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Originally Posted by Linton
If you transfer from one boat to another do you get a briefing first on the current mod state of the boat you are going to?
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I dunno. I've never been in the service. From talking to people, my sense of things is that it's much more like hands-on training at sea combined with classes ashore so that you ought to be capable of operating whatever you find there.
Some ships, particularly older ones, are pretty obviously modified. Like that old Spruance with the odd looking radar mast. They also had other less obvious modifications. Another example is the LAs with dry deck shelters. Another example is the Arleigh Burkes. There's at least three different variants out there right now. When you see ships tied up at the pier, you'll notice they all have different numbers of machine guns and grenade launchers mounted on them. A lot of it is little things like that, which aren't necessarily massive changes to the whole system that require programatic changes. There's things like different software versions, and minor hardware changes which might not effect functionality from an operator's end, but affect performance. P-3s are REALLY bad as far as all of them being different.
The whole thing is called "spiral development." It's expensive but it keeps engineers working, which makes Congress happy. :-)