Word: ethan
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Manning the Ethan Allen was its "Blue Crew"; the Polaris submarines two-platoon their crews, and the alternate "Gold Crew" was now at New London, Conn. For Polaris crewmen a patrol starts with a change into a special navy-blue Dacron and cotton coverall. The coverall reduces lint in the closed environment, has no cuffs or belts to get tangled in gear. "But," complains one officer, "it's next to impossible to go to the head in this outfit without dunking part...
Amid the maze of machines, the bulkheads covered with cheery green plastic, the shiny steel fittings and the delicate equipment that demands constant attention, there is a private world that turns on four-hour duty watches and countless battle-station drills. It all goes on in the 410-ft. Ethan Allen's six watertight compartments, on four levels and three decks...
...brains of the sub, which must always know its precise location, are banks of digital computers. They are linked to the ship's inertial navigation system (SINS). The three SINS, which check each other, dangle from the stable ceiling platform of the Ethan Allen's navigation center. They contain a secret array of spinning gyroscopes and accelerometers, can measure the most minute variation in the ship's movement due to drift. A computer called NAVDAC (for navigation data assimilation computer) records the position changes detected by SINS...
...Ethan Allen patrols the North Atlantic, this automatic navigation system constantly feeds position readings into the guidance system of all 16 missiles. At every dip and turn of the sub, its missile brains know the ship's location, local vertical, true North, target location and trajectory to be flown. In this underseas base, the countdown is always...
...order to fire the Ethan Allen's holocaustic weapons would come in a coded message on the sub's low-frequency radio. Like all Polaris subs on station, the Ethan Allen receives a constant stream of "familygrams," routine orders and plain "garbage"; the idea is to keep the message traffic at a steady pace, so that an emergency would not increase the flow and thereby warn an enemy...