#having sentient boats messes with so many historical events

[joezworld]

Any headcanons about Ever Ace and the other new A-class Evergreen ships? This totally isn’t just because I love your version of Ever Given and want more of her and her family XD

The following is an excerpt from How to Avoid Huge Ships, Or: I Never Met a Ship I Liked by Capt. John W. Trimmer (National Writers Press, 1982)

Chapter 14: The Emotional State of Ships

For most captains, the emotional state of a seagoing vessel (other than your own, of course) is often seen as irrelevant - after all, who cares if the seven hundred foot tanker about to run over you and your ketch is a nice person or not?

However, like many common beliefs in the marine industry, this is an incorrect one. The mental state of vessels is vital to continued safe navigation.

First, we must mention the obvious: An unhappy ship is a dangerous ship. Think about the last time you drove to the store while upset. Now pretend you weighed several thousand tons and required a mile and a half to stop in an emergency. I imagine your car insurance premiums might be a bit higher, no?

Then we must mention Fleets.

Allow me to explain: While this may be seen as a massively reductive statement, most large vessels (and most living machines for that matter, including commercial aircraft, railway locomotives, and even large dragline cranes) are best viewed as pack animals. When left alone to their own devices (and the growing economic benefits of 'machine autonomy' have meant that more shipping lines are allowing ships to go off by themselves!) vessels will often form a "fleet", as they call them, which substitutes for what we humans would call a joint family.

A fleet may include any number of vessels and relationship combinations, ranging from a number of single vessels who consider themselves siblings, to sets of separate married couples, and even groups of non-monogamous vessels whose conduct would make a Mormon blush. That being said, regardless of type, bonds formed in this manner are extremely strong, and will often overcome any difference between vessels - see the growing trend of former US Pacific Fleet vessels and their former Imperial Japanese Navy spouses!

Now, what does any of this have to do with the continued safety of marine navigation, I hear you ask? Well, let me put it to you in the simplest terms possible:

If you were to wrong me in some way, I might decide to take legal action against you, or I might lick my wounds and walk away. I might even go to the police if the offense were serious enough.

If you were to wrong a ship, and the offense were serious enough, they wouldn't lick their wounds, they wouldn't pursue legal action, and they most certainly would not go to the police. Most ships believe quite strongly in the merits of what could be charitably called 'extrajudicial punishment'. Most ships, if they are in such a relationship, would bring this to the attention of their fleet-mates, at which point you would not have one, but several, maybe even a dozen, extremely large and extremely angry ships going after you.

-

Of course, any discussion of the often-overlooked subject of Fleets is incomplete without at least a brief mention of the US/Canadian Great Lakes Fleet, which has managed to continuously add to their numbers through a process they call 'Lake-napping'...

-----

April, 2021 - Great Bitter Lake, Suez, Egypt

The Egyptians were insane, Given concluded. Aside from the obvious - where in the name of all that floated was she going to get nine hundred million US Dollars? - they'd actually called their Navy on her, like some kind of Triad enforcer making sure a mark didn't get away without paying.

He was a tiny ship, really - some old design that made its priorities clear, judging from his open-air flying bridge and thick hull, but the massive anti-ship missile pods on his aft deck showed he could punch well above his weight.

She'd tried speaking to him, but they didn't have a language in common - and that was impressive all on its own. From the short, clipped sentences, and badly accented Arabic, he seemed both Eastern European and decidedly unfriendly.

As the sun set on the end of the first week of what might be a very long stay in Egypt, she wondered if the line might abandon her here. The cheap fucks had already been making noise about replacing her with another, bigger ship, but Ace - still in the shipyard, but already proving herself to be just as loud and annoying as any proper 20,000+ TEU ship, bless her - had made enough noise about "not being a rebound date" that their hand had been forced.

Of course, that was all before the Egyptians decided that they wanted nine hundred million dollars, so who knows?

Another ship went by - the backlog still wasn't through, and convoys continued at all hours. This one was one from CMA CGM, and while she couldn't quite catch his name in the dark, she could absolutely catch the scathing French insults being hurled her way as he passed by.

"Je parle français, toi voilier sans hélice." She sniped at him, relishing in the startled yelp that trailed him into the night. The tugboats pulling him along laughed, and he growled at them as he moved further into the lake.

The missile boat looked at her with what might have been admiration, but it didn't stop him from keeping his guns trained on her as he changed his watch position to a spot off of her stern.

She honestly considered running - the mockery she'd get once she left Egypt might be too much.

As the next ship in line approached, she got a ping on one of the company radio frequencies.

Tuning in, her brow furrowed in confusion - now that everyone had satellite internet downlinks, internet chatrooms had become the primary communication method across the fleet. Evergreen Lines ships had all gravitated towards Discord instead of WeChat or Line, but their server had been strangely silent for most of the last week.

Opening the channel, she caught a flash of a call sign - What was Elpida doing out here? Wasn't she on the Australia run?

"Don't say a word, we've got it under control."

"You what? Who's we?"

Elpida swept past , literally - she was breaking the speed limit for this part of the lake, and had probably been doing so in the Canal too - the ropes to her tugs were taut, and judging by the Arabic screaming, they were trying to get her to slow down or at least let go. She was high in the water - her decks empty of containers - what the hell was going on?

Given was too big for the swells to affect her, but the Egyptian Navy ship wasn't, and he yelped in whatever his native language was as he rocked and rolled in Elpida's wake.

Behind her, a distant cry that sounded suspiciously like the word "Now!" rang out, followed by a deafening cacophony of foghorns.

She'd shut down her radar - because what really was the point? - and it took a worrying few seconds for the Furuno system to spin to life and return a clear result.

Or... what might be a clear result.

All hell seemed to be breaking out behind her - the convoy had broken formation and was going in what seemed like every direction possible. At least ten ships were now going berserk behind her.

The Navy ship, by far the smallest vessel out there, (except the tugs, who were fleeing for their lives, it seemed) spun around towards the main shipping lane.

Collision alarms immediately started wailing on the Canal's common channel as a very large blip on the radar screen (Who turned off their AIS transponders in the Canal?) slowly swung towards him.

The Egyptian seemed stunned for a moment - he'd drifted back into Given's range of vision, and his expression ranged between sheer horror and mildly poleaxed - before he calmed himself and stood down the ship bearing down on him.

That calm look lasted for a few minutes, but as the blip got closer and closer his confidence faded. The doors to his missile pods swung open, but his nerve broke before he could fire them, and the water around his stern frothed up into a roiling tempest as he set off at full astern.

It wasn't enough. He'd held his ground for just long enough for the other ship to reach him.

Slowly - this whole event was playing out in breathless slow motion, because nobody was actually that speedy - a bulbous bow, riding high out of the water without a load of containers, ploughed towards him. It was followed by a bowsprit, one that was so huge it looked like it could have been Given's own.

Then came the name: EVER ACE.

Then came the collision.

Ace (?!) didn't so much collide with the Egyptian ship as she drove over him. His low freeboard meant that the impact with her bulbous bow had his far side dipping into the water. Once his deck hit the swells, it acted like a giant scoop, and his keel was to the night sky within a few seconds. He'd been hit at an angle, so once he'd been pushed free, he slowly rolled back up, a much more traumatized and injured vessel than he had been a minute ago. More importantly, the water gushing out of his missile tubes meant that he was no longer a problem.

"Hey!" Ace boomed as her pilothouse drew even with Given. "Best Sea Trials Ever!"

Behind her, another ship - this one laden and looking a lot like Golden - steamed by. "Stop hanging around and get her out of here!"

"That would be my cue." Another voice called from behind her.

"Tex?" He was in Manila!

"Who else would it be?" Texas Triumph, thick Texan accent and all, steamed up. "now let's jus' get you settled up here and we'll blow this joint."

"This is a rescue?!"

"For sure pardner! We've been planning this since those highwaymen said they was keepin' ya here."

"Stop talking and get her out of here!" Golden bellowed from further up the river. It seemed like she was now intimidating some other tugboats from intervening.

"Well, ya heard 'er." Tex said. "Les' go!"

Given had been so distracted by the appearance of so many members of her family that she hadn't even noticed Tex slipping lines through her hawseholes until they went taut and she was yanked from her moorings by Tex steaming out in pursuit of Ace's retreating form.

She just barely managed to get her anchors retracted before Tex really put some power on, and began to pull her across the lake entirely.

------------------------------------

Later...

