The British withdrawing from Gibraltar might make Spain wanting to reclaim it. Unless Spain is dealing with matters on their own for now.
The Last Ship (TNT Series)
- Thread starter Matt Wiser
- Start date
The British withdrawing from Gibraltar might make Spain wanting to reclaim it. Unless Spain is dealing with matters on their own for now.
It was pretty good. My complaint was that Season 4 was shorter than the previous one (10 episodes as opposed to 13). Other than that? It was good. No key characters got themselves killed-still sore at Tex getting killed last season, and his daughter proved herself on several occasions.
See the trailer for Season 5? Looks like Chandler's an Admiral, as is Slattery. Kara Green is CO of the James, and CDR Garnett has her own command as well. And they go down to South America this time.
See the trailer for Season 5? Looks like Chandler's an Admiral, as is Slattery. Kara Green is CO of the James, and CDR Garnett has her own command as well. And they go down to South America this time.
I am guessing Chandler is CNO. My only serious complaint was them turning Fletcher into a bad guy
Should be late July when Season 5 premieres. This may be the last one, but keep your fingers crossed that TNT decides to go for a S6.
Well, at least, something good happen, a uinified South America
The US Navy took a helluva beating. I find it hard to believe that the incoming aircraft were not picked up on radar before they lost everything.
I wonder where those attack aircraft came from. I doubt they don't have the operating radius to come directly from south/central America. While they could do a great deal of damage with rockets it is questionable that they could actually sink any ships.
I also wonder at how many full (4 star) admirals there were (and they didn't wear the insignia correctly) - it would have made more sense to have a number of 1, 2 and 3 star admirals instead.
I also wonder at how many full (4 star) admirals there were (and they didn't wear the insignia correctly) - it would have made more sense to have a number of 1, 2 and 3 star admirals instead.
I put off posting anything until I caught up watching.
Am I the only one mystified as to why the USA does not seem to have any kind of nuclear weapons in inventory? In circumstances like these, shouldn't someone at least be discussing using nukes of some kind?
Granted that there may not be any intel known "north of the Rio Grande" of the "bridge" over the Darien gap (never mind whether that makes any sense or not) by author fiat, and that by some quite mysterious means the entire fleet of US satellites has been brought down in one fell swoop (
)--still in any realistic back story, surely Americans monitoring the satellites before the bad guy's Pearl Harbor Day would notice, hey, someone is building something in the Darien gap. Blindsided as Uncle Sam is, surely some security wonks somewhere would have been keeping an eye on the rise of a Grand Columbian Empire, just as a routine part of the job, so it is not like no one should have been looking.
So--someone ought to know, hey, there is this bridge in Panama. Whatever could it be for? Too bad we can't look now, but let's lob a quarter megaton bomb on it. Anyone who follows my act knows I am the kind of bleeding heart who would object to a wholesale counterterror strike at South America's major cities at this early date in the war, but war has been declared, El Norte at least knows Panama's legitimate Presidente was assassinated and Gran Colombia is absorbing it, or claiming to, so a target on Panamanian soil is legitimate, especially if it is not going to massacre a million semi-innocent people. They might not know what the bridge is for, but (unless the regime happens to be, oh I don't know, marching 40,000 soldiers aiming at taking down the Mexican government) hardly anyone lives anywhere near it, this is the deep wilderness. That's what "gap" means. Any other worthwhile target would involve killing at least tens if not hundreds of thousands of people, so a unique opportunity to express Yankee displeasure at being Pearl Harbored again after saving everyone in the world two or three times depending on how you count presents itself. An excellent way to clear one's throat provided Uncle Sam still has hands on more than one bomb.
We saw nukes being used a few times in the first couple seasons. Granted it is now 3 years since the last one and I have lost count, somewhere between 5 and 8 years since the Red Plague first deranged US command and control, presumably our inventory of many thousands of nukes did not simply turn into dust and blow away; either they remained under lock and key despite the nefarious infighting of misguided bad guy Americans and someone has taken the trouble to account for them all, or else there are hundreds or more nukes unaccounted for that presumably some of the cartoon villains of this storyline would put to bad use. I presume the former--steps were taken to make it inconvenient for three successive sets of villainous misgovernments in the USA to get their hands on...presumably had Granderson's mother, the leaders of the Immunes, or the conspirators in the season two seasons back had been allowed to persist and fulfill their various evil plans they'd have cracked the lock and key codes eventually and activated some, but Our Heroes from One Special Ship never give them the time and leisure for it. So three years of stable and legitimate government later, presumably the St Louis White House controls the codes and the weapons are all accounted for and either operational or disabled.
