Oct
2
In business, creative, energetic people like many inventors are often very dynamic. I always advise them that they will destroy their companies if they do not harness or “bracket” that energy. However, unbridled administrative control has strangled much innovation and many companies. Likewise unbridled creativity has driven companies to destruction like our test torpedo. Creativity and administration are both required, working in harmony and balance.
If you have ever had occasion to service a common, household, washing machine, you have seen a comparatively small electric motor that drives the mechanical motion of the tub and agitator. On an advanced torpedo, we were working with a motor of similar but security-classified design, and security-classified performance. Suffice it to say that a motor about the size of a washing machine electric motor was turning out the kind of horsepower automotive engines produce. Meanwhile, an electric battery was designed to literally consume itself during the tactical operation time designed for this torpedo.
The premise of the advanced torpedo was a helicopter launch. The chopper, from the deck of a ship, could navigate through air much faster than a ship through water. With appropriate sonar and other gear, shipboard and airborne target detection equipment would identify a threat water craft, such as a submarine. A helicopter would be launched to pursue. Eventually the helicopter would drop an advanced torpedo into the ocean in the vicinity of the targeted threat.
The torpedo would do a short loop as it scanned, acquiring the target, and would then race toward the target at an unprecedented speed to deliver a “shaped charge” warhead into the hull. This was not the technology of “Run Silent, Run Deep.” Here the ship was no longer a gun; the submarine was no longer an aiming platform for precision aiming of the torpedo. In this case, the torpedo was a “fire-and-forget” self-guiding, seeker and destroyer.
On one occasion a test motor was installed in a test fixture, a tank in a laboratory at the facility developing the motor and power system. However, someone had not secured the bracketing hardware. Again, this was no toy. This was a full-sized, tactically capable, motor section for a very powerful and fast torpedo. When the test device (torpedo motor section) was initiated, it came to life in a spectacular way, shooting forward through the tank instead of churning water past its stationary test-fixture position.
Freed from its brackets, it actually traveled with tremendous speed and power. The torpedo engine section and power module together raced to the end of the tank and plowed right through the barrier, launching through the wall at the end of the laboratory.
Much like the checks and balances we talk about in government and other organizations, a tremendous amount of power, unleashed, can do a lot of destruction. Whether kept in check by one’s own personal values and administrative limits, or by those of others, power must be harnessed to be useful. Unharnessed , it is typically useless and destructive.
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