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Originally Posted by Frame57
Interesting obs BN. You may indeed be right. Everything is so cut and paste these days. My current Boss is a former Nuke Bubblehead and we often chat about this stuff and we are pretty much in agreement too. We work on medical life support equipment now. I had to get my electronics degree after my military career in order to work on medical equipment. we had to learn a lot of theory in electronics and had to be able to troubleshoot down to componant level on PCB's. But today that is pretty much gone in a lot of the electronics programs that are available at the community college level. Now when a board fries, you just replace the board. No more hooking up a DMM or O-scope. Those days are gone, so it seems that the level of knowledge does not have to be there as well. By the way my electronics professor was a Bubblehead too. He served on the diesel boats in the 1950's. He even made us learn tube theory. That guy knew his math every which way and then some. Me, if I do not use I lose it it seems. I have always admired peope who can take stuf like pre-calculus algebra and actually remember it. The Engineer on the A-fish was Tony Watkins and I still think he was the most intelligent human being I ever met. I envied the nukes and we A-ganger worked well with them even though we were called "Coners" once in awhile. But one thing we shared with our shipmates aft of frame 57 was our lack of liberty. I swear if I could do it all over again, I would strike a rate that got liberty as soon as the brow went over. Any one got a time machine handy?
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Keep your crap running and clean knucledragger and you can ve the first guy over the brow as well. Well second we know the data systems guy is always first. :rotfl:
But seriously. I feel for you. Nuke stuff fascinated me but I joined unrated. I don't think it is even possible to strike a nuclear rating. I had to craw through glass practically to become an ET. In the end I had qualified all of their watchstations and been in for more than two yearswhen I managed to get to Orlando for BE&E. They played the game to send me TAD by making my orders show me returning between that and EW A school in Pensacola. I may have been the very first submariner to go there. I loved it and I think get much more out of it than I would have going to the Great Lakes since I was standing ESM watch most of the time. I think it would be the better school no matter since the other major watchstation for ETs was Inertial Navigation which wasn't a major forus of ET A school anyway.
From a gaming standpoint the best thing about my time in was being in the fire control party. I worked the plot and eventually became geoplot coordinator. It has been immensly valualble doing TMA but also in giving me a very good familiarity with the other areas. I also am grateful I spent a lot of time in/with sonar as that would have been my second rating choice. I actaully fit in better there as I am kind of a hippy/wild guy. The ETs were a little more straight/clean/geeky.
Anyway, I guess I can quit running off the mouth now. You guys just got me thinking back with your experiences