I know nuclear war heads, and the missiles that deliver them (it is plain enough to me why more "conventional" delivery systems like airplanes are off the board at the moment) have limited shelf lives, the bombs due to radioactive decay of their cores bringing them below critical not to mention any structural/electronic deterioration the neutron and gamma flux from the Pu or U-235 in the cores might do over time. Missiles, even such relatively simple and foolproof ones like the Minuteman with solid fuel, age and need maintenance and lose reliability as they age. Certainly it is reasonable that no one has manufactured either new bombs or missiles since the Red Plague broke out. But is it reasonable that after 8, maybe 10 years tops, and it sure looks like a lot less than 10 years, our ready and reliable inventory would drop to zero? I don't think so. If there are not thousands, there must be at least dozens of missiles ready to go.
Aha, the electronic control systems have all been hacked. Well, gosh, that is a problem, but many of these missiles go back in design to the 1960s or earlier. Say every guidance system has been since upgraded to something vulnerable to the computer virus. Well geez, just find some old geezers who designed the pre-microchip era versions, the ones installed in the original Minuteman and the like, and blow the dust off some museum pieces, and program in their flight instructions with a solder gun. They are ballistic. Do the math to program the rocket vector controls to put it on a course for the middle of the thing in the Darien gap, install the Flintstones generation brains, and fire. This might take some time I suppose, but if that is the case someone in Southern Command could at least mention it--"yes, we'll be firing some bombs at Cartagena if Mexico falls, but it will take a week and a half to get them ready."
It is like the writers of this show have simply never heard of anything like ICBMs--they must have fired the ones writing the first couple seasons I guess.
Has anyone read the book(s) or are they even relevant by now? What gives?
Am I the only one mystified as to why the USA does not seem to have any kind of nuclear weapons in inventory? In circumstances like these, shouldn't someone at least be discussing using nukes of some kind?
Granted that there may not be any intel known "north of the Rio Grande" of the "bridge" over the Darien gap (never mind whether that makes any sense or not) by author fiat, and that by some quite mysterious means the entire fleet of US satellites has been brought down in one fell swoop (
what the hell? Well, destroying satellites is easy enough, you just shoot a cluster of buckshot to deploy at the top of a straight-up, more or less, suborbital trajectory, so they come to a dead stop in center of mass terms at the orbital radius, just as the satellite is arriving, so the relative speed of the satellite's own orbit is what kills it--a much larger mass can be boosted on such a trajectory than is available for the same rocket to orbit at that radius, therefore a much smaller rocket can send up the warhead..but the satellites are shown deorbiting, which is much harder to accomplish so that theory is out I guess
So--someone ought to know, hey, there is this bridge in Panama. Whatever could it be for? Too bad we can't look now, but let's lob a quarter megaton bomb on it. Anyone who follows my act knows I am the kind of bleeding heart who would object to a wholesale counterterror strike at South America's major cities at this early date in the war, but war has been declared, El Norte at least knows Panama's legitimate Presidente was assassinated and Gran Colombia is absorbing it, or claiming to, so a target on Panamanian soil is legitimate, especially if it is not going to massacre a million semi-innocent people. They might not know what the bridge is for, but (unless the regime happens to be, oh I don't know, marching 40,000 soldiers aiming at taking down the Mexican government) hardly anyone lives anywhere near it, this is the deep wilderness. That's what "gap" means. Any other worthwhile target would involve killing at least tens if not hundreds of thousands of people, so a unique opportunity to express Yankee displeasure at being Pearl Harbored again after saving everyone in the world two or three times depending on how you count presents itself. An excellent way to clear one's throat provided Uncle Sam still has hands on more than one bomb.
We saw nukes being used a few times in the first couple seasons. Granted it is now 3 years since the last one and I have lost count, somewhere between 5 and 8 years since the Red Plague first deranged US command and control, presumably our inventory of many thousands of nukes did not simply turn into dust and blow away; either they remained under lock and key despite the nefarious infighting of misguided bad guy Americans and someone has taken the trouble to account for them all, or else there are hundreds or more nukes unaccounted for that presumably some of the cartoon villains of this storyline would put to bad use. I presume the former--steps were taken to make it inconvenient for three successive sets of villainous misgovernments in the USA to get their hands on...presumably had Granderson's mother, the leaders of the Immunes, or the conspirators in the season two seasons back had been allowed to persist and fulfill their various evil plans they'd have cracked the lock and key codes eventually and activated some, but Our Heroes from One Special Ship never give them the time and leisure for it. So three years of stable and legitimate government later, presumably the St Louis White House controls the codes and the weapons are all accounted for and either operational or disabled.