The War Zone

Ever Given Escapes Custody Suez Canal Authority claims no responsibility, Egyptian Navy vessel possibly damaged. BY TYLER ROGOWAY April 17, 2021 THE WAR ZONE

📷@mahmou10_ships VIA @SUEZWATCH_EGY

SHARE TYLER ROGOWAY View Tyler Rogoway's Articles @Aviation_Intel Details remain limited at this time, but there was an incident in the Great Bitter Lake. At least one Egyptian Navy vessel has been severely damaged, and MV Ever Given, who had been held in the Great Bitter Lake by the Suez Canal Authority, has now fled the Canal into the Mediterranean Sea.

Again, details are extremely limited, but based on social media reports, marine tracking data, and radio reports, at approximately 11:47 PM Egypt Standard Time (EGY) a disturbance was reported by the Egyptian Navy craft - their identity is still unconfirmed, but images posted to social media seem to indicate that the vessel is a former Soviet Osa-class missile craft. The vessel reported that "A convoy has gone mad" and he was "under attack from multiple vessels".

While a convoy had transited the canal at that time, it is unclear if they were involved in the attack, or if one occurred at all.

We've reached out to Evergreen Lines, The Suez Canal Authority, the Egyptian Navy, and the individual ships believed to be involved, including Ever Given.

We will update this piece as more information comes available.

Contact the author: Tyler@thedrive.com

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[joezworld]

A battered and beaten U-21 dragged himself onto the shoreline near Kirk Ronan, utterly bewildered by the total lack of alarm or surprise from the English before they unleashed so much firepower that he was almost blown into next Dienstag.

His bafflement continued when the Sudrians turn out to be equally non-plussed. At first they think nothing of a submarine seemingly trying to escape the ocean, and when they eventually notice he's there, they apologetically(!) declare him a prisoner of war and drag him fully onto the beach so he can't escape.

He spends the rest of the war and some time after that as a climbing frame for beachgoing children before the admiralty realizes he's there.

(Did I mention that nobody on Sodor informed the Admiralty? Nobody informed the Admiralty. They recognized that he was an enemy ship and took action on their own, in the process becoming some of the only people to kidnap a ship.)

They drag him off the beach and send him back to Germany The Wiemar Republic, shaking their heads at the Island People Who Managed To Catch A Submarine.

As a note, the victorious Allies were not kind to the U-Boats who surrendered (with good reason), and U-21 is one of the few imperial German U -oats to have avoided even longer prison sentences, 'exile' to foreign lands (America), or worse.

The people of Kirk Ronan get letters every couple of months from Germany, and their general care for the well being of their former prisoner is viewed with suspicion by some. It doesn't help that most of the town's children have an above average grasp of the German language, especially nautical terminology.

Then, in the 30's some... interesting news begins to come out of Germany. It seems that, among other things, their version of Parliament has burned to the ground, and their government is introducing sweeping changes as a result.

About a month later, the citizens of Kirk Ronan find an unusual piece of flotsam washed up on "U-Boat Beach": U-21, who beached himself on shore and is refusing to leave. "All is not well at home." He says, and begs them to put him back on his Beach.

They do, of course, telling no-one in the process. Afterwards, they wonder what exactly has gotten their old friend so scared?

For more information on why U-21 might have wanted to leave Germany, please read any history textbook published after 1945.

The twelve year time period following U-21's second beaching is one of the most influential periods of human history. War breaks out, anti-German sentiment is on the rise, and the citizens of Kirk Ronan are forced to go to increasingly absurd lengths to ensure nothing untoward happens to their friend.

Most admiralty men can be tempted or distracted by food, drink, or particularly attractive women, but one keen officer sees through their distractions, ignores the British Flags painted all over U-21, and rips off the novelty fake mustache that Mrs. Parker the barmaid was sure would work. The townsfolk must resort to violence after that, and the officer is eventually returned to the Admiralty hogtied and sporting a black eye. He never tells anyone.

One of the other residents of Sodor at this time was a young Anglican priest by the name of Awdry. He'd come over with his family after they'd been relocated away from areas hit by the Blitz, while they'd settled (temporarily) in Els River valley near Ffarquhar, the Reverend and his family did make the occasional seaside trip, including several journeys out to Kirk Ronan's renowned beaches. The presence of a U-Boat, regardless of where his allegiances laid, was quite off-putting to the elder Awdry, and might have been the reason why Kirk Ronan and its surrounding areas didn't feature in the books he would later write about the island!

Following the war, U-21 would remain on Kirk Ronan's shores until 1949, when he was returned to the water just as quietly as he arrived. Bidding the seaside town a farewell, he returned to Europe, and became one of the first submarines to serve in the West German Bundesmarine in 1951.

Following an honorable 16-year career, he retired from active service in 1967. Upon his retirement, the Bundesmarime honored his service by announcing that a new Type-205 submarine would be commissioned as the next U-21.

Around the same time, the local Government of Kirk Ronan announced that a disused dock in the town harbor had been purchased by the town council after the previous owner had gone bankrupt. After a lively local discussion as to what it should be, the local council announced the winning result: a small museum, showcasing the maritime history of Kirk Ronan and eastern Sodor in general.

Reaction from the rest of the island was bemused at best: Kirk Ronan did not have much in the way of "maritime history." In their minds, a larger port like Tidmouth, Knapford, or Barrow would be better suited for this.

So it was greatly surprising to the rest of the island when the Kirk Ronan Maritime museum managed to bag themselves a fully functional U-Boat as their star exhibit!

It was of course U-21, who helped curate a quite frankly excellent collection of artifacts from both world wars, in addition to quite accurately depicting Sodor's own maritime industry.

(In 1982, the International Congress of Maritime Museums listed their "Top 10 exhibits you might not have heard of." The "Sodor's Fisheries" exhibit at the KRMM was narrowly awarded second place, beaten by their own Early WW1 U-Boat exhibit!)

Since then, U-21 has lived a mostly* uneventful life in Kirk Ronan, managing the museum's collection of artifacts while also finding time to appear in local regattas and sail-in events. He is a well-regarded member of Sodor's citizenry, albeit one of the more obscure.

*I say mostly, because having a U-Boat suddenly appear out of the depths of the harbor has occasionally scared the living daylights out of people and ships alike. There is also the events of January 29, 2015, when, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the shelling of Vicarstown, the museum staged a recreation of the shelling... without informing BAE Systems, who now owned the shipyard that U-21 had shelled.

In an almost Awdry-esque Sodor Coincidence, BAE had finally received permission to demolish the old WW1 era hangars on their property. The buildings were old, solidly constructed, and the local council (who didn’t really want the historic buildings knocked down) had given them exactly one day to demolish the structures. Faced with few other options, BAE hired a demolitions company, who wired the buildings with plastic explosives and took them down just after lunch on the 29th.

Meanwhile, out in the Walney Channel, a group of very pale museum employees were staring down the smoking barrel of U-21's deck gun, wondering if they'd somehow just completed a gunnery mission planned by Kaiser Wilhelm.

On 29th January 1915, Barrow itself became the subject of attention from the German submarine U-21, the first enemy submarine to reach the north-western coast. U-21 suddenly appeared in the Irish Sea some 3 miles off Walney Island. The fact that it was 2pm and broad daylight, she caused little panic as submarines were a common sight in these waters, given the nature of the shipyard.  It wasn’t until she opened fire on the airship hangers on Walney Island that anyone actually took any notice.

what

[joezworld]

Question: who wins if the crew of a vehicle want one thing, but the vehicle wants to do another. For Example since you brought up CSN ironclads, Year: 1861, the Crew of an Iron Clad want to join the Confederacy, but the ship is loyal to the Union. Who wins?

Depends on how hard everyone is willing to fight about it - it's very easy for a ship to just go do their own thing, crew be damned, but the crew is likely to have axes and wrenches and hammers and other things that could totally disable the ship if they wanted. (They're like parasites in that way, and many ships who have had that happen are very hesitant to take a crew again) In modern times, with watertight bulkheads, ships are able to just seal up hallways and lock people inside, but welding equipment can get around that - see the Steven Segal movie Under Siege for an example of Ship vs Crew and the advantages/disadvantages both sides face.

That being said, in 1861 it's likely the ship wins that argument - it's very unlikely that anyone on the crew knows how to swim, and with very early steamships like those, really the only way of truly disabling them is to cause a catastrophic mechanical failure... which would disable the bilge pumps, cause the boiler to explode, and/or strand everyone at sea. In order to prevent the death of everyone on board due to stupidity, the crew would likely just let the ship sail into port, and then slip into the Confederacy on their own time.

