Day 161 - Return of the Jedi

343 Pieces - 31.03%

   Hey everybody!  It's me!  I'm back from a nice healthy underway on the USS Nevada.  So since I last got to work on the Falcon, a lot of neat stuff has happened.  For everyone who keeps up with me using this blog, get ready for a light-speed update on what's up.
   First off, Nevada is out of the yards.  We did Sea trial in May(?) and it was a pretty neat experience.  We got to take the boat to test depth and do all kinds of other cool stuff that you don't normally get to do with your boat.  Basically we made it go as fast and deep as we could forwards and backwards.  The only bad part was that every time we went deeper was the deepest we had gone in two years, so for about 3 and a half days the whole crew was up checking for leaks and ready just in case we had flooding.   Fortunately we didn't, and after than we got into the buisness of putting the ship through the ringer.
   With sea trials over, we came back to SUBASE BANGOR (finally) and did a short refit, then made our way back out into the pacific for some CODT (CODT = screw around learning how to use the boat again time) and an ORSE (ORSE = dumb ship's exam testing how good we are with the reactor).  The time went by pretty fast, only about 2 months.  In that two months I got qualified OOD Surfaced and Submerged.  So if you think I'm a bad driver on the road, now I drive a multi-billion dollar, 18000 ton ship that sports a nuclear reactor and may or may not sport some SWEET missiles that could make any day end poorly.  Anyawys, now I'm only about a month or two away from getting my fish (Fish = Dolphins = Symbol of a fully qualified submariner) and life is pretty good because I don't have to go out to sea for another couple of months.  For the first time since I've gotten to Washington, the boat is the other crew's problem.
   So onto the Falcon.  I know that there are some of you haters out there who thought that I had given up and that it would never be completed.  Boy were you wrong.  It's not done, but I am still working on it.  Sorry that I didn't take it underway with me.  Something tells me that my ENG would have been PISSED OFF if he found out I was working on a massive LEGO project instead of getting ready for ORSE.  So today I started (and finished) work on the Falcon's main engines.  The problem that I ran into with these bad boys was that they were a much bigger job than I had anticipated them being.  I blew way past my half hour time limit today.  There are two reasons that I didn't feel bad about it though.  Reason number 1 is obvious, I hadn't worked on the thing in months and a little bit of catch up only seems fair.  Reason number two goes out to all my fellow submarine nukes, PROPULSION.  I felt bad about not giving the old bird her engines, because propulsion is key to staying alive where I work.  People in Power School, Prototype, and SOBC don't count, get to the fleet and start earning your paycheck then you might understand what I'm talking about.  Skimmers definately don't count because they can just cross connect steam plants and be fine.
   That's all that I have for now.  Hopefully my posts will be a bit more frequent now that I'm back in action.

Current Progress

All Ahead Flank Cavitate!