What If vehicles, ships, etc. from Clive Cussler books.

[seadude]

Not sure this is the right forum for this topic. I'll let a Mod move it if necessary.

Clive Cussler has written a ton of books about the adventures of character Dirk Pitt, the marine organization NUMA, and a host of other entities.
What would some of the vehicles, ships, equipment, etc. look like from his novels? Both from NUMA, villainous people and organizations, and/or from other entities?
Just remember, most vehicles, ships, etc. from NUMA are a turquoise color.   See note below.

[Diamondback]

I'll start off...

SS Oregon - roughly the same size as a US Maritime Commission C5 freighter, though about half the tonnage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_C5_ship

Wikipedia:

The Oregon is a high tech ship owned by a private secret service organization called 'the Corporation'. It is disguised as a rusty old tramp steamer. It mounts five cranes - three fore, two aft – only two of which are operational, one each fore and aft. To add to its appearance of authenticity, this disguise is highly detailed. This includes a fake mess hall, and a captain's cabin specially designed to be utterly repulsive, with features including specially designed chemicals to keep people away, a dysfunctional toilet, and depressing paintings of clowns on black velvet.

In reality the Oregon is an extraordinarily sophisticated intelligence-gathering vessel with luxury facilities and top-of-the-line technical capabilities. It is equipped with a moon pool for launching two minisubs, an Olympic swimming pool (in one of its ballast tanks), state-of-the-art medical facilities, and powered by a pair of revolutionary magnetohydrodynamic drives. It also uses an array of underwater vectored-thrusters to give it unparalleled maneuverability for a ship of its size. Dark Watch gives its dimensions as 560 feet long, with a 75-foot beam and a gross weight of 11,585 tons.

The Oregon is also equipped with a suite of armaments that rivals most military capital ships, including: French-built Exocet anti-ship missiles, two torpedo tubes below the waterline (firing Russian-made TEST-71 and later Type 53-65 torpedoes, though Cabrillo has stated he would have preferred American Mk48 ADCAP), 20 mm multibarrel Gatling-style rotary cannons (probably M61 Vulcans) mounted behind steel plates on its hull, and an array of 7.62 mm caliber M60 machine guns concealed in dummy oil barrels welded onto her deck (also known as their boarder repellents) that are all remotely operated with the most sophisticated fire-control systems. As well as these, the Oregon carries Russian-built cruise missiles of an unspecified type, a 40 mm Bofors autocannon (later replaced by a Metal Storm gun system), and at least one Rheinmetall 120 mm gun of a similar type to that of the M1A1 Abrams tank. Most novels talk about the 120 mm in the singular, however Dark Watch states that it has two – one on each side of the hull.

Based on these drawings (if you want to learn about MARCOM and MARAD shipping an excellent site!) https://drawings.usmaritimecommission.de/drawings_c5_s_7xx_types.htm I think Oregon looks fairly close to a C5-S-37e (top) or -75a (bottom).


Or, were there any comparable designs from the British/Commonwealth or Japanese merchant-marine agencies?

[seadude]

That's a lot of firepower for the Oregon. I can't remember what book it was from, but I think I read that the Oregon also had Harpoon missiles.

[Diamondback]

I think the original Oregon did have Harpoons, it was scrapped soon after its debut appearance. Cabrillo and Co. got a whole new ship between then and the Oregon Files... perhaps one of us should reach out to Dirk Cussler and see if his father had any research notes.

It would have made more sense to have the 120's mounted on the centerline on some kind of "jack in the box" elevator in a fore and an aft hold, that way both could be brought to bear if needed rather than being stuck with each gun having only Port or Starboard arcs.

[jcf]

The C4-S-1 Mariner Class is an almost perfect match 564' OAL, 76' Beam.


