Quote:
Originally Posted by Racerboy
The US Navy, well the Nuclear US Navy at least, LOVES to do drills. When I was in the Navy that is what I hated most. It cut into my rack time (sleep), my chow time....it ruined everything. I was a Nuke EM so I almost always had to respond to whatever the 'casualty' was. Big morale sinker 
Funny thing is the drills created more real casualties than fake ones. Equipment broke or caught fire either because it wasn't used correctly or it was 'switched' on/off too many times (there's only a certain amount of times a switch can be flipped, a button can be pressed, a breaker can be opened/closed, etc.) or because the drill team didn't intervene and stop the watchstander from taking an inappropriate action (usually the case). One time in the Med they ran a reactor #1 scram (reactor shutdown) on us. We cross connected steam plants and isolated #1 reactor but then the second reactor ended up scramming also (this is NOT a good situation to be in btw - Captain scrammed #2 reactor). Forward diesel was manned and started but it's switchgear caught fire due to parallel out-of-phase (junior EM manned it). Aft diesel was manned and it's output breaker wouldn't close (jammed)....all this time we're steaming down #2 reactor and in a REAL casualty. Reactor #2 steamed down almost to the point where it couldn't be allowed to get any colder before we were able to get the aft diesel online and thus complete the restart of #2 reactor.
Even after all that drills continued - and more feverishly
Point I'm making is if the game allows you to run drills then there should be some randomness about casualties happening from running the drills either due to watchstander error or equipment malfunction or you (the Captain) causing it. |
This would be funny if it were not true. The line between running drills to improve operations and having it absolutely kill morale and/or screw **** up is very fine indeed.