AZ BS Thread 4²0

Definitely worth the trip...

 

Welcome!!

 

Nice looking truck! We can use more 1st gen representation around here!

 

Santa came early.

But it goes in the to-do pile for now

 

Welcome

Well youve got a great truck for Flagstaff and AZ in general

I just left flag myslef

 

Thanks fellas. Ole nag’s put a few wrinkles in my forehead but a million more smiles.

 

Super dope. We went last April. I wanna go back and hook up my ham radio to their giant discone antenna. You should also check out the Pima Air&Space Museum.

 

is there a TW radio thread ?
I need to get more active again

 

If you ever get to North Carolina, near Wilmington ... the USS North Carolina (WWII battleship) is anchored there. Self-guided tour is fun. "Hidden Battleship" tour is given a few times a year (check their online schedule) and lets you into the engine room, radio room, climbing up the central observation tower. Here is the fun point ... apparently they spend a few years getting all of the vacuum tubes for the radio ... THEN they contacted Pearl Harbor on the same type of WWII radio there from Wilmington NC.

 

If you ever have the misfortune of being in California I highly recommend checking out The USS Iowa in Long Beach and the USS Midway in San Diego

 

Battleships are monsters. Getting around in them is not as expected ... getting from the deck down a ladder you have to watch your head, almost are better off not using the steps and riding the rails and stopping with your feet at the bottom. And all of the passages that are designed for skinny 20-year-old people. Fun though.

My nephew and his wife live in San Diego.

 

The thing that gets me is that for such huge monsters they are, the living conditions are freaking cramped

 

Exactly. They squeezed as mush use out of every not square inch but *cubic* inch of space. Even CIC (the super-secret room on the ship that even a visiting captain may not be granted access to if not needed) where an entire theater of battle is managed is claustrophobically small ... CIC is windowless darkened room that part of the "Hidden Battleship" tour for USS North Carolina, not the self-guided tour.

 

USS North Carolina photos ... label from a food locker ... radio room equipment pictures were taken rotated 90 degrees to get more detail ... vacuum tubes!

 

I worked with 2 dudes who were both onboard battleships during the gulf war. One was a boiler operator and the other was an armourer or machinist. They got to witness the last shots fired in anger from those platforms. The armourer/machinist was on which ever ship had the explosion in one of the turrets. And the other guy was on the other battleship that was involved. Don't remember the names of the ships off the top of my head. The Iowa might have been one of them though.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Iowa_turret_explosion
That was the Iowa, they had a big display on it.

Wild he was there for that

 

North Carolina would have been scrapped after the war, but people in the state bought it for a private museum and it never served after the war. There is another in Mobile AL that I think was not in service after the war. Missouri was refitted and served in the Gulf, but now is a museum. Iowa apparently was decommissioned in 1990.

That is all I can tell right now. Some immediately became museums, others were refitted and served longer.

 

Yeah I just did a shallow dive on wikipedia, the Iowa had the explosion. But wasn't deployed to the gulf. The Wisconsin and the Missouri were involved in the gulf war.
Interesting stories from them though.

 

When I was a Cubscout at about 11. Our troop and a few dozen others got to stay the night on the USS Lexington in the bunks, watch movies on a big screen below deck, polish the sea mine collection, tour the whole ship. Was a really cool experience.

 

Fun Fact: the Midway was actually in our battle group in the Gulf