General question : Retired or not?

jinman · Aug 13, 2009

RichT said:
Jim, I remember the Mk76, a good system IIRC. And the spig55 Terrier Fire Control Radar. I was mostly a Tartar guy, then SM-1. Worked a lot on the Tartar Digital System, then early AEGIS.

I knew a lot of guys who worked on the Tartar's SPG-51 C/D radars. I was in the instructor crew at Mare Island and knew Tartar guys and Basic Point Defense Missile System (BPDMS). I still remember we used to pronounce BPDMS as "beep-ah-dee'-mus." We would kid the Tartar guys by telling them that Tartar spelled backwards is "RatRat."

When the Aegis missile system was in it's design stages, I was on the USS Leahy DLG-16 (later CG-16) out of Norfolk. Raytheon engineers brought a presentation onboard to show us and talk about problems and obstacles we faced with our weapons systems. I was extremely impressed that they wanted to actually see some of the nightmares we experienced due to designs that didn't take the shipboard environment into consideration. As it turns out, the Aegis missiles used the 51-C/D type of fire control radar system for their homing phase and it was much more stable than our old Terrier radar was.

Probably the biggest surprise of my career was the Harpoon Missile System. That system was so good and so stable that when it wasn't working, you could just turn it off. When you needed it, you just turned it on and it was ready. That was beyond comprehension for an old SPG-55 guy like me. If our radar was ever turned off, it could take a day or two to get it back on line and stable. We left it in Standby most of the time.