[joezworld]

Do you have any thoughts on the USS Wolverone and her sister ship USS Sable, the only two paddlewheeled aircraft carriers in the US Navy?

Sister ships is a... bold stance to take there. Try telling that around the Chicago docks and you'll get laughed all the way to Sault Ste. Marie.

Both of these ships did not initially start life as aircraft carriers - they were originally very luxurious passenger steamers - Greater Buffalo and Seeandbee. It's not known exactly when they first got to know each other (they ran basically the same routes along the American side of Lake Erie from Detroit to Buffalo via Cleveland), but considering the fact that Greater Buffalo has never quite been able to shake the nickname GeeBee, it's assumed that Seeandbee was the initiator of that friendship.

Both of these ships were known at the time as paragons of beauty - they'd been designed to attract passengers and in the process attracted other ships as well - but no other Laker could ever "get" either of them, with callers/suitors being gently or not-so-gently turned down. This was not exceptionally uncommon, as many vessels were 'waiting for Mr./Ms. Right', but these two never seemed to be that type.

In fact they seemed quite close to each other... but it was the 1930's, so they were just gals being pals, right?

Right?

Listen, I'm not going to say that the Great Lakes fleet was very homophobic, but such relationships just didn't occur! (because it was the 1930's and everything was awful and nobody ever said anything)

So it was quite a surprise when in 1942, Greater Buffalo joined the Navy, and got willingly converted into an aircraft carrier. Why was that a surprise? Because Seeandbee had already done that a few months earlier, and if anyone was not going to get their upper works chopped off, their pilothouse moved, and generally submit to massive structural changes, it was "GeeBee" - who was so invested in her appearance that she spent part of her winter layup obsessing over anti-fouling paint swatches. (It came in one color at the time. Where she found someone who could make different ones is lost to history.)

Of course, once that happened, and she sailed out of the shipyard in Chicago with a side island and a flight deck just like Seeandbee, everyone else on the lakes kinda knew. It actually became a very big to-do amongst the ships of the Great Lakes fleet, as this was probably the closest thing to an out-and-out declaration of same-sex love that anyone had ever seen, and a lot of informal social change followed it.

-

Their war service was actually an anti-climax compared to all the buildup to it - they lacked any real 'carrier' equipment, and were basically just giant floating landing strips for inexperienced pilots. As Seeandbee would recount much later: "for such a big war, it was actually rather dull."

-

3 years later, the war was over and so was the Navy's interest in the two. In what would become a rather unfortunate trend for the Navy, they dropped the ships like hot rocks the moment hostilities ended, leaving them as RADM Seeandbee (USN Ret.) and CDRE Greater Buffalo (USN Ret.) whether they liked it or not!

After that, the ships entered "private ownership" working for themselves as 'hulls for hire'. It wasn't economical to de-convert themselves back into passenger steamers, as the postwar economic boom soon made car and rail travel the dominant forces of travel in and around the Great Lakes, but they found work throughout the 40's, 50's, and 60's as dedicated cargo vessels and spot-hire ferries, capable of carrying a lot of automobiles on their flight decks, along with large or otherwise unwieldy cargos.

This made them a regular sight in all of the Great Lakes, and they continued to be unofficially but totally officially A Thing (TM), meaning that a lot of the Lakers (a term denoting any ship that is permanently homeported in the Great Lakes) had to really address their prejudices whether they wanted to or not, as a quirk of mechanized psychology means that something as serious as the criticism of a "fleetmate's" life partner will draw an immediate, vociferous, and oftentimes unconscious defense, even if the ship doing the defending shares the viewpoint of the person or ship they're yelling at. This meant that most of the Great lakes Fleet spent the 60's and 70's more or less unconsciously indoctrinating themselves into not being homophobes - which is a fun historical side note that rarely gets mentioned because most ships had no idea it was happening.

Seriously - they didn't know. A sociology paper was published on this in the very early 80's by a NASA jet who was doing her doctoral thesis, and when it finally got the attention of the lake fleet in the late 1990's, they all collectively bluescreened over it.

-

Going into the 1980's, Lake traffic had changed significantly - air travel, rail freight, and cars and trucks had taken away a lot of business, and ships were having to band together just to keep busy. (I could do a whole thing on him, but noted Survivor(tm) Ed Fitzgerald ended up cashing in a lot of his liquid assets and just bought vertically-integrated steelmaker Cleveland-Cliffs in 1999 just so he could employ as many of his friends as possible.) Finding their business opportunities drying up, both Seeandbee and Greater Buffalo went back into government service, joining the Coast Guard in 1986. Since then, the pair have been operating as mobile search and rescue bases - with helicopters being launched from their decks in support of missing or sinking boats.

An incredibly recognizable pair of ships, especially in their white and orange Coast Guard paint, the two have become local icons in their home port of Chicago, appearing in the background of many different films and tv shows.

Going into the 21st century brought new and interesting life events: In 2003, Ontario legalized same-sex marriage, becoming the first in Canada to do so. Within days of the ruling, Seeandbee and Greater Buffalo - with flags flying and USCG paint polished to a mirror finish, besieged the Sault Ste. Marie municipal courthouse and were wed in a very short ceremony after a 70 year courtship period. This made headlines across the United States and Canada, as the United States, which did not recognize same-sex marriage at the time, had a significant bit of egg on their face from the very public nature of the marriage ceremony. It was expected that some pushback might occur from either the Coast Guard (don't ask, don't tell was still enforceable), or the US Government, which was capable of not recognizing the 'illegitimate' marriage certificate.

That pushback never happened - in no small part due to the fact that the Department of Transportation had spent most of the 1980s and 1990 funding studies into mechanical psychology, meaning that SecTrans Norman Mineta was able to articulate to President Bush exactly how fucked the US/Canadian steel industry would be if the entire Great Lakes Fleet rioted over this, which they absolutely would have. Additionally, the Coast Guard had seen how poorly the Navy had treated some of its ships in the early 1990s (Not due to LGBT rights, but instead had been part of a greater push to retire Cold-War-Era ships, and had notably caused a massive institutional brain-drain within the Navy after said push went a little too well, and caused many ships whose service began in WW1/WW2 to leave in disgust.) and had no desire to repeat those mistakes, so they supported the pair unconditionally, a first for any US uniformed service. (They'd hired many of the now -ex Navy vessels, and feelings were still raw.)

Following this, the now-married couple continued their Coast Guard service, which they continue to this day. Additionally, after realizing that their marriage was accepted more through extenuating circumstances than any real attempt to accept same-sex marriage, they both became tireless advocates of same-sex marriage until the ruling on Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015, after which they became supporters of acceptance of gay people and LGBTQ+ rights.

[joezworld]

The USCGC Taney has a pretty interesting real life history. It's the last Pearl Harbor survivor to leave active service. Any headcanons about her?

Roger Taney (yes, his namesake is very very very very racist - but he's made numerous strides to be the "better Taney") is currently the Commandant of the Coast Guard, the second time he held the position. (previous term was 1994-1998) He's a stubborn old tub (in the most affectionate way possible) who's been a pack a day smoker since the 40's, can shoot the wings off a fly at 1.5 miles, and is generally considered to embody many of the Coast Guard's truest ideals.

A common joke in the USCG goes more or less as follows:

"Hey, you hear that Roger's retiring next week?"

[Optional Uproarious laughter]

"Really? They managed to schedule the apocalypse, did they?"

-

Also, saying that Roger Taney is the last Pearl Harbor survivor in active service is quite a bold statement, considering that most of his Coast Guard fleetmates were also in Pearl Harbor - you might know them: USCGS Pennsylvania, USCGS Maryland, USCGS Nevada, USCGS Oklahoma, USCGS Utah, and USCGS Vestal. After long and fruitful Navy careers, they all retired in one way or another and ended up in the Coast Guard alongside a lot of other former Navy vessels.

Also there's USS Oglala, who has been asked many times to retire/go away by the Navy, and has refused every time. She's one of the oldest ships in the Navy after the USS Constitution, and is perfectly fine with that.

[joezworld]

I was just reading the thing about vehicle shopping and I love how in depth it is, but I do have to ask; there are still Civil War ironclads *in service* with the US Navy?? I assumed they'd all have retired by now.

That's a great question!

The short version of this is: No, but also yes.

Long version below:

Bluntly put, there aren't any more ironclads in US Navy service - however that doesn't really matter. The Defense Commissary Agency is a lot like the VA, in that they serve active duty soldiers as well as retired ones, so they're legally required to serve anybody who served the DOD at any point - which includes the US Navy's (and the Confederate Navy's - reconstruction had some shit go on) Ironclad warships, as well as any other sentient vessels, which consists of a lot of wooden paddlewheel steamers and screw-powered cutters and the like. Their numbers have gone down via attrition over the years, but there's more than you'd think.

