I got to visit Bath Iron Works today. School field trip. They gave us a tour of the facility, they're currently about ready to launch two aegis class destroyers (one of which is the Stockdale, didn't know the other one's name, but it's the same class). We got a tour of the indoor facilities, which was pretty sweet. They've upgraded their indoor-building capabilities from 'mega' size to 'ultra' size (this is what they call it), subsequently there's the entire deck housing for one of the destroyers just sitting in a hangar-type building. Somehow they manage to move this damn thing outside and put it onto the ship...I guess that's what the big ass cranes were for. Unpainted it looks kind of like a giant playground.
Anyway, yeah, it was cool. I wanted to take pictures but they wouldn't let us take cameras inside. Poopheads.
Oh yeah, as the title said, I got to walk underneath the ships. They build the ships on level ground now and move it to the drydock where it floods and the ship goes underway, rather than the ships having to be build in that silly incline thing that the boat gets released from.
They employ a lot of nerdy naval architects that develop computer models for finite element analysis, computational fluid dynamics, stability calculations, junk like that. I'm thinking about trying to get an internship for them after I do my cadet shipping...actually put my programming skills to some sweet commercial use.
i enjoy boats