C4-S-1 Types

The SS Evergreen Mariner was purchased by the USN and commissioned as the
USS Tulare (AKA 112).
USS Tulare

[Diamondback]

BTW, I found Dirk Cussler on Facebook, and posted a message asking if he might be willing to see if he can give advice from his dad's research notes on planning Oregon builds.
https://www.facebook.com/dirkpittcusslerbooks

[Weaver]

I would have thought the best way to build a modern "Q-ship" would be to use a container ship. As the Arapaho project demonstrated, you can fit a wide range of modern military systems into 40-foot containers. Anti-ship-missiles that "pop-up" from 40-foot containers are a staple of modern coastal defence systems. If you want VLS silos, you can have them run vertically through several fake containers, and someone would have to be VERY nosey close-up to spot it. As for things like moon pools and other big spaces, you could have the containers above deck level supported on a below-deck framework, so it looks like it's containers all the way down, but there's really large spaces underneath them.

The hardest things to hide would be aerials. If you want radar, ESM and ELINT/SIGINT systems to provide constant surveillance, then there's little point retracting the aerials: they've got to be out all the time, except when you're in port.

[PR19_Kit]

The hardest things to hide would be aerials. If you want radar, ESM and ELINT/SIGINT systems to provide constant surveillance, then there's little point retracting the aerials: they've got to be out all the time, except when you're in port.

How about hiding them inside plastic 'look alike' containers?

[Weaver]

The hardest things to hide would be aerials. If you want radar, ESM and ELINT/SIGINT systems to provide constant surveillance, then there's little point retracting the aerials: they've got to be out all the time, except when you're in port.

How about hiding them inside plastic 'look alike' containers?

That's a good idea. Some of them need to be pretty tall though (depending on what systems you want, of course).

[PR19_Kit]

The hardest things to hide would be aerials. If you want radar, ESM and ELINT/SIGINT systems to provide constant surveillance, then there's little point retracting the aerials: they've got to be out all the time, except when you're in port.

How about hiding them inside plastic 'look alike' containers?

That's a good idea. Some of them need to be pretty tall though (depending on what systems you want, of course).

Containers, be it metal or plastic, are designed to be stacked atop each other. 

[Weaver]

The hardest things to hide would be aerials. If you want radar, ESM and ELINT/SIGINT systems to provide constant surveillance, then there's little point retracting the aerials: they've got to be out all the time, except when you're in port.

How about hiding them inside plastic 'look alike' containers?

That's a good idea. Some of them need to be pretty tall though (depending on what systems you want, of course).

Containers, be it metal or plastic, are designed to be stacked atop each other. 

Yeah, but they're only stacked eight high on the biggest ships. Four high is more common on smaller ships, and that's still not as high as a warship's mast. Not saying it can't be done, just saying that these are the issues that need to be addressed. Maybe you just have to accept the limitations of the aerials being lower as a trade-off for the stealthiness. Another thing is that however hidden the aerials are, the signals from active emitters won't be hidden, and phased-array radar signals coming from a container ship are going to be a dead give away.

[Diamondback]

Could the fictional Oregon have some of her antennas hidden in the dummy cranes' kingposts?

[jcf]

Could the fictional Oregon have some of her antennas hidden in the dummy cranes' kingposts?

Yes, it wouldn't be that big of a deal,
an entire "crane" could be all antenna.

[Diamondback]

Not WHIF but Reality: What's is the first date we see Isaac Bell on the Twentieth Century Limited? I recently came by a very rare and expensive book on the early Pullman cars from a longtime rail-historian friend who's doing a Twilight Years Downsizing, and it has sufficient floorplans to work up a lot of the cars the early TCL's were assembled from aside from the NYC&HR and LS&MS diners. (Note that diners were ONLY carried along portions of the route traveled at mealtime, then cut out to be restocked and switched into another train going the other way up til at least 1918, possibly into the '20s or '30s--the "all the way" diner started sometime before April 1932.)

Since I'm plugged in with the New York Central and passenger-train history communities but haven't kept up on the Isaac Bell series, you guys get me dates when the Van Dorn team rode the Century and I'll go through my TCL research and see what I can do to tell you how the train was assembled, where to find floorplans and how to model it - the closest to completion may be the very first runs of #25 (westbound) and #26 (eastbound) on June 15, 1902; I have a friend who does stereolithography design that owes me a favor and I'm thinking to suggest the TCL as a piece of scenery for his miniatures-gaming figure lines with the condition that in return for my research and analysis he print me both full trains in HO scale. (I have a guy who's a former NYC System Historical Society board-member trying to run down the diners and their blueprints for me.)