I know nuclear war heads, and the missiles that deliver them (it is plain enough to me why more "conventional" delivery systems like airplanes are off the board at the moment) have limited shelf lives, the bombs due to radioactive decay of their cores bringing them below critical not to mention any structural/electronic deterioration the neutron and gamma flux from the Pu or U-235 in the cores might do over time. Missiles, even such relatively simple and foolproof ones like the Minuteman with solid fuel, age and need maintenance and lose reliability as they age. Certainly it is reasonable that no one has manufactured either new bombs or missiles since the Red Plague broke out. But is it reasonable that after 8, maybe 10 years tops, and it sure looks like a lot less than 10 years, our ready and reliable inventory would drop to zero? I don't think so. If there are not thousands, there must be at least dozens of missiles ready to go.
Aha, the electronic control systems have all been hacked. Well, gosh, that is a problem, but many of these missiles go back in design to the 1960s or earlier. Say every guidance system has been since upgraded to something vulnerable to the computer virus. Well geez, just find some old geezers who designed the pre-microchip era versions, the ones installed in the original Minuteman and the like, and blow the dust off some museum pieces, and program in their flight instructions with a solder gun. They are ballistic. Do the math to program the rocket vector controls to put it on a course for the middle of the thing in the Darien gap, install the Flintstones generation brains, and fire. This might take some time I suppose, but if that is the case someone in Southern Command could at least mention it--"yes, we'll be firing some bombs at Cartagena if Mexico falls, but it will take a week and a half to get them ready."
It is like the writers of this show have simply never heard of anything like ICBMs--they must have fired the ones writing the first couple seasons I guess.
Has anyone read the book(s) or are they even relevant by now? What gives?
launching a nuke would require some satellite data and with everything hacked, not sure you can do that.
It requires a globe, some more detailed knowledge about the Earth's actual gravitational potential shape, some corrections for the fact that the Earth is spinning, and a target location.
From a given launch point, there is one trajectory that, for a given solid fuel rocket burn, will deliver a ballistic warhead to another given point on Earth. This trajectory is the same as long as the target stays where it is and the Earth does not change shape dramatically. It is just knowing where and what speed a rocket launched with a given mass of warhead will be when its fuel burns out, and then it is all Newtonian physics. The trickiest part, aside from the fact that Earth is not a perfect sphere so the geopotential field is not quite the simple ideal inverse linear potential of a point mass and you have to allow for it being a bit lopsided and having some mascons, is remembering Earth rotates so your rocket at burnout, relative to a fixed frame, is not on the same trajectory as it would be if Earth did not rotate, and that your target is moving eastward during flight time so you have to lead the target--which changes the flight time, so either someone knows a good trick to jump right to the right answer or if I had to do it, I'd have to iterate many times to converge on the right answer. But this is what thousands of people have done for a living since long before I was born so either they know the tricks or they just iterate it.
Given the full data someone trained in the basic math involved could do it with pencil and paper, and there are probably people who can give a damn close answer to how to program the vectoring in their heads. Maybe all those people retired and got old and died since computers got good enough, but programming a non-networked, unplugged and reset computer to do it is something I am very confident I could do myself, given a couple weeks to practice with C++ anyway. I couldn't do it fast enough but I think I could have back in 1986 or so.
Satellite data is relevant for target location but we had ICBMs long before we had a good fleet of surveillance sats up; back in the early '60s we had satellites that sent capsules with film canisters down to be retrieved and developed and studied. But we already had Atlas and Titan I operational. You just need latitude and longitude to within the precision you can hope to achieve given the precision you can control the rocket burn with. With solid fuel rockets burn time is a given, plus or minus some range of variation. Control is a matter of controlling which way it points, which is to say the rate of change of its attitude and azimuth of burn. Ideally you calculate the right azimuth and it holds to that, and the tricky bit is controlling the change in pitch from vertical to make it reenter at the right distance downrange.
As I said, install a foolproof dumb 1962 vintage guidance system and hardwire in the target destination. I don't think the Earth's geopotential field changes much from year to year--you have to know it pretty well for close accuracy but how much accuracy do you need with 250 megatons?
As I said, they should have noticed whatever the hell a "bridge over the Darien gap" is being built prior to the attack, and the people who saw it ought to be able to point to where it was on a paper map. They don't have to know what it is or what it is for; the purpose of sending the first missile is to remind people that attempting to invade the USA, or even Mexico if its government cries for help from us, is a hazardous undertaking. Picking that target from the plot of the story is fortuitious, because otherwise you'd be killing a lot of people--not that the USA is not already entitled to, but striking this mysterious object in the middle of nowhere is the "speaking softly" part of reminding everyone we have some big sticks.
Unless we don't. Which is the way everyone on screen is acting, like they have been shifted into a parallel universe where the Bomb never existed.
