I got curious, the only carrier left now in the Mothball fleet is the USS Kitty Hawk CV-63. The first of a class of 3. The Kitty, The Connie (Constellation) CV-64 and the America. CV-66. (Note The Enterprise was CVN-65). It looks like the JFK CV-67 was considered a variant of the Kitty Hawk Class, I thought it was in its own class of one.
The Connie was on station with my Ranger CV-61 in San Diego while I was serving. The Kitty was there for a while also, but it seemed like they were usually at sea if we were in and vice versa.
IIRC it sorta straddled the line. It was a larger slightly modernized derivative of the Kitty Hawk class. Much as the KH was a larger and modernized derivative of the Forrestal class.
Which when JFK was laid down it was intended to become the lead ship for the new standard class for non-nuclear CVs.
Then the Enterprise turned out to be a success and the interest in building future non-nuclear CVs crashed. No more JFK class and the JFK itself was retconned back into a super-Kitty.
Then with many lessons expensively learned from Enterprise, they started in on a dedicated nuclear carrier class. Which borrowed at least some aspects of JFK’s design & equippage. But with vastly different interior layout due to the much different and smaller powerplant arrangements and the vastly reduced space no longer needed for bunker fuel. And thus was the Nimitz class born.
Question asked and somewhat answered. He pleaded it was somewhat outside his wheelhouse with his cutoff circa 1950 and asked if any (ex-)USN personnel might provide insight. His main conjecture matched mine, they are a distinct term.
I’m a little unclear on what this means - does it have to do with traffic control? I imagine the last thing you’d want during GQ or battle is a traffic jam. If you need to go aft or down you do it on portside stairs/corridors and if you need to go up or forward you do it on starboard stairs/corridors?
That’s exactly what it is. On a ship the stairs are called “ladders” for a reason: they are really just narrow ladders permanently mounted, with nonskid on the treads. And you walk down them like stairs, at a crazy steep angle. You get used to it.
And going downstairs is super easy: grab the polished rails and lean backwards as you slide down to the deck below.
So you can imagine how things would be chaotic if people were trying to go up and down ladders at the same time, same for narrow passageways.
I don’t see why it would need to be distinct. More likely, there was simply no need to change it in all the damage control handbooks and ship’s drawings (many of which are also for damage control). So they just kept it as it was, a relic of the pre-WWII phonetic alphabet where a phonetic alphabet wasn’t really needed. There is a lot less chance for misunderstanding if “Set Material Condition Zebra” gets a bit garbled over the one MC and comes across almost indistinguishable from “Set Material Condition Zero” because of course “Material Condition Zero” is a nonsense/meaningless term. Obviously, anything like “Set Material Condition Ze-ra” is going to be understood as Zebra.
By contrast, with external radio communications often being passed as code, something like “Xray Two Uniform, this is Zulu Eight Alpha, Execute to Follow, Alpha Victor Two Six Tac One, Over,” there really is a huge risk of misunderstanding if certain even vaguely similar sounding terms are permitted, and so the words in the phonetic alphabet really do need to be as distinct as possible, to minimize the chance of mishearing under the widest possible range of adverse conditions. Although, on that note, I do have a bone to pick with whoever settled on “Kilo” for K.
One of the conjectures Drach had was not only would manuals have to be changed but also you had hundreds of thousands of sailors with the old alphabet impressed on their reflexes and retraining them might lead to confusion during the transition period. There’s a difference between GQ with your adrenaline pumping and clarifying a garbled moment on the TBS (talk between ships) while keeping station.
Indeed. A garbled moment on Bridge-to-Bridge, FLEET TAC, or any number of exterior comms systems can result in a catastrophic collision and the loss of one or both ships. Much less margin for error than passing the word over the 1MC for GQ.