None of them remain in active service with the US Navy - as there has not been an active need for river warships since the Civil War, and the unfortunate loss of USS Monitor in 1862 showed that most ironclad's seagoing abilities were minimal. The US Navy began retiring the vessels in the early 1870's and into the 1880's. By 1900, the only Civil War Ironclads still in service were the USS Kickapoo, USS Casco, and USS Ajax, all of whom held desk positions within the United States department of the Navy well into WW1. No Confederate Ironclads were permitted to enter US Navy service, (Almost all surviving CSN vessels were ex-USN, and therefore were traitors. Those built by the CSA were either KIA or never completed.) however many vessels did end up being appointed to state national guards or city police forces in southern coastal cities by sympathetic governments.

In the many years since the Civil War, most Ironclads have found other work within the US Government - the Coast Guard especially benefited from this, as the Ironclad fleet's extensive local knowledge of the US river system, and their large gun emplacements have made them an excellent fit in the service's "life saving" and "law enforcement" roles. These ships have in some cases served for well over a hundred years, and thanks to active rebuild programs (and the fact that the Coast Guard isn't a bunch of utter jerks like the Navy - ask me about that clusterfuck sometime) they're more than likely going to continue serving for centuries more.

Those ships that didn't enter Coast Guard service (many chose to go into 'private ownership' for long periods of time) usually ended up in other federal agencies - the Immigration and Naturalization Service being the most prevalent, but Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, and Treasury service is/was not uncommon, as is modern-day service for NOAA and State Departments of Fisheries/Wildlife/Commerce/Watercraft Enforcement.

[joezworld]

📁How did the ships react to the clusterfuck that was the Costa Concordia disaster? I'm willing to bet that a certain Captain Schettino is likely to end up on the ocean floor, or at least something else that's dark-yet funny in a baroque way.

Overall, reactions started out sympathetic, but rather quickly turned angry.

The accident itself was kinda-sorta Concordia's fault - she was The Ship, and if she'd been on the ball, this accident wouldn't have happened. Every ship has had a bad captain at some point, and it's their responsibility to keep the idiots in check. If the accident had ended there, it's likely that most ships would have quietly made fun of Concordia for her lapse of judgement while publicly saying that it was an "unfortunate accident".

(BTW, Concordia got raised in 2015. She's slowly being rebuilt by her insurance company. Pre-COVID, her repairs were expected to be done in 2022.)

That being said, Schettino's conduct following the crash was absolutely unacceptable. It is both accepted and expected that the captain of a ship will either be the last one off or one of the last ones off. (Going down with the ship has fallen out of fashion - someone needs to be interviewed by the authorities afterwards) The fact that Schettino jumped ship and left his passengers to die is considered extremely distasteful by humans, but is a cardinal sin amongst ships. As it stood, it was likely that he'd never be able to captain anything bigger than a Rowboat ever again, but when he started getting support from the Captain of the MTS Oceanos, the. Gloves. Came. Off.

To briefly speak on the topic of Oceanos, he was an old Greek liner who found a second life working cheap cruises. He sank off the coast of South Africa after years of deferred maintenance caught up to him. His captain and almost all the crew very quietly abandoned ship, leaving the passengers to die in the heaving 30ft seas. It was up to the ship's entertainment staff to actually perform an evacuation, while Oceanos himself kept broadcasting an SOS until help was summoned. Somehow, the only fatality of the sinking was Oceanos himself, but his captain's betrayal was not forgotten by the international ocean-going community.

So, as Schettino was getting raked over the coals, Oceanos' Captain Avranas opened his big mouth and started supporting Schettino's actions.

To put this in context, imagine if the Charleston Church shooter started getting support from the guy who shot up Sandy Hook - it was NOT a good look, and the international maritime community went from 0️⃣-💯 real quick.

Schettino had been smart enough to keep well away from the oceans since the accident, but Avranas had no such self-preservation instincts, and convinced Schettino to travel out to his home in Greece so they could present a unified front for the media.

Avranas' home was on a small Greek Island. It required two ferry changes to get to it.

Supposedly, the two of them boarded a ferry to get there.

They've never been seen since!

[joezworld]

Has there been any media specifically catered to sentient vehicles in your universe?

Yes

In the early days of films, many silent movies featured locomotives as leading and supporting actors - Buster Keaton’s film The General launched several engines into stardom, and Charlie Chaplin once considered going into the railroad business after he filmed three films back-to-back-to-back on the same California short line.  

The isolated nature of mountain railroading has often been used as a backdrop for both thriller and horror movies, and many locomotives have found modest or large stardom as a result. 

While most movies featuring sentient vehicles are intended for mass markets, the rise of affordable film equipment in the 1970′s and onwards led to the rise of independent films made by trains, ships, and airplanes for trains, ships, and airplanes. While these films could be considered to be part of [insert minority here]-ploitation genre that was common at that time, many of these films were actually very well done, including the 1979 Oscar-nominated war film Trijet Sunrise. 

Most war movies have also been aimed at the sentient vehicle demographic, with the 1991 film Fleet of the Sun featuring over two dozen US Navy warships as they reenacted part of the Battle of Leyte Gulf. 

While aimed at humans, the 1986 Ridley Scott film Top Gun has been enormously popular within the fleet and aircraft of the United States Navy, to the point where the song Danger Zone has become the unofficial anthem of Navy aviation.

While it has never been released to the public, Miles Up was a film collaboratively made by NASA’s Space Shuttle fleet between 1991 and 1999, and is currently the only non-documentary film to be made entirely off-world. 

The most recent film to feature sentient vehicles in a major starring role is the 2021 film Godzilla vs. Kong vs. Battleships, which follows a group of US Navy vessels as they seek revenge for their colleagues killed by Godzilla during the events of the previous two Godzilla movies. Originally meant to feature only USS Missouri, the film was heavily rewritten after every surviving World War 2 battleship (from both sides) agreed to participate. The film features a massive climactic fight in the center of the earth between numerous anti-gravity equipped Battleships, King Kong, Godzilla, and Mechagodzilla. Despite its ludicrous plot and outrageous scope, the film is being hailed as one of the best (CGI) fight scenes in recent years. 

[joezworld]

In your headcanon posts, you consistently cover the Genocide of British Steam Locomotives; but what about the mass-scrapping, sinking, or nuking of most of the Royal Navy's ships post-WWII? Would it also be considered a genocide? Did any ships escape?

What a very good question! As much as I'd like to give a simple answer, it's very much a yes-and-no kind of deal.

During the early stages of the war, the United States (who was supplying the UK with most of their weapons) had become mildly concerned about the loss rate of British combat vessels. While this was nothing unusual, (take a look at Liberty Ships and the unarmed Jeep Carriers, Tin Can destroyers, and destroyer escorts) the number of pointless losses - where ships would be sacrificed to save the human crew, or scuttled after receiving major bit repairable damage - were much higher than in the rest of the Allied Navies. This was emphasized by the destruction of USS Buchanan (HMS Campbeltown) in the Saint Nazaire Raid. Buchanan, a relatively obsolete American ship on long term assignment to the English, was loaded with dynamite and used as a suicide bomber against the German-controlled drydocks in Saint Nazaire. The British reported Buchanan as "Killed in Action", without saying what happened, and the US only discovered the results after reading a report filed by members of the French Resistance.

Around the same time as this was occurring, concerning stories were emerging from the UK proper - sentient vehicles such as locomotives, cranes, heavy machinery, aircraft, and some road vehicles, all of whom were officers or enlisted men in the US Armed Forces and were merely serving with the British, were reporting that they were receiving significantly shoddier treatment from the British than their human counterparts. This got to the point where they were being withheld things like pay, mail, and basic medical care. Some locomotives and a lot of heavy equipment were also discovered to have 'gone missing' after major damage, with British records reporting that they had been "put down" or "cut up".

It did not take a brain surgeon to figure out what was going on, but there was this tiny little problem of NEEDING TO BEAT THE NAZIS, so not much was done until the war's end other than drafting more humans into observation roles in primarily machine-filled units.

That being said, during the 1945-1947 demobilization program, the United States made it very clear that their machines had been lent, not donated, and they'd like them back. By 1948, almost 99% of all surviving US vehicles were repatriated or otherwise transferred out of the UK.

As for the rest of the Royal Navy, they were forced to make do with less - as the US had taken back most of their ships, it meant that those who were left had to keep on going long past their retirement date. Some veterans of WW2 were part of the Falklands fleet, if that gives any idea as to how long they served.

Those ships that were retired usually had a bleak future for them: the culture of the UK being what it was, most ships had no idea that they couldn't just sail away when they retired, and more than a few willingly steamed into ship-breakers yards.

But, the Americans, not needing to take on the massive expense of rebuilding their country, had no need for a lot of the ships who had served in the military, and they retired them en masse throughout the late 40's. This meant that many vessels who had served with the Brits in battle were not busy at all, and were more than willing to drag their friends out of the scrapyard whether they wanted it or not.

Following the 1960's, when Britain's cultural disdain for the mechanized lifeform was put on full display, a large number of retired ships, including the retired Battleship USS Pennsylvania, formed a makeshift privateer force that would... deter Royal Navy vessels from turning themselves over to scrapyards - at gunpoint if necessary. This proceeded until after the Falklands War, at which point the "newly reorganized" Argentinian Government offered to "purchase" any vessel the Royal Navy no longer needed. This plugged the stopgap between the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the still-ongoing Hong Kong Crisis, which has ensured that the RN actually hasn't retired a vessel in almost 30 years, electing to keep its institutional memory alive and well and instead modifies and modernizes existing vessels.

.

.

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As for the Nuclear Tests... that remains a sore spot in the Vehicle Rights world, as well as in US-German relations.

During the war, a large number of War Crimes were committed, many of them heinous and not worth speaking about. For reasons that really do not need to be gone into here, the majority of the sea-going war crimes were committed by the German Kreigsmarine.

(Although in the interest of fairness, with the exception of Australia and New Zealand, vessels from all countries, Allied or Axis, had been convicted of War Crimes)

Following the end of the war, the numerous war crime trials that followed usually sentenced the guilty to death - because, well, pick up a damn history book, I'm not saying what they did out loud - and the maritime trials were no exception.

Some debate occurred in how they would actually conduct these executions, as you can't really hang a battleship or a submarine, until the United States announced that it had a solution.

The vast majority of the condemned vessels - mostly German and Japanese, but with some Italian, Vichy French, and Polish as well - were stripped of usable parts before being towed into the South Pacific, where they were used as target vessels during the 1946 Operation Crossroads nuclear tests. Those who were not part of the Crossroads blasts were later used as targets for the Operation Sandstone tests in 1948.

I will not go into exact details here, but one primary point of contention is the fact that the first two blasts - Able and Baker - were unable to sink the vast majority of the target vessels, requiring the third test - Charlie - to be conducted with the ships moored in a tight grouping, with the bomb placed on the deck of the ship in the center.

It was not a pleasant or diginifed way to go, and it almost makes you feel sorry for literal Nazis.

[joezworld]

All you boat headcanons got me thinking after I watched a video on the Edmund Fitzgerald the other day. All I could think of was Arthur M Anderson and him were maybe like friends or something and they were both traveling in that storm. Then they lost contact and Anderson and his crew risked their lives to go back out in the storm to try and find them but never found anything except one piece of a lifeboat. And then that thought made me really fucking sad. 😞

I’m actively writing a piece on how boats deal with friends and family sinking - it’s an interesting concept because most of the time boats survive the sinking unless they break up in the process, which means that a lot of shipwrecks might still be alive until they rust away. 

The Great Lakes are a particularly interesting place because the water is fresh, and therefore most wrecks don’t rust and are therefore really well preserved, and therefore are around for a long time on the bottom. 

This was not something that was well known until the late 1940s, at which point deepwater ship salvage became a bonafide cottage industry on the lakes, as men and ships began trying to pull colleagues out of the deeper parts of the lakes. 

One of the biggest issues in the way of this is the Zebra Mussel, which began invading the Great Lakes in the early 90s. This is not a normal problem, as the aren’t that harmful, however they multiply like fucking rabbits and grow on everything, including shipwrecks - to the point of structural collapse. 

Once this was discovered, the Great Lakes shipping fleet collectively lost their fucking minds and spent most of the 90′s actively scouring the lakes for anyone they could find before the mussels got fully entrenched. They’ve pulled thousands of ships off of the bottom since then, and have also made good progress on stopping the Zebra Mussel. 

-

As for Ed Fitzgerald, he is one of the few ships to survive breaking up while sinking - he snapped in half very close to his engine room, which meant that enough of his body was attached that he lived. They raised him in 1987 after a three year salvage operation. (Which is very long by modern Great Lakes standards) He’s still alive and sailing, but for reasons you might expect, he had trouble finding a crew, which meant that he often had to sail by himself. It might be common now, but at the time a fully “autonomous” ship was rare, and he’s kind of a trendsetter. 

He also needed a lot of therapy, but he’s doing much better now - his sense of humor came back to the point where he’ll often play a certain Gordon Lightfoot song as he leaves port. 

[joezworld]

Deeply Specific and Very Long Ocean Liner Headcanon

So, most boats, ships, and vessels of every sort are normal - or as normal as a sentient seagoing vessel can be. 

With one big exception 

The Transatlantic Ocean liners were considered to be an odd bunch on the best of days, and got seemingly nuttier as years went on and ships got larger. While ships like the RMS Olympic might have had some personality quirks, moving on just 20 years brought about ships that were just eccentric. 

Take, for example, the SS Normandie. 

The pride of the French Line, the ship made a name for herself in the interwar years for being bigger, faster, more luxurious, and downright prettier than any other liner at sea. She took her appearance very seriously, and many of her initial eccentricities were missed under the assumption that she was vain, not nutty. 

But nutty she was, and this became especially evident during The War. 

Most French Line ships scattered to the four winds, running to any port who might protect them from the incoming German threat. Not Normandie, who called her fleetmates cowards and kept to her scheduled sailing dates until September of 1939, when she sailed into New York harbor and requested asylum for herself and her full complement of crew. 

The Americans were more than willing to provide protection, but at a cost - Normandie would have to become a troop ship for the allied war effort. According to the vessel, she had been expecting this, but had been more than willing to do her part for the war effort. 

That is, right up until the US Navy announced that they would be stripping her of her fine furnishings and painting her in dazzle camouflage. This was a line in the sand that Normandie  refused to cross, as she knew that the Americans would likely ‘appropriate’ her elegant art deco décor for its scrap metal content the instant it hit the dockside. She refused, and left immediately for the open ocean, opting to serve her native France in a different way. 

What was that different way you might ask? 

Well, first she sailed to the French Colony of Guadeloupe in the Caribbean, intending to serve as the island’s supply ship in order to keep it from starved out by enemy U-Boats. 

This plan lasted about a month, before a U-Boat sank another vessel virtually in front of her. Equipped with high-tech radar and many other navigational aids required for a safe transatlantic crossing, the infuriated liner bore down on the surfaced U-Boat and rammed it, sinking it instantly. 

To quote the ship’s 2011 autobiography: “It was at that moment, surrounded by the oil and debris of my first kill, that I became a warrior. My mission - to destroy the enemy by any means possible.  None would escape me.“

Normandie would spend the rest of the second world war as a one-ship wolf pack in the Caribbean, chasing down and sinking any and all vessels - military or otherwise - flying the Axis flags. 

A typical day for the Normandie was captured in the logs of the U.S.S Plymouth - which sighted the ship several times during a Convoy Escort mission in September 1942. 

Log entry - Sept. 9 42 - sighted Periscope off port bow in early morning (approx. 09: 30) - dropped depth charges to no effect. Sub made attempt to torpedo convoy - missed by significant distance. Sub fled. No further sightings until after noon.

- Recon aircraft out of Guantanamo observed what appeared to be a German sub tender and Sub two hundred miles due east of Havana. Moved to intercept at 13:04 ship’s time. 

-13:51 Sighted large contact on radar, moving fast to intercept from SW. Radar says that contact is bigger than any ship known to be in area. 

-Large contact made no attempt to intercept - made beeline for approx. location of sub and tender. Crows nest observed a huge liner flying the French flag at 14:39.

-15:04 All ships visible - contact revealed to be liner Normandie - flying biggest French flag ever seen. Sub Tender - unknown freighter flying Italian flag- attempted to flee while sub dove. Liner lowered French flag to reveal equally large pirate flag and charged the sub - ramming it and sinking it at [COORDINATES CLASSIFIED] 

- 15:12  rescue effort made on sub crew - 3 survivors. Normandie bound NNW in pursuit of sub tender.

