Sort round sinks the tug

[jimlongley]

Well, almost anyway.

One of the neat things about being a gunner on a ship at sea is getting to shoot at the ocean, you almost always score a hit.

Seriously, they don't just put up target stands to shoot at, but there really are targets - usually sleds towed behind another ship.

One day, down near Puerto Rico, we were firing a shoot for record at targets towed behind a seagoing tug boat.

Towing a target is supposedly pretty safe, the tow line is six ior seven hundred yards long, and it's tough for even the worst gunners to miss by that far - notice, I said tough, not impossible. The tow line has to be long enough to provide a modicum of safety, but not so long that its weight sinks the floating target, so a practical maximum is right about 600 yards.

So the tug is chugging along pulling the target at a stately five knots or so, and our destroyer is scooting along at about thirteen knots, sometimes in the same direction as the tug, and sometimes the opposite or even at an angle - the whole purpose of the exercise being to challenge the entire gun crew to accurately place shots aroung the target.

The float itself is merely the X ring of the target, the rest of the target is imaginary, a ship centered around that X riuing, and when shots are fired, a team of judges asseses where the shot would hit on that imaginary ship, and a hit is scored based on the judges' consensus. You are not supposed to hit the actual target, they are kind of expensive and hard to recover if sunk.

So our turn, in Mount 52, comes to fire. I, as "pointer" get to pull the trigger, and my "trainer" is the best one in the fleet, at least in my estimation. The only other truly critical person is the Mount Captain, who sits with his head out of the gun mount judging the shot fall and shouting corrections to the sight setter based on that shot fall. He tells the sight setter the initial settings and then corrects them, as long as the pointer and trainer do their jobs.

The pointer runs the guns in elevation, and the trainer turns the mount in azimuth, and the two have to co-ordinate so that the cross hairs are on the target when the pointer pulls the trigger. Imagine shooting a target rifle with one person having the vertical cross hair of a scpoe, and another the horizontal, and a third actually determining what the settings on the scope are - it's exactly that.

There is also a "sight check officer" (SCO) - the Navy, knowing that the gunners develop tunnel vision in the excitement of shooting, have the sight check officer looking through a third sight and his job is to make sure that the target area is clear of objects that we wouldn't want to shoot at. In this case the SCO was a young butterbars ensign with flaming red hair, who naturally was tagged with the sobriquet "Red." The SCO stands immediately behind the pointer in very cramped quarters and these two cummincate by kicks and tugs on pants legs - it being a little noisy in the gun mount for some reason.

So here we are, the old first class bosun mount captain, judges the target to be this many yards away and moving in this direction and calls down sight settings to the sight setter - a fellow we affectionately call Short Round due to a previous incident detailed here.

We get a guns clear from the SCO and I fire the first round - good splash, a little aft of the target and a little short, of course not having any scoring rings to see we have no idea whether it's scored as a hit or not, so we adjust the sights to get closer to the x ring. The mount captain shouts down his correction to the sight setter "RIGHT FIVE, ADD TWO HUNDRED" and the sight setter spins the dials.

The sight setter shouts that he is ready, which in retrospect took a little longer than it should have, and the pointer and trainer go to work. The SCO clears the guns and the pointer pulls the trigger and then the second pass - the target is about 5000 yards away so even at a conservative estimate of 2500 feet per second, we should see a splash in less than six seconds.

The seconds tick by, and the pointer, me, at about the eight second mark, starts to get nervous, maybe I missed the splash, so I yank Red's right pants leg and yells - "Red did you see a splash???" almost simultaneously with Red kicking me in the butt and yelling "Shortly," (a natural nickname for someone named Longley) "did you see a splash???" and the mount captain screaming "Did you see a splash???" to anyone who might have been looking outside. At about the point when we had all agreed, some ten seconds after the shot was fired, that indeed none of us had seen any splash - the cease fire alarm starts to screech.

Seems as though the tug boat skipper was not pleased with us placing a shot off his BOW!!!!

The sight setter - the same old Short Round guy, had misunderstood the mouunt captain's "right five add 200" and had attempted to crank in two hundred mils of right deflection, and five yards of elevation.

For those of you needing a refreseher, a mil is equivalent to just over one yard at a thousand yards, so at out approximate range of 5000 yards, each mil of deflection was worth about 5 yards of azimuth, so Short Round tried to crank in an azimuth change of about 1000 yards, and the tug was only about 600 yards ahead of the target in the direction the guns would be pointing, yielding a shot off the bow of the tug.

Needless to say we didn't continue the shoot.

[dukalmighty]

I think short round needs to become a cook lol

[jimlongley]

I think he did, after he finally got out, but I think it was a career position with McDonalds.