In The Navy (FT “A” School), Part 1

I will get the technical stuff out of the way in Part 1 of this section, so skip to Part 2 if this bores you or goes over your head.

FT “A” School was a 12 week long dabble into one of the most complex systems I have ever been introduced to. It should have been mind boggling, by any stretch of the imagination. A Weapons System on a fairly modern Submarine is one of the most insanely/brilliantly designed things you could possibly encounter. If you think about it, every other part of a Submarine is there for one reason; to support the Weapons System. It relies on or ties into everything inside the hull and is the one real reason you are out there on the water in the first place.

This is a classic argument between Sub Weapons Division personnel and guys running the engines. The engineering guys say the weapons are crap if the engine can’t get them to where they need to be. The weapons guys say we wouldn’t need an engine at all if we didn’t have the weapons. Of course, they need each other, unless neither is needed.

We dove into very complex “component level” trouble shooting. That means we learned how to figure out what Diode or Transistor on a certain card might be blown out. The hypocrisy of this level of training is the fact that we had no way to actually replace an individual “component” on a circuit card in the field (except maybe in the most extreme situations) and would normally just trash a bad card and plug in a replacement.

We were the very last class of MK-113 students (or so I was told) for the US Navy, so we were the last guys being trained like this. Someone had figured out that it was a waste of time to teach to the component level and with the new MK-117 there were just cards to swap out anyway. The MK-113 systems were all being replaced.

One of the most difficult parts of the class was learning how to handle the monstrous Analog equipment that was part of the system. The MK-113 (Mod 10, which I was learning) was a mix of archaic Analog and new age (for the Navy) Digital technology.

The MK-75 Attack Director was a fascinating piece of equipment. The reason it existed was to track a single target’s course, speed and range, so you could kill it. It was taller than a man, steel frame, heavy, always hot and very quirky. It was water cooled like much of the electronics on Subs of this time were. It’s easy to chill water down and dump the hot excess water overboard. It had 3 sections, which we were taught one at a time. If you opened the top or bottom section it looked like what you would expect the inside of Robby the Robot would look like. It sounded like a symphony of humming frequencies, anywhere between 60HZ and 400HZ. It was a just a big ass maze of gears, synchros and servos.



The rest of the Weapons System was mainly complex switching equipment, less the one Digital component of the system. The MK-81 Weapons Control Console looked a lot like a first generation Atari game screen, it was monochrome, black and green. It really had one purpose and that was to backup the MK-75. It was all digital and the FTs spent a lot of their time getting the Computer guys to restart the UYK-7 Computer which fed the MK-81 data. Windows 3.1 made this thing look like a tinker toy, for a lot less money.

We learned all about digital logic circuits (AND, NAND, OR, NOR etc.) and how they worked. It was a great experience and the technology basics we learned are still very practical in digital circuit design and software design, even today. But the fact remains, the weeks we spent tracking ones and zeros through digital circuits was an utter waste of time to us all, once we got to our boats.

Some of the training was learning how to replace bad pins or sockets in connectors (a common problem). Hardware stuff. We also learned all about safety while working on the equipment, which was interesting. We learned that you shouldn’t touch someone being electrocuted and to instead, use your belt to yank them off or just drop kick the effected person out of harm’s way. I never had the occasion to use either technique in real life, but have never forgotten them.

I wish I could find pictures of the equipment to get the point across of how big and bulky these things were, but I haven’t been able to find a single snippet.