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Tuesday, July 26, 2011

THE WHALE GUARD SHