Many people don’t realize the history of the US Navy’s interest in a better riding ship…

Small Waterplane Area Twin Hull (SWATH) designs have actually been around since the 1930s.  But the Navy got interested in the late 60’s and built the RV Kaimalino in conjunction with UH Marine Center in the mid-70s.  It was basically a steel box welded on top of two newly designed underwater hull forms.  It also had a helicopter landing pad on top.  I’ve posted about it before, but it just struck me how sad a shape the ship is in. UH has no money to do any repairs, and have pumped the hulls dry to try to keep the leaking rudder post out of the water…

It wasn’t really designed as anything other than a ‘day cruiser’, with minimal services/billeting/etc on the ship.  At only 27 meters, it’s not a real big ship…

It sits today, tied up at the UH Marine Center, slowly rotting away (well corroding away), a sad relic of the early days of R&D.

A good article on SWATH hull is HERE, from American Scientist in the Nov/Dec 2000 issue.

In many ways this reminds me of a few other ‘orphans’ sitting in various places…

One of the first, if not THE first ROVs sits in a bay at Scripps, and some wag put a paper coffee cup in the mechanical arm with the words “Will work for food” penciled on it.  That ROV is a monster, probably 10X10X10 feet, and constructed out of space hardware, as few knew what impact the pressures of the deep would actually have on mechanical devices. It should be in a museum somewhere, but again, no money and no desire to make that happen…

As technology accelerates from years to months of development, I wonder what will happen (or has already happened) to those ‘original’ prototypes of new tech.  Hell, if you’re a SF reader, you’ve seen Buck Rogers gadgets imagined by Nowlan, Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke and others come to life in our generation.

I remember someone posting an ad from Radio Shack back in the day, and EVERY item on that sale page is now contained in the average smart phone…

As we move ever more quickly into this evolving technology age, sadly American kids don’t want to go into STEM – science, technology, engineering and math curriculums. They are hard work…

This US News report gives some information HERE. But these scholarships go begging…

And those people who ARE at the forefront of tech development aren’t American, they are Asian, Indian, Pakistani, Iranian, etc…

Pretty soon WE (America) will be hostage to the rest of the world in the tech sector…