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Originally Posted by LoBlo
 That puts the engineer in quite a bind doesn't it. Whatever your running from is going to get you unless you go fast enough... but go *too* fast and you'll blow yourselves up with overstressing the engine. Quite a quandary
Great answer, Thanks! That was just what I was looking for.  |
When the difference if getting sunk and killed or eeking that .3 knots out of the engine, you go for the gusto and roll the dice and hope you win.
Why do you think a GOOD engineer is ALWAYS in demand. Anyone can read a guage, but how many KNOW how the plant is operating by vibration, sounds, and even the SMELL of the plant while it is operating.
I will tell you, I could do that. I could walk throught the watertight hatch and go to ERML and by the sound tell you what was going on. Any good nuke could to that. When walking your watchstation you could feel the systems. It gets in your blood like nothing I can describe.
One time, we had a loss of the port non-vital switchboard, killed half the ship electrically. I was asleep in the rack when I woke up for no reason I can describe, I went from sleeping, opened my eyes, noticed no fan in my rack, and I was moving before I realized it. In my mind I am going: Fire, SCRAM, or something bad aft. I was offgoing engineering watch so my casualty station is aft. In fact, about 10 of us were moving aft within seconds BEFORE they even called away the problem. We did not even wonder what was going in. We KNEW something was wrong within about a second of each other. When I hit the mess deck I knew that the port SSTG had gone offline because of a panel on the mess deck. There are 2 lights on it, each powered by it respective bus, and the port powered light is off. I am already wondering if it is mechanical or electrical by the time I hit the hatch. I absorbed it by moving through the boat heading aft. No real thinking involved. As we hit the hatch control called away the loss of the port switchboard. Elapsed time: about 15 seconds. Oh, and the coners?? They didn't have a clue as to why so many of us had such a serious face on and a get the hell out of our way attitude till they called away the casualty.
See what I mean about getting in the blood?
A lot of the information about propulsion plant operations you will not find. It is just mumbo jumbo to those who never ran a plant and well, boring to those of us who have run one. The real JUICY parts, well, those are still classified.
On a slightly differnt note I would LOVE to sit down and create a mod that took into account propulsion plant operation in a tactical enviroment. Alas, that would get me a room in a prision. There are a LOT of things that go WAY beyond the scope of this sim but then again, it is operationally a constraint that the sub has to operate under and make decisions about. It is something that the captain of a ship HAS to be aware of and has a major input into how he does his job. Modeling it would put us at risk in the real world and thus I see the need to exclude it.