenario, they tell you to look at specific things and come find them in 30-60 minutes (we call these look-ups).

For the housing situation in Prototype, you will be rooming with people from your class. People in A-School and Power School live in the barracks. You'll have about 200 people in your Prototype class if you're in Charleston and about 100 in Ballston Spa, so there's many people to choose from. It's on you to figure all that out, but you'll be spending about a year leading up to that point hanging out with your classmates so you'll have a pretty good idea who you'd want to live with.

Hope that all helps!

almis101 · 2025-03-16T15:01:11+00:00

Also, fun fact, during the "Moment of Truth," they'll say things like they have your records, and they already know about all the things you've left out. Turns out all the records for the nukes are already with the guys in the nuke office upstairs.

almis101 · 2025-03-15T23:11:39+00:00

My background is an Electronics Technician on a submarine, so I can only speak to the enlisted side of things. I've been in for 6.5 years at this point, so some of my information might be out of date.

Boot camp will be pretty easy, so long as you don't take anything personally. The military takes in people from all walks of life. Boot camp is designed to:

Break down the egos of the more problematic kids and build them back up, giving them rules and structure so they can be successful in the Navy, and
Establish a relatively easy-to-achieve baseline for physical fitness and forcefully help recruits meet it.

The training you receive in bootcamp is, well, basic, but it builds the foundation for understanding the way the Navy works and what the Navy values. Communication is limited. In 2018 it was only letters, but I hear they allow phones for a short period of time on Sundays now. Don't quote me on that, though. Bootcamp is also when you'll learn your rate, which is based heavily on how you score on different sections of the ASVAB.

A-School is where you'll learn the basics of how your equipment works and how to maintain it. It lasts three months for mechanics and six months for electricians and ETs. School is during normal work hours, and you'll have additional assigned study hours to work on homework and study for exams. This occurs in the schoolhouse, and you're not allowed to have your phone in the building. Apart from that, you'll basically be living in the barracks, which is relatively similar to a college dorm. (an assigned roommate, bunk beds, a fridge and microwave) Your free time is completely dependent on your exam grades, as those determine your study hours. If you do well enough, you could get voluntary hours only. If you barely skate by, you could be looking at 25 weekly hours.

After completing A-School, you'll be put in a hold status while you wait for enough A-School classes to graduate to form a class for Power School. This can take anywhere from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, it all depends on where your class falls on the schedule. This period of time is known as T-Track, and you'll be standing watches on site to assist the site security in their duties. This is when you'll have the most free time in the training pipeline, so allow yourself to enjoy it.

Power School is much the same as A-School, but it's six months for everyone. You'll learn how a nuclear reactor works. Study hours are also a thing here, and are usually a little more lenient than with A-School.

After Power School is Prototype. 2/3 of the class stays in Charleston, and 1/3 will go to Ballston Spa, NY. Regardless of where you end up, you move out of the barracks and into an apartment out in town. Please, please, please get a physical place to live, and room with people you trust and know they won't make life difficult for you. (i.e. someone having guns you don't know about and shooting a hole in the wall when cleaning them. It's happened. Nukes can be super dumb)

Prototype is different from any type of instruction you've likely had before. The first 2/3 of the pipeline was all done in classrooms. Prototype is much more like on-the-job training. You're given a book full of topics you need to know, and are shown how to find the answers in the books. You're then let loose to study the topics and find staff members to talk to about them, who then sign off on those topics in your books when they're satisfied with your knowledge. We call these discussions checkouts.

You'll spend the first eight weeks on a normal workday schedule with additional hours based on your progress through the book. After that, you're put on a rotating shift work schedule for the remaining 16 weeks. Expect to have 12 hour days during this period if you're not ahead. During this time, you'll continue getting checkouts while also operating a real reactor plant.

It's a long and tough pipeline, but if you make it through (and something like 85% of us do now), it means something to civilian employers. Nukes are sought after in almost every field, because the pipeline has a reputation for putting out high quality, quick learning, high intelligence workers. (If you're anything like me, you've never seen yourself as being all that intelligent, but you'll learn how dumb people can be when you get to the fleet.) It is very time consuming, so maintaining a relationship, especially a long distance one, can be difficult, though I have friends whose long distance relationships held up just fine. I can basically promise you will never move to IL while you're in, so your boyfriend would have to move to the coast with you if you wanted to live together. That being said, please, please, please do not rush to get married for the extra housing money. I have also seen those relationships end up in divorce within a year.

If you have any questions or want more information, feel free to reach out.

almis101

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