By the way does the idea of a "bridge over the Darien gap" even make any sense itself? I believe this gap is a stretch of Panamanian territory near the Colombian border where the terrain is really awful and no one has ever attempted to drive a road or railroad through, coast to coast, so one hikes through on foot, with great difficulty and danger, or takes a ship or boat from a port north of it to another port south of it, or flies over in an airplane. Wouldn't a "bridge" be a road perhaps having a great many individual bridges? And wouldn't it be a slow and expensive bit of civil engineering that would be a bit awkward to explain to the President of Panama, therefore not something you start until after you've assassinated him?
Anyway if they wanted to hit some other target it would have to have a fixed location, and of course be in range of the missile.
Where is the Pacific fleet in this story. Normally there are more ships based in the Pacific area than the west. It is hard to believe that only 1/2 of the USN is still operational. The remaining PacFlt ships could play a significant role in dealing with the problems to the south.
Also it is hard to believe that taking down the data links/communications would result in satellites falling from orbit.
Also it is hard to believe that taking down the data links/communications would result in satellites falling from orbit.
I accept that this is a melodrama and enjoyed it on that basis. Note that two seasons back, the question might have been where is the Atlantic fleet since all action then took place in the Pacific! I forget if there was some massive ship killing event during the dual Chinese warlord/American dictatorship franchise coup plotline, but I don't recall more happening than just the Chinese or other bad guys, with stabs in the back from St. Louis, being able to sink some US ships in Asian waters. As for the previous season, the whole thing with the Red Rust was set in the Mediterranean, so we would not know one way or the other what the hell was going on back in the States.
But except for events we have seen in all four seasons, there is little reason to think any of the hundreds of ships we now have in inventory would actually be sunk. The majority of them may not be seaworthy due to half a decade or more of no maintenance, but no one was going around sinking American ships in droves, and the Red Plague itself would kill crews but not harm the vessels. A ship out on deployment with a dying crew might be lost due to mishaps happen as it drifts as a ghost ship, but rather than 99 percent of the USN vanishing softly and silently away like so many boojum hunters, I have similar notions, now that you mention it, to the nuclear situation. Either bad guys broke in and seized assets which are scattered all over the world now, hundreds of bombs in the hands of very sketchy elements, and the drifting lost American ships either sank or were boarded by guys in motorboats who improvised ways to control them well enough to get to their home port and there crew and fix them up as best they could. Instead of a world where the USN has 5 ships and then 4 of them are sunk leaving it with just one, we ought to be facing a world where every surviving drug lord in Latin America and West Africa and Europe has commandeered a USN ship or three and are sinking them left and right in half assed combat. Indeed the plot would be stronger if the USN had say 25 operational ships in commission, but the South American bad guy of the season has been quietly knocking heads together and accumulating say a couple dozen of those Flying Dutchmen* to patch together and match the USN. It certainly would explain where the airstrike came from, though of course again the US satellites should have seen this fleet forming and a task force headed for Florida. Perhaps a more subtle form of cyber attack, that hacks each satellite into showing what the hackers want them to? That would explain ignorance of the "Darien Bridge" too. It would explain a lot of stuff actually.
But as with the ICBMs, if it is plausible the USN retains only a fraction in operational and mannable condition--that should still be a couple dozen, way more than the handful we saw blown up or otherwise wrecked in the past 4 seasons.
As for satellites being brought down by hack alone...it would be possible for the ones which are in low Earth orbit to be ordered to use their propellant reserves to brake them and thus bring their perigees below reentry level. And it is not necessary to account for every satellite, just a big part of them. That's actually better than my notion they could be killed with suborbital buckshot in fact! The ones way out in Geosynch and other distant orbits are not burning up in the atmosphere but perhaps they are wrecked by a two stage cyber command, to burn up all their propellant and then execute some logic bending instruction that burns them out somehow, or turns them into the mechanical equivalent of zombies. Putting them into slightly off and somewhat random orbits turns them into so much hazardous space junk of unknown location too, making sending anything into the orbits they used to occupy very risky.
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*I don't think Coleridge ever named the ship the Ancient Mariner sailed on, which is sad as that would be a more apt name.."And with a thump/A lifeless lump/They dropped down one by one!" Asimov by the way had an essay in which he makes an indirect case the Mariner was in fact on a Yankee ship, since "we were the first/Who ever burst/Into that silent sea." It was Americans who first ventured into Antarctic waters. So still more apt, curse you you flaky dope fiend for not naming the ship!)
Just caught up. I'm liking it but one thing I'm not getting is why is the Nathan James the only ship? Why did they build a brand new fleet when there must be dozens of USN ships still afloat. The virus didn't sink them that's for sure.
Also, I knew several years have passed the the pandemic but there is no way the world would have recovered to such levels after a mass die off like that. 5 billion people died.
Also, I knew several years have passed the the pandemic but there is no way the world would have recovered to such levels after a mass die off like that. 5 billion people died.