Criminals Amaze Me Sometimes!

[eric383]

Back about 5 years ago when copper scrap was big money, these clowns would break into places that had copper and would even go as far as taking telephone cable between poles(yes this did happen in Detroit). We came in to work and our boss had sent us an e mail including pics of 2 guys that had broke into a substation and tried to cut the power cable to steal it. The human body does not hold up well when compared to +27,000 volts. Basically they were vaporized and what remained looked like charcoal. I always said that if these guys would put as much effort into working a real job instead of stealing they would be rich. But then you would have to get up in the morning and go to work instead of sleeping till noon and then looking for stuff to steal.

 

[67GTX440]

Just reminds me of back in the 1990s, we made about a hundred training tapes for P-3C Orion acoustic operators. They were Ampex 12" x 1" tape reels, five to a box, and one of our guys drove them to Jacksonville to deliver them to the Navy. They were in the back of his pickup truck when he stopped at our office to go to the bathroom before headed to the base, and he came out ten minutes later and all 20 boxes of tapes were gone! The boxes were marked with what they were, but some idiots took them anyway.

There was never a trace of them found, so we figured when the thieves found out what they stole they probably dumped the boxes into the St. Johns River.

I hope they did not get the box lunches. My former next door neighbor who spent twelve years on a nuclear sub and who now works for MIT swears a P-3C Orian could not find a nuclear sub even if they fired off a "boomer" when surfaced right below them. LOL

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gk9ATctJHd8

 

[Bruzilla]

You can tell your neighbor he's totally FOS. His experience is limited to how P-3's did during exercises since we rarely flew on our own subs since there wasn't any point to it. During exercises, the sub would turn on augmenters, which are essentially noise makers that increase the amount of noise our subs make to make them compatible with foreign subs. They were supposed to have them running throughout the exercise, but oops... they somehow always seemed to break down and not be on, so we would be looking for the wrong sounds (I know looking for sounds seems illogical, but trust me it isn't). But after they burned us a few times, we got wise to them and found ways around their little games. How good did we get? When I was developing training for P-3 acoustic guys in the 1990s, I was out at NAS Moffett Field collecting data for a new training program that would enable operators to more easily find our boats, and when COMSUBPAC got wind of what I was doing they confiscated every bit of data I had collected. It's easy to say you won a fight when you get to tie the hands of your opponent.

But here's something else you can tell your neighbor. In 25+ years of working in ASW, I never saw a US SSN hold contact on a Soviet submarine, even the loudest, oldest, ones for more than 36 hours before calling up the P-3 guys to ask for help in relocating their target. The bubbleheads love to brag about how submarines make the best anti-submarine platform, but the truth is their being in the same environment as the enemy exposes them to the same amount of risk they impart. Yeah, they're great for arriving on scene, firing, and killing the bad guy, but if their mission entails any extended tracking of a target they often break contact and lose them to avoid becoming a target themselves, and when they do... guess who they call to go find the sub they lost and tell them where it is? The P-3 guys.

 

[67GTX440]

I should mention he drives a Porsche 911 with the tag CAVIT8 and also claims to have watched the movie Clerks something like 300 times on a submarine. Engineer from Virginia Tech with a Masters from MIT. I have never understood the Clerks fascination. I just assumed it was some form of personality fault associated with being an engineer.

 

[Bruzilla]

CAVIT8? That's odd. There's few things in the world submariners hate more than cavitating. Cavitation occurs when a sub's propeller, which has high and low pressure areas, turns fast enough that the water pressure in the low pressure areas gets low enough to allow air bubbles to form. Then as the prop blades moves into a higher pressure area, the bubbles collapse, and that makes noise that gives away a sub's position. I guess he thinks cavitating is associated with high speed, but in reality it is more associated with poor propeller design, so you can tell him his 911 must suck *** if it's cavitating. .

 

[YY1]

Jeez, didn't he ever see "...Red October"...

 

[Bruzilla]

WWII submarines started cavitating almost as soon as they started turning. What's worse is people don't think about air bubbles as damaging, but they do yield a good bit of explosive force when they go off and can do a lot of damage. The props on our Fleet class submarines had to be changed out after every cruise due to cavitation damage.

- - - Updated - - -

It looks like there might be a silver lining to my dark, rainy, theft cloud. I went over to the shop today and my car is inside and being studiously worked on. Apparently my letter to the shop owner indicating he was responsible for all damages to my vehicle, including theft, while it's in his possession was the incentive he needed to get it out of there.

 

[Cranky]

Cavitation in pumps is also a problem. It was scary to see what the internals on some charge pumps looked like once they came in for service....especially ones from a Cat Cracker and we had a Cracking unit right outside the shop. Man, I'm so glad to be out of there!