- 18:26 rejoined convoy - prisoners in brig to be transferred to Guantanamo Bay.

- 23:11 sighted Normandie again. Received Aldis lamp  transmission from liner. “Two Sunk. Success.”

- 23:19 lost sight of Normandie.

At the war’s end, the Normandie had accumulated a whopping 37 confirmed kills of German, Italian, Japanese, and Vichy French vessels, making it one of the most decorated warships of either side had it been commissioned into any navy. 

Following the war, Normandie resumed transatlantic services until she was replaced by the much larger SS France in 1962. 

Now lacking anything to do for the first time in her long and illustrious life, Normandie elected to sail more or less for pleasure, spending several years sailing about the Caribbean in order to properly mark out her ‘kills’ to West German survey vessels, before circumnavigating the earth in the company of the SS United States, who had been retired following the collapse to the United States Lines in 1964. 

Although both ships are immensely private about the nature of their relationship,  the addition of a gold band to each vessel’s lead funnel - a traditional sign of marriage - in 1972 did not go unnoticed.

Since then, both liners spent the tail end of the 20th century living lives of leisure punctuated by mild adventure. 

in 1979, both ships attempted to evacuate residents of the Dominican Republic ahead of Hurricane David. They failed to do so, and were forced to ride out the storm at sea, reportedly reaching the eye of the storm in the process. 

Following the attack on their close friend SS Atlantic Conveyor during the Falklands War, both ships led a flotilla of other retired liners in an effort to significantly hamper the Argentinian Navy’s assault on the islands. The success of this still debated, however it did show that the Normandie is not alone her ability to hunt down submarines, as the United States and the former German/French liner Liberté  successfully hunted down  and sunk the ARA Santa Fe during the conflict - much to the shock of all military forces involved, who had thought that the liners were joking when they began to participate.

In 1985, following the SS France’s abrupt ‘retirement’ from Norwegian Cruise Lines, (NCL had wanted to ruin France’s lines by adding more cabins on her upper decks - she refused and was shown the door) The United States and Normandie joined in a venture to provide even better cruises - so that they could beat NCL at their own game. The resultant company was one of the largest cruise lines in the world, and  was the highest valued travel stock in the world after its IPO in 1991, causing all three ships to become immensely wealthy when they sold the company to  Carnival Cruise Lines in 2000. 

All three liners have left the public eye since the early 2000′s - becoming eccentric billionaires instead of eccentric vessels. Most sightings of the Normandie and United States have been in increasingly unusual places for them to go, like the Arctic, the Antarctic, the US Great Lakes, and even off the coast of Siberia. They claim that they’re just doing touristy things, but most of the world’s submarine fleet has doubts. 

[joezworld]

About the Falklands War thing: when you say the entire US Navy steamed down to the Falklands after Montana got murdered, does that include museum ships like Constitution, Constellation, Olympia, or Texas; and do former USN ships that were sold or loaned to Argentina like Phoenix and Heermann revolt against the Argentines?

Another great question.

To say that the US had "museum ships" is not entirely accurate.

Most combat vessels do not and have never had the patience required to be docked for years on end while the general public crawls all over them. Generally the only ones who do are vessels that know they can no longer go on in day-to-day sailing life. Most of the very early 19th century monitors fall into this role, as their low freeboard keeps them trapped within calm ports or inland waterways, but few other ships can stand such idleness.

USS Constitution and USS Constellation are noted exceptions because sailing ships aren't sentient. It's unclear exactly where the line is drawn, but the first sentient machines came about in the early 1800s with the invention of Trevethick's Puffing Devil steam carriage. It's generally assumed that some sort of mechanized propulsion is required for sentience, meaning that ships like USCGC Eagle and the Italian Training Ship Amerigo Vespucci, both of whom have auxiliary diesel propulsion systems, are sentient, while ships like Constitution and Constellation are decidedly not.

Furthermore, following the second world war, a lot of the US Navy was basically Not All Right, from a mental health point of view. The Atlantic fleet spent over three years dodging U-Boats, and developed a rather healthy fear of open water as a result, while the Imperial Japanese Navy fought the Pacific Fleet with the intensity of trench warfare - every inch of water they gave up until the Battle of The Phillipine Sea was paid for in Allied lives. The Kamikaze attacks that occurred in the later part of the war were a startlingly effective psychological warfare method as well, and most ships that weren't afraid of the IJN itself soon began jumping at the sound of unfamiliar aircraft.

What this all means is that when the US Navy began retiring ships at the end of the war, nobody really wanted to tie up at some dockside and tell stories of how they almost died - they wanted a beer and a hug, and most ships just sort of dispersed themselves into the seven seas.

It's only been very recently - probably since the early 90's - that ships have felt comfortable enough to actually talk about things like that and do "museum stuff", mainly because of the many mental health initiatives that Montana had fought tooth and nail to get set up during most of his life.

In the 80's when the Falklands happened though, this hadn’t happened yet, and so everyone who could go down to kick some ass, did.

As for your other question, Phoenix and Heerman had both taken the express route to getting really fucked up mentally, with Heerman taking part in the Battle off Samar, and notably being the only surviving destroyer of his task force. Phoenix had started the war in Pearl Harbor, and had come very close to getting blown up by the Japanese, before taking part in a lot of tense shore support work with the Australians, and then charging headlong into the end of the war in the Battle of Leyete Gulf.

Neither ship was entirely "all there" after the war, and when the Argentinians came looking for suitable vessels to update their Navy in the late 40's, they both jumped on the opportunity to go Somewhere Else.

Heerman definitely took to Argentina a lot more than Phoenix did, and actually believed a lot of the stuff that Galtieri was saying in the 80s. Phoenix didn't, and he was the one who called Montana to come down and save him, thus forcing the US' involvement in the war.

Unfortunately not all things go well. Phoenix tried to do as little as possible and maybe surrender peacefully, but the Royal Navy, who was operating under the decree of "shoot anything that speaks Spanish" after the sinking of Atlantic Conveyor, put two torpedos into him and then plastered the results all over the tabloids - not their finest hour.

Nobody knows what happened to Heerman. The US kept detailed logs of who blew up what, and the British knew what the ships of the Argentinian Navy looked like, so both navies would have known if they'd sunk him, and neither did. Yet despite this, when the tally of the surviving Argentinian ships was made, Heerman was nowhere to be found, and he has not been seen anywhere since.

[joezworld]

Also, does anyone care that USCGC Eagle was captured from the Nazis? (And, more of a joke thing, would the battle between USS Monitor and CSS Virginia be the ship version of a slap fight?)

Operation Paperclip brought over a lot of people and vehicles, so when Horst Wessel was brought over, he wasn't even a blip on anyone's radar. It doesn't hurt that he was actively sorry for being built by the Nazis in the first place, and he very quickly adopted the new name Eagle in an effort to fit in. He's integrated well, and other than his Hamburg Accent when speaking German, you'd never know he wasn't always a proud American.

Monitor vs. Virginia was not a slap-fight. It was a knock-down, drag-out brawl. If there's any modern parallel that could be made, it would be the Cap vs Bucky fight from Captain America: Winter Solider, although it should be noted that Monitor was The Winter Soldier, coming out of nowhere to kick the shit out of Virginia.

[joezworld]

Do you have any headcanons pertaining to the HMS Terror? Do you think it would be one , or do you think that the Terror would be a separate entity from the locomotive that was turned into its engine?

 - One trip to Wikipedia later... - 

Holy shit.

Uhh...

Well, my going headcanon is that sentient vehicles require some sort of power source - a straight up sailing ship isn’t going to come to life, but a powered one will. That being said, I don’t think that a non-sentient sailing ship like the Terror would gain sentience after having a steam engine put in it, specifically because the steam engine in question was already alive. 

Yes I am aware of how horrifying that must be, but let’s keep going. 

What would probably happen for the Terror is that the engine that was powering it was alive, but the ship itself isn’t. Considering that this is England in the 1830s, nobody is that bothered by this, including the former railway engine. 

[joezworld]

Sentient vehicle headcanon - The Falklands war

Normally I try to tell these headcanons in a manner similar to Wikipedia - only keeping the relevant details. However, this one is so insane that even in my head, I feel it needs to be told differently. 

So, for the purposes of this headcanon, pretend that this is being told to you by your friend, who is desperately trying to appear normal while telling you about a Wikipedia article he just read. 

So, this entire story is fucking insane - there’s so much that goes on, lemme just start at the beginning. 

