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Spruance class DD Ship Brief coming in February!

🕑 Added 2021-02-01 15:42:34 +0000 UTC

Comments

Jackson Plant

I served on DD 987 Obannon as QM3 any questions I might be able to help.

Jackson Plant

Sprucans were DD not DDG

It does have a paragraph on the Spruance class installation.

Aaron Amick

oh, thank you. Good find.

I have found a 1976 article on gear units for naval gas turbines. The author is British; perhaps some technology is different from that in American shipyards. The article is here: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/GT/proceedings-pdf/GT1976/79740/V01AT01A026/2391700/v01at01a026-76-gt-26.pdf

Interesting. I built the gearcases for those ships at Westinghouse Marine Division in Sunnyvale. 4 gas turbines into two gearcases .. 80,000 horsepower. We made them so quiet, that the Navy didn't believe it, until they came out and visited our humongous anechoic testing chamber. There is (or was) one left, which had been converted to remote control, which was mimicked in an episode of "The Last Ship", using a remotely controlled 'Chinese' destroyer to fool the bad guys. Hollywood imitating reality. As I recall, there were serious construction delays, due to Lockheed having very serious skilled trade-persons turnover of 60% per annum. We had to totally disassembly a lot of the gearboxes, kosmoline, and fill with dry nitrogen for storage. I seem to recall someone saying that it was costing Lockheed $13K a month per box, for storage fees. That's $13K in 1974 dollars. We also made the boxes for LHA's and the "Thresher" drivetrain replication. Challenging and rewarding work.

Is this the ship that’s behind James Earl Jones on his desk in The Hunt for the Red October?

Fantastic - I want to research the DD-963 class destroyers. Will the brief cover only the Spruance class ships, or also the derivative Kidd and Ticonderoga classes?