Not speculating about Porter or any other incident; just my usual tongue-in-cheek AW "thinking out loud" post:
Wouldn't it be amazing if someone invented devices that allow you to have vision at night? I mean, how cool would it be to be able to see what's going on around you at when it's dark outside? Imagine the possibilities...
Yeah, ships have them. Armory owns them and we kept them on the bridge and turned over between watches.
However, the handheld sets are pretty fucking worthless on the bridge. Maybe it's because we had shitty Gen 1/2 NODs, but they don't really help you clarify the situation other than "something's" there. And that "something" can easily be washed out in background lighting.
Keep in mind that requirements change when you're on a ship bridge. You can't look down, see a wake, and know what it's doing relative to you.
And the monochromatic tubes can make things more confusing considering you need the colors to really figure things out visually at any sort of useful distance.
We also had them standard issue in my RIVRON. They were new model and we obviously had helmets to mount to but they were even more useless in Chesapeake Bay with all the Virginia Beach background lighting.
I navigated fine with naked eye...needed colors to get the buoy lineups and ship movements. Coxswains and gunners kept NODs on, but only to spot unlit objects/shooting at night. Honestly it's probably hard to understand if you haven't had that perspective...I realize it really does sound as easy as "buy NODs, problem solved."
Now FLIR was a different story. We do need more of that shit. Great in both low vis and at night, fucking perfect really, but it also was originally designed to be used on a river, not in any kind of sea state. Ships do have a viewer that is as good though, it's called OSS/TIS and it is freaking money. No idea how it did or did not factor into PORTER's incident. Multiple FOV/zoom settings, and I've used one to correlate a radar track to a periscope that was "way" out there. I hate to speculate, but if they were using it that night, this probably wouldn't have happened.
Unfortunately, it's also not normally fed into into the bridge, we did some jury rigging on my DDG ride to make that happen. Bottomline, bridge needs a dedicated FLIR system or two to be used by the bridge team. Ours (NSW/RIVRON model) only costs 300K each and would be perfectly adequate for ship use as well. On another note, PC's have this, and it's set up on the bridge. Again, much better BRM/interface/whatever.
Point is, at long range, unmagnified NODs don't help much. We HAD NOD's the size of Big Eye binos mounted on bridgewings, but somebody up high made the decision to take them and not give them back between our first and second deployments. Something about no longer supporting the system....not sure how that's changed, but the resolution on them was good enough to matter out at the 15+nm mark.
It's why even though I feel bad for them, I'm interested in seeing what the report turns up. Would be nice to see some intelligent change come out of this instead of another kneejerk mandate to review RotR.