So, the UK owns these little islands off the coast of Argentina in the middle of goddamn nowhere. The Argentinians really don’t like this because the islands are much closer to them and they say that they own it - but it’s like that one Eddie Izzard bit - do you have a flag?  - And the brits did and the Argentinians didn’t, so everybody said that england had the islands.

Naturally this made Argentina very mad, but they didn’t do anything about it because they had shit goin’ on. Because like, all of South America had really bad shit happening to it between the 30′s and the 90′s - so nothing happened. 

Until in the 80′s, when Argentina had a military dictatorship called a Junta - which led through the very nice and normal way of ‘taking anyone they didn’t like and throwing them out of helicopters’ - the government had basically spun up their propaganda mill to the point where they actually believed that they could take the Falklands and the British wouldn’t do anything!

And they did this in 1982, which is like the exact wrong time to piss off the UK, because they used to be the biggest empire the world has ever seen, and then in like the last 20 years they lost India and Pakistan, had to give Canada their constitution back, and they were about to do the same to Australia and New Zealand, and they had basically signed Hong Kong back over to the Chinese. 

-And you know *spoiler alert* they didn’t give Hong Kong back, but at the time they thought they were gonna! - 

And so this means that the UK is feeling really bad about itself going into this whole thing, and then this punk-ass little country with like two ships in its navy tries to start shit because they think that The Queen won’t do anything. 

Except, they aren’t dealing with the Queen, they’re dealing with Margaret Thatcher - who will kill you, your dog, your family, and anybody who ever sold you a cannoli if she thinks it’ll make England strong.

So - even from this point, the Argentinians are gonna die, but what happens next is so out-of-left-field that it’s astounding. 

-

So, let’s roll back the clock a few weeks and The USS Montana is about to get involved. 

So, Montana is this pugnacious old man of a heavy cruiser who’s been with the navy since before World War 1. He has this amazing history going through every war the US has been in - and he’s amazing: when they tried to retire him after the first world war, he told them no, and said he’d raise a pirate flag and follow the sixth fleet around if they didn’t let him stay. So they did, and he served in every war and conflict the US was in until the 80′s. 

And this is kinda important, because when he was built, it was before the wars - everything was a bit slower, a bit more laid back, and he actually got a lot of family bonding with the other ships in the Navy and in his class, and it meant that he wasn’t like, sad and miserable and scared when the war happened. 

Flash forward to 1946, and the US has just built like hundreds of ships to kill the Axis with, and they did it so quickly that most of these guys went from the drydock to the battlefield with no real training or anything - so they were really fucked up when they came back. 

So, when Montana sees this, he decides that he’s basically going to be the father figure that everyone didn’t have - and basically makes most of the navy his kids - like straight up his sons and daughters, no questions asked. And he did this for almost every ship the Navy built between 1950 and the 80′s.

Which means that basically the entire US Navy loves him unconditionally. 

Like, I can’t stress this enough - he was their dad - he taught Iowa class battleships how to go fishing, he gave the birds and the bees talk to submarines, like, everything he did was for his kids or for his country. 

And so, one day in 1982, he gets a call from one of his kids who’s moved down to Argentina - which I need to point out that a lot of US ships went down to South America in the 40s and 50s, but a lot of them did that because they were fucked up from WW2, and most of them didn’t get to know Montana very well - so they weren’t ‘his kids’. 

But one of them was, and he calls up his dad and says “Hey dad, uhh, my bosses have really started to believe their own BS and they think that they can take on the UK - and I think that I’m gonna die, because I work with these people and we are not gonna be able to win this. Please help me.” 

And so Montana tells him to calm down, and he’s gonna get him out of this. And then he goes to his bosses at the navy, says he’s using some leave time to go rescue his kid, and the Navy realizes that they’re never gonna be able to talk him out of this, so they call up the chain to Washington and cut him some orders that say that he’s a ‘neutral observer’ so that nobody shoots at him. 

And this seems like its all going to go just fine, except that several ships in the Argentinian Navy were made by the West Germans, and have NO IDEA who this guy is - because even the American ships who aren’t his kids still know him, because how can you not.

And so he makes it almost all the way to Argentina when one of the Argentinian submarines - who was German - sees him, has no idea who he is, doesn’t know about the neutral observer thing because the Argentine Navy is a clusterfuck, and sinks him! And he dies!

And I can- I- This is so bad!

Because now, the US NAVY is involved. 

And They. Are. Pissed. 

Because Their DAD JUST GOT MURDERED!!!!!!

And the Argentinians have no idea what’s happening - they have no idea that this guy is important or that he even got sunk! Because the submarine just assumed he was English and called in that he’d sunk a British advance party or something, and it takes like a week for the Americans to put two and two together, so for a while, nobody knows what’s happened - it’s like they’ve stepped on a land mine and it hasn’t gone off yet. 

-

But because no one knows the enormity of the shitstorm the Argentinians are gonna be facing yet, the British are still mobilizing - they didn’t do what the Americans did and set up a network of navy and air bases all over the world in case they need to kick someone’s ass in the future - and all the countries around the south Atlantic either hate them, or are former colonies who really hate the English. So they have to schlep everything they need to fight a war alllll the way down from England to Argentina - which is like the furthest distance you can go without running into the British Empire it’s so far why. 

And so the Royal Navy has to call in the civilian reserve fleet, which is a bunch of ocean liners and container ships who really would rather be flagged under any other nation right now, but they’re not!, so they have to go basically become war-adjacent for a while - just hanging out in the frigid North Atlantic until the Royal Navy finishes kicking ass and taking names and then they can go home. 

Except. 

Except. 

EXCEPT THAT 

The Argentine Navy is a bunch of suicidal morons!

Because they saw that the British didn’t have enough logistics vessels and was requisitioning ferry boats and ocean liners and had a brainwave: 

¡ Hey !  ¡ If we shoot at these unarmed ferry boats and container ships, not only will the Brits not have any logistical support, but they might get scared and go home!

Which sounds like a good plan, until you realize that the Royal Navy is not pleased that they have to bring civilian ships into battle - like the aircraft carriers and the destroyers see this as ‘a stain on their character’ for having to ‘endanger civilians unduly’ because they’re posh and they’re English but also they’re right - this is not a place for civvies - Exocet missiles are gonna be flying around, it’s not safe. 

Also, the Royal Navy had a very dim view of this whole conflict, because they thought it was pointless to sail halfway across the ocean just to fight over a tiny island with 3 people on it - if they wanted to expand the empire just invade Ireland or something. 

- Now, that sounds bad, but this was the 80′s - The Troubles were ongoing, and in the Royal Navy at least, they liked the Irish a lot less than the Argentinians! -

Also, Ireland was closer. 

But anyways, the RN ships at least had a rather dim view of the whole conflict, right up until the SS Atlantic Conveyor took an Exocet to the fuckin’ face.

And he dies. 

And this is almost as bad as sinking Montana, because Atlantic Conveyor had this really unique ability to make friends with anyone, and had spent most of the voyage down basically being the flotilla’s morale officer. 

So when he dies, this stops being a token effort to restore British Sovereignty, and starts being The Royal Navy Wants You Dead. 

Which, on its own, would have meant that Argentinian Navy would have been wiped from the face of the earth - because the Royal Navy wasn’t leaving until everyone was dead. It didn’t matter if it was a tugboat with a handgun - there would be no more Argentinian Navy when they were done. 

-

Now. 

Now.

Meanwhile in America, while the Royal Navy is still steaming down to the Islands, words starts to get around that someone killed Dad.

And this went over exactly as well as you think it would. 

The ships of the US Navy reacted calmly and coolly, and didn’t cry or scream or plot revenge. 

They totally didn’t. 

Except that they totally did, and spent a few days gathering every bullet, shell, round, and torpedo they could find, before leaving with the intent of finding and killing everyone in the Argentinian military. 

Now, that might sound like a generalization, but it wasn’t. 

There were somewhere around 370 ships in the US Navy at that time, and about 280 of them were capable of reaching Argentina without leaving the US vulnerable to an attack  - plus about another 200 or so that had retired from the navy or transferred to other nations but still kept in touch. 

So that’s about 500 battleships, destroyers, submarines, amphibious assault ships, support vessels, aircraft carriers, tankers, oilers, troop transports, guided missile cruisers and the Presidential Yacht. 

All of them went to Argentina. Every last one of them.

And no-one believed it!

The British thought it was a joke, and the Argentinians thought it was counter-intelligence!

The ENTIRE US NAVY just up and left to kick someone’s ass! That doesn’t happen! That didn’t happen in WW2! This has never happened before or since in US history! Even when the US Navy was a bunch of sailboats in Philadelphia nobody did that!

