[Bubblehead Nuke]

Originally Posted by MaHuJa

I heard a turbine ship (like the perry) has a startup-time of 5 minutes before they can get underway, as opposed to 30 minutes for dieselships. And numerous hours for nuclear-powered.

From what training I had in the Navy, gas turbines plants can go from cold iron to underway in less than 8 minutes. I presume, that with the plant already hot and everything ready to go, all you have to do is hit the starter button. Once you are lit off, you are ready to rock. Only question how fast can it come up to minimum operating speed. A jet airplane can do it in less than a minute on a hot pad standby. Why should the same turbine, adapted to a ship, be significantly slower?

Personnal experience here:
When Hurricane Hugo was in the Atlantic they decided to sortie the fleet out of Norfolk. I was standing on the tender waiting for something when the message hit (the tender announced it over the 1MC that emergency sailing orders had just come down). I heard a Tico on the next pier over anncounce an immediate ships muster. They singled up lines and I heard the induction WHOOSH about 3-5 minutes later. Them as pretty as you please, with NO TUGS, they pulled in lines and the brow, and left. Watched them do a thruster turn to starboard and away they went. I remember because I was in awe at the time, it was less than 10 minutes from when I heard the announcement. I KNEW I had a pre-crit to do and these SOB's were already gone. Second Tico left about 3 minutes later.

Then all hell broke loose and just about every ship in port was working there butts off to get underway. All the gas turbine ships were LONG gone. The conventional ships were leaving in about 5 or 6 hours and us nukes.. it took us about 8 hours. We had no pre-crit done at the time, nor had any other boat on piers 22 & 23. Even the carriers got caught by suprise.

Wanna know the real funny thing? They would not let us go. We had our dive certificate pulled due to a few things and they made us tie up triple lined and rigged for dive right next to the pier.

There were a LOT of P.O'd sailors that day. Just that morning they had come out and stated that nobody would be leaving because the storm was going in WAY south of us. Everyone had relaxed and nobody had done any 'got to go honey', park the car somewhere safe and all that pre-underway stuff. If you were on the boat (ship) you were not allowed to leave due to the frantic 'we gotta GO' mentality that was there that day. We thought the storm had shifted north and was going to hit near us.

BTW: a Nuc boat can get fired up and underway in less than 1 hour if needed. Trust me, I know. But it has to be an emergency and you break a lot of rules to do it.

So it's not quite that simple. Being adrift like that puts you in a non-defensible position.

It also puts you in a position that makes it hard as heck for a sub to find you unless he goes active or looks out the 'scope. I can think of a lot of pro's and con's on it.

Plus, it's the power plant, as in electric power; they would have power concerns on top of it all. How much batteries do they have?

Gas turbine ships have either seperate gas turbines to power the electrical generation gear or they use backup diesels. These items would be heavily rafted to not transmit sound. The screw turning, even when making no way on the ship, would be significantly louder. Remember, a gas turbine is going to have a minimum speed that it has to maintain in order to operate. It is like a jet engine. There is a minimum alpha speed and that will be the slowest RPM that the screw can turn at (even with a reduction gear) and you have to zero the pitch out so that you do not make way on the ship.