Arglebargle III posted:

3

But break open the emergency coffee supply you keep in the forward escape trunk. Personally. Just in case.

Magnetic North posted:

No sorry. I just want to encourage those to stand up and be recognized, and since I'm American, I often forget just how many English-literate foreign goons their are.

Should have been more specific, if I was an American (which I am) in the American Navy (which I'm not) the local representatives of the People's Republic of China might inquire as to why I didn't mention that on my immigration forms.

Side note: magnetic anomaly detection is cool but only gives you a general idea of where an object is. US subs starting with the Seawolf class are actually designed to spoof MAD to some degree with aluminum, brass, and weakly magnetic steel alloys used as much as possible. The Idahos were built before this though.

rant from the terrible conservative chain email in D&D: there's a conservative chain letter going around suggesting that the USS Jimmy Carter is a peace ambassador ship going around apologizing to every government in the world. Apparently the author doesn't know that the real USS Jimmy Carter (SSN-23) is a Seawolf-class nuclear attack submarine armed with Mk 48 torpedoes, UGM-84 Harpoon ship-to-ship missiles, and UGM-109 Tomahawk cruise missiles.

I don't know how people continue to overlook Carter's service as a nuke engineer in the sub fleet (which is why the Navy named a sub after him) or his heroic actions at the Chalk River nuclear disaster. Instead they think of him as a weakling because his physical appearance and Reagan's crack political team. There are few people who deserve to have ships named after them while they are still alive, but Carter is one. Reagan, I don't think so, but then again his life in the 1990s hardly counts as such.

Sorry to rant like this, but Carter gets such a bad rap in the modern "common knowledge" shaped by the media that people don't actually know shit about shit.* Any questions about Carter's toughness should have been settled in 1952 when he and his team took apart a broken nuclear reactor from the inside. Seriously, they lowered them down into the reactor vessel to disassemble the core with hand tools. They had to work in shifts measured in seconds to avoid lethal exposure.

Carter had an extremely unlucky presidency, with a recession caused by an exogenous supply shock that he had no way to control. The failure of Operation Eagle Claw, or rather its tremendously spectacular failure, was unpredictable. So thanks to the Republican political machine, Carter is remembered as a wimp for trying to rescue the hostages with a daring military strike, while Reagan is remembered as strong for rescuing the hostages by looking imposing on TV and scaring the Iranians.  Somehow no one remembers that he later started selling the Iranians missiles, which I'm sure never came up at the hostage negotiations and is in fact totally unrelated. 

The difference in how Reagan and Carter are remembered get me a little angry.

*a common problem