Welcome to MSW’s Scuttlebutt! Here’s the news for the day.



Sad News

Last night Tom Harrison of Tom's Modelworks lost his fight with lung cancer. Words are not enough to express the loss the scale modeling community has suffered from his passing. May he rest in peace.
Sad News


On Display - HMS Danae, 1942
MSW crew-mate Peter Fulgoney (peterf) gives us yet another fabulous build to look at, this time the HMS Danae,1942 in this "On Display" feature!
On Display


On Display - JMSDF Hatsuyuki
Crew-mate Dade W. Bell (Karybdis) sends us a fine gallery of images of his MSW "Cold War Tin Cans Campaign" build, in this "On Display" Feature!
On Display




The Naval Museum of Alberta

Today’s website is the Naval Museum of Alberta. The museum in Calgary, exhibits a collection of naval artifacts including three RCN fighter aircraft which flew on the decks of HMCS Warrior, Magnificent, and Bonaventure. Enjoy.
Website




This Day in U.S. Naval History

1811 - Congress authorizes the first naval hospital.
1944 - Sue Sophia Dauser, superintendent of the Navy's Nurse Corps, is the first woman in the Navy promoted to the rank of captain.
1991 - Navy A-6Es of USS Ranger's (CVA 61) Attack Squadron 155 and Marine aircraft bomb Iraqi troops fleeing Kuwait City to Basra in convoys after Iraqi President Saddam Hussein announces a withdrawal from Kuwait.


Navantia Lays Keel of F-105 Frigate
Source: Navantia

On January 20, the Fene-Ferrol shipyard laid the keel of F-105, the fifth F-100 frigate ordered by the Spanish navy. With this event, the shipyard began assembly of the ship on its launching slip; the ship is to be completed in 2010 and delivered in the summer of 2012.

F-105 incorporates several modifications compared to earlier ships of its class, including improvements to the construction process and experience learned during operations of the previous ships. For example, living quarters will be improved, as will the command and control system, while a new radar, Lockheed Martin’s Aegis 1 D(V) will be installed. In addition, other modifications will be made so as to reduce maintenance costs.

The construction order for F-105 was signed on July 5, 2006 and its construction began on June 2007, with the cutting of the first steel plates.


The Navy Has a Top-Secret Vessel It Wants to Put on Display
Source: Wall Street Journal

PROVIDENCE, R.I. -- Anybody want some top-secret seagoing vessels? The Navy has a pair it doesn't need anymore. It has been trying to give them away since 2006, and they're headed for the scrap yard if somebody doesn't speak up soon.
One is called Sea Shadow. It's big, black and looks like a cross between a Stealth fighter and a Batmobile. It was made to escape detection on the open sea. The other is known as the Hughes (as in Howard Hughes) Mining Barge. It looks like a floating field house, with an arching roof and a door that is 76 feet wide and 72 feet high. Sea Shadow berths inside the barge, which keeps it safely hidden from spy satellites.

The barge, by the way, is the only fully submersible dry dock ever built, making it very handy -- as it was 35 years ago -- for trying to raise a sunken nuclear-armed Soviet submarine.

Navy Seeks Home for Secret Vessel
"I'm fascinated by the possibilities," Frank Lennon said one morning recently. Mr. Lennon runs -- or ran -- a maritime museum here in Providence. He was standing in a sleet storm on a wharf below a power plant, surveying the 297-foot muck-encrusted hulk of a Soviet submarine that he owns. His only exhibit, it was open to the public until April 2007, when a northeaster hit Providence and the sub sank.

Army and Navy divers refloated it this past summer with the aid of chains and air tanks. Mr. Lennon can't help but imagine how his sub might look alongside the two covert Cold War castoffs from the Navy. "They would be terrific for our exhibit," he said, watching the sleet come down.

But a gift ship from the Navy comes with lots of strings attached to the rigging. A naval museum, the Historic Naval Ships Association warns, is "a bloodthirsty, paperwork ridden, permit-infested, money-sucking hole..." Because the Navy won't pay for anything -- neither rust scraping nor curating -- to keep museums afloat, survival depends on big crowds. That's why many of the 48 ships it has given away over 60 years were vessels known for performing heroically in famous battles.

Museum entrepreneurs like Mr. Lennon who don't have much money can only fantasize about Sea Shadow and its barge. After all, a pair of mysterious vessels that performed their heroics out of the public eye can't have much claim to fame. Glen Clark, the Navy's civilian ship-disposal chief, has received just one serious call about the two vessels, and it didn't lead to a written application.

The Navy's insistence on donating Sea Shadow and the barge as a twofer may also explain the lack of interest. Here is the Navy's vision for a museum display as Mr. Clark describes it:
"When you're driving down the road, you can't see the Sea Shadow. You have to pay for your ticket to go on board the Hughes Mining Barge, and then you see the Sea Shadow. That has the capability of preserving the aura of secrecy of the program."
Possibly. It might also cause drivers to drive right by the hulking rust-bucket without devoting a thought to stopping

Frank Lennon
The Hughes Mining Barge actually has nothing to do with mining or with the late, reclusive Mr. Hughes. He merely let the Central Intelligence Agency use his name in 1974 to cover up its mission to raise a Soviet submarine from the floor of the Pacific Ocean.

The adventure was publicized as the expedition of another new vessel, the Hughes Glomar Explorer, to mine for minerals on the seabed. To grab a sub, the ship needed a giant claw. But because it was big and unwieldy, the claw couldn't be installed in the ship at dockside. That's where the "mining" barge came in.

The claw was assembled inside it. According to Curtis Crooke, retired president of Global Marine Development Inc., the company that did the work, the barge with the claw inside was then towed off the California coast and submersed. The Glomar Explorer was positioned over it, and the claw hoisted into its belly.

Then the Explorer went sub hunting (exactly how much of the sub it retrieved, if anything, has never been declassified) and the barge went into mothballs.

"That's all it was used for," says Mr. Crooke, "to put the claw inside the Explorer." Would the barge work as a museum? "It's just a big old dumb barge," he says. "Now, the Sea Shadow, that's a way-out spacey kind of thing. You could tell a story about that."

The Glomar Explorer was refitted as a drill ship. The barge -- thanks to its satellite-proof roof -- got a second secret job for the Navy and its contractor, Lockheed Missiles & Space Co. In the early 1980s, Sea Shadow was assembled inside it. At a cost later put at $195 million, it aimed to attain the same invisibility at sea that it had in the federal budget.

Sea Shadow, 160 feet long and 70 feet wide, was the Navy's first experimental stealth ship. Its special coatings, sharp angles and other confidential doohickeys allowed it to baffle radar and sonar. Viewed bow-on, it looks like a squat letter "A" standing on two submerged pontoons for exceptional stability on rough seas.

From the start, Sea Shadow moved at night, towed from its California dock inside its barge and launched onto the open sea to sail on its own in darkness.

S.K. Gupta, now a vice president at Lockheed Martin Space Systems, was in the crew. He recalls watching a glass of Coke on the bridge barely ripple in 12-foot waves. In war games with the Navy off San Diego, he says, "We operated during the night with impunity. We could disappear and sneak up on whomever we wanted. Nobody thought we could do it. A ship is usually hard to hide."

The Navy brought Sea Shadow out of the shadows for daylight tests in 1993, setting off a flash of publicity. It hit the cover of Popular Mechanics. Revell made a plastic model. A mad media mogul used a Sea Shadow look-alike to foment war between Britain and China in a 1997 James Bond movie "Tomorrow Never Dies."

In 2006, its experimental life at an end, Sea Shadow and the barge it was boxed in were struck from the Navy's register and tied up in Suisun Bay, near San Francisco. The technologies it developed have sired a generation of land-attack destroyers and ocean-surveillance ships. "Sea Shadow is the mother of all stealth ships in the world," says Mr. Gupta. It ought to be displayed out in the open on dry land, he thinks, its invisibility visible to all.

The Navy's Mr. Clark says, "We're looking at that option." In December, Sea Shadow got a one-year reprieve from the junk yard. And in Providence, Mr. Lennon got one more year to dream.

Retreating from the sleet, he was in the Sealand Diner eating breakfast with Ed Sciaba. Mr. Lennon is 66 years old and an ex-Green Beret. Mr. Sciaba, 54, is a scrap dealer ready to tow Mr. Lennon's sunken Soviet sub to his yard.

Mr. Sciaba knew nothing of Sea Shadow or the CIA's sub-raising venture. As Mr. Lennon recounted the details, he got excited.

"Hell of an idea," he said. "That's a museum I'd go to."

"You could tell the story of the Cold War," said Mr. Lennon.

Mr. Sciaba banged his coffee mug on the table. "Let's go get 'em and tow 'em back here!" he said. Mr. Lennon turned his gaze to the storm outside, and Mr. Sciaba picked up the check.




GE Selected for the AV-8B Harrier Technology
Source: GE Aviation

ANAHEIM, CA. --- The Turbomeca Arrius 2B2 engine will power the future EC 135 helicopters of Japan’s Defence Ministry.

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. --- GE Aviation has been awarded a development contract from the U.S. Navy for AV-8B aircraft radar display computers. The contract is valued at more than $16 million, with completion in 2011 at which time the follow-on production contract is anticipated.

“GE is applying new technology to the AV-8B’s radar display computer, enabling the addition and modification of software functionality for the Harrier,” said Stuart Mullan, president, Military Business Unit for GE Aviation Systems. “In addition to providing an advanced technology to the U.S. Navy, the system will facilitate upgrades to address the future needs of the U.S. Marine Corps.”

GE’s radar display computer processes all crew station control and display functions in the AV-8B Harrier II Plus aircraft. The radar display computer will fit within the existing form factor of the existing processor while adding new functionality and updated technology. The new technology will facilitate upgrades to address the future needs of the U.S. Marine Corps. The systems will be designed, manufactured and tested at GE facilities in Michigan and Florida.

The AV-8B Harrier II Plus is a multi-mission, short-takeoff vertical landing (STOVL) tactical strike aircraft. Because of its short-to-vertical takeoff and landing characteristics, it possesses basing flexibility that is unmatched by other fixed-wing aircraft. It supports a broad selection of air-to-air and air-to-surface weapon systems and third-generation technologies that address diverse tactical scenarios.


Photo of the Day



The Navy test craft, Sea Shadow, prepares to moor alongside the Embarcadero waterfront park in San Diego, Calif., for public tours of the experimental twin-hulled vessel.

Gator