The Hornet's "island."
I was just getting ready to leave the event, probably around 7:30. As I was heading for the exit, I heard a voice call out, “Want to join the tour?”
The voice belonged to one of the Hornet Museum’s Docent, Richard (I never did get his last name.) I stopped short, not being able to resist. The DSLR came out of the backpack, and I managed to shoot some photos as the sun set.
The USS Hornet is smaller than today’s supercarriers, but the scale is still staggering as you walk around the flight deck. At 893 feet long and a full load displacement of over 40,000 tons, it’s a massive vessel. Listening to Richard, it’s also incredible how labor-intensive the task of launching and recovering aircraft really was.
The Hornet did have one computer, and analog, gear-driven affair. This primitive computer actually controlled a light that shone underneath a laminated mat. The pinpoint light would move as the computer calculated the ship’s position, a spot of light tracking across the map. Without modern GPS, without satellites, without even much in the way of radio communication, the Hornet could cross thousands of miles of ocean and end up within a mile of its originally calculated position.
Richard, our docent, is on the right. It's all manually controlled, folks!
Given that we were just attending an event where the focus was on semiconductor devices with vast numbers of transistors, no bigger than your fingernail, walking around something as massive as a World War II era aircraft carrier, as old as the tech is, makes you appreciate the huge variety in engineering and technology human beings can build. From 40nm to 40,000 tons, our ingenuity never fails to fascinate.
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3 comments
Skip
September 12, 2009 at 6:32 pm (UTC -7)
Nice article, if you ever head up to New England, you should stop by the Mystic Seaport. They are in the process of restoring a whaling ship, and when you realize these boats sailed the open ocean for months with nothing more than a watch, a compass and a sextant for dead reckoning, you have to be amazed.
josh
September 13, 2009 at 12:14 am (UTC -7)
that picture of the tower is awesome! did you use a tripod?
Loyd Case
September 13, 2009 at 8:25 am (UTC -7)
No tripod. I shot it with a D300s @ f2.8 24-70mm lens, at ISO3200. I did use noise reduction software to reduce the noise a bit, though.