us navy

Three quick movies for you to watch on a lazy Sunday… things which I’ve been sent over the last week.

1. The 15-minute promotional film A Ballad for the Fair (pictured) tours the 1964 New York World’s Fair, with an emphasis on communications technology since it was produced by Bell System. Marvel at the video-phone! Warning: there is folk music. Hat-tip to Paleo-Future.
2. A creepy community service announcement about violence against women starring Australia’s celebrity criminal Mark Brandon “Chopper” Read. Chopper even has his own website. Hat-tip to Rhys McDonald via Five Thumbs Down. Check the latter for an amusing AFL players’ social guide.
3. The US shoots down a spy satellite. Thanks, Richard. I won’t bother discussing the military-strategy and international-politics angles of that one, there’s plenty elsewhere.

Apparently this photograph from Microsoft’s Virtual Earth is exposing some big dark secret — the shape of the propeller on a US Navy Ohio-class nuclear submarine. I reckon it’s a big “So what?”

Now the Sydney Morning Herald article is correct: the propeller design is an integral part of a submarine’s ability to remain undetected. The specific shape of the tips helps prevent noisy “cavitation”, the formation of tiny bubbles, which can reveal the sub’s location.

But let’s be real. This is one, grainy frame from a commercial satellite. The crucial propeller tip is about 4 pixels across.

The Russians, the Chinese and perhaps other people have military reconnaissance satellites with much, much higher resolution cameras — and they’d specifically target nuclear submarine bases trying to take photos. The 18 Ohio-class subs are so old they were going to be retired in 2002 — although a few are being kept on for other duties now that Destroying The World has gone out of fashion. Between them, those two facts lead me to believe that “They” already have plenty of good, clear pictures of those propellers.

And that’s assuming one of the many, many workers involved in the design, building and maintenance of the subs wasn’t persuaded to take a few happy snaps in exchange for a hand with his mortgage payments.

No, I don’t think this is revealing a deep, dark secret. I reckon it means the US Navy doesn’t care any more. But it will give the military geeks without access to classified data the chance to have a tug.