-

And So, that’s how it was - the US Navy was steaming down en mass to fuck up the Argentinians, the Royal Navy was hopping mad, and the Argentinians didn’t even know anything was going to happen!

Also, before I forget, also on top of all this - Atlantic Conveyor was friends with a bunch of ocean liners, and because they’re all fucking insane - Normandie spent WW2 fucking up U-Boats in the Caribbean, and the United States sailed into a Cat 5 hurricane, and Olympic is one of the reasons that Singapore got kicked out of Malaysia - so, they all decided that their friend dying was worth fighting for, and they got together and steamed down to the South Atlantic at the same time the Americans were, and set like 9 speed records in the process because of course they did. 

-

So, now that there’s essentially three giant navies coming down to kick their asses, the Argentinians finally  begin to clue in on something being wrong - like, there were a couple of Soviet Trawlers that were parked offshore, and they claimed to be fishing but in reality they were spying - and they had these giant radio masts that they’d put up whenever orders came down from Moscow. 

And one day, the Argentinians watched from their spy planes as the masts went up slowly, then got taken down very quickly, and then they watched as the two spy trawlers went racing off towards Africa. 

And they wondered why they were going towards Africa, because the soviet union is the other way - you need to steam around the edge of South America, until they called down to Ushuaia - in Tierra Del Fuego, and heard that what looked like half the US Navy was coming round the tip of South America. 

And it looked like that because it was! Because half of the US Navy had sailed down from the pacific to cut off any way of escape! 

It was only now, at this incredibly late time, that the Argentinians realized exactly how Fucked  they were. 

-

Now, at this point, a smart man would have given up - but Galtierei was not. 

So naturally the Argentinians kept fighting for a whole week before they all just died. 

And it wasn’t in normal “get shot with a missile and sink” ways either - like, one of their cruisers fired on a ship, and it turned out to be the USS Missouri, who was right next to the other three Iowa Class battleships, and they all targeted this ship, and made him disappear because that’s what happens when the four biggest battleships on earth shoot at you at once. 

Or, the Submarines - the one that sank Montana got chased by 4 Los Angeles class attack subs and ended up getting pushed beneath his crush depth - not hit with a torpedo, PUSHED. The other one, meanwhile, tried to shoot at one of the Ocean Liners, and ended up getting sunk by them! Which is incredible, because Nobody expected that to happen, least of all the Liners, and yet they just totally went in and contributed - which actually means that there’s a third “belligerents” column for the Wikipedia page for this, and it’s just them. 

So the war actually ended on kind of an anti-climax, because after the US just steamrolled the Argentinians, there wasn’t anything left to do. The Brits landed more troops at Port Stanley, and then they just sort of went home. 

Most of the Americans did too, but they also went and installed a new government in Argentina! 

Which, as the rumor goes, the Navy did that without asking anyone, and BOY O BOY was the State Department Upset - I think a lot of people got fired or demoted for that. 

But it did turn out well in the end, because unlike every other time the US tried to install a leader, it actually went rather well, and the guy they put in charge left when he lost his re-election, and now Argentina is a democratic ally and a partner in Peace! 

Who still claim that they own the Falklands

[joezworld]

How did the ships react to the Suez Crisis? In our world, it was basically what broke the British Empire. How does it go down in yours?

I’ve been slowly putting some thought into how the rest of this world works, and the Suez Crisis basically goes down the same way it would have in our world - there’s not a lot that could have been reasonably done to stop it, first of all, and second, it’s the United Kingdom - which is the one country that would be the least changed by a sentient vehicle world. 

I’d also like to take this time to point out that the Brits are damn lucky that the crisis happened in the 1950s - by the 1960s the US Civil Rights movement included several big moments for the locomotive rights movement, and BR’s modernization plan had put the UK on the US’ shit list from a humanitarian standpoint. It’s entirely possible that, if the Suez crisis had happened in the 1960′s, the US would have intervened against the United Kingdom.

That being said, I will say that the Empire didn’t fall apart as much as it did in our world. Going into the 1980′s, there was a genuine sense of hopelessness in the UK, as they basically gave away the Empire - Canada, New Zealand, Australia, the African Colonies all would be gone by the end of the decade. This was especially intensified by the sentiments of the Royal Navy, which consisted primarily of modernized WW2 ships, and their younger fleetmates who had been raised in a very stratified and Edwardian sort of environment - Britain rules the waves and whatnot - because of intuitional inertia, and were therefore very not okay with the idea of allowing Crown Dependencies to go off on their own. 

You also have to consider the massive bollocking Britain was taking on the international stage because of their flagrant locomotive rights abuses - for the time being, the government could keep a lid on things, but not for much longer, and they knew it. Having a citizenry who didn’t think they were being sold down the river by those in power was key to keeping everything in order. As such, the Callaghan and Thatcher Governments were much more willing to use force in order to keep what was left of the empire intact. 

Obviously Ireland happened, but that’s an entire shitshow that is beyond my purview. 

Then there was the Falklands, and from a British point of view, it went wonderfully, even if it was one of the strangest wars in modern history. 

Then came Hong Kong. 

You see, after roundly defeating the Argies in the Falklands (even if the Americans did most of all the heavy lifting), there was a growth in pro-empire sentiment both at home and abroad. Thatcher’s plan to return Hong Kong to the Chinese was widely criticized after 1982, especially when it became known that most Hong Kongers wished to remain British. “Anti-handoverism”, as it became known, reached its peak in 1989 after the Tiananmen Square Massacre. Citizens in both Hong Kong and London demonstrated in favor of keeping Hong Kong under British rule. Notable among these demonstrators were numerous ships and aircraft of the Royal Navy and Air Force, who broke their usual stance of remaining apolitical in order to show their support for the people of Hong Kong and the Empire. 

Following these protests, PM Thatcher was summoned to Buckingham Palace. Queen Elizabeth had become somewhat more in favour of keeping the Empire together following the disastrous 1987 Fijian coups d’état and worsening of relations in Ireland, and is believed to have informed Thatcher that if she wanted to remain PM, she was to find a way to keep Hong Kong “in the fold”.

The resultant speech, known as “The Home Counties Speech”, Thatcher announced that, effective immediately, the UK would pull out of the Sino-British Joint Declaration, claiming that: “giving Hong Kong to the Chinese would be like giving the Home Counties to The French - They are part of England and England they will remain.”

Naturally this went over wonderfully in Beijing, and Chinese Leader Deng Xiaoping quickly announced that Hong Kong would be under Chinese rule on July1, 1997 - treaty or no treaty. 

So naturally there was going to be a land war in Asia, between two economic superpowers and boy o boy did the United States try its hardest to stop it. They privately and publicly offered both sides enticements, threats, sanctions, and even flat-out bribes if they’d come back from the brink. 

Progress seemed to be happening, until 1993, when a fleet headed by HMS Ark Royal and HMS Arrow steamed into Macao Harbor, fired a single symbolic shot, and claimed the territory for the United Kingdom. 

As one might expect, the Chinese went absolutely ballistic (as did the Portuguese, but they don’t really matter) and it really seemed like conflict might break out at any given moment. 

And then it all just kind of... fizzled. 

Sensing that some kind of bullshit might happen, the UK had sent a large amount of its surface Navy to Hong Kong and Macao in the spring of 1997. Not willing to be outgunned under any circumstances, the government also hired a large “privateer” force, consisting of former Soviet battlecruisers and retired Royal Navy ships, to keep station there as well. (Inadvertently, this would be the impetus for the “Russian gunship for hire” craze among PMCs in the 2000s)

The US Navy, who really didn’t want to intervene but was afraid they’d have to, had the Sixth Fleet doing “combat drills” just outside of territorial waters, and several off-duty or retired ships, including the USS Wisconsin, “just happened” to be spending some time off in Victoria Harbour for most of July. In an effort to further piss off the “occupiers of their territory”, the Taiwanese Navy also sent a token force to Hong Kong as well.

The People’s Liberation Army Navy, who was in no way equipped to deal with that much firepower, actually did sortie to just outside of Kowloon, before turning around and heading back to base. 

--------------

Since then, the sun hasn’t really set on the British Empire per se, but there’s definitely an aura of “one wrong move could break the entire thing”, especially around the subject of Hong Kong - China is still upset about that, and in today’s modern age of terrorism, cyberattacks, and misinformation, there is a genuine fear that China will try to attack from within.

But that’s a story for another time, once I’ve read up on contemporary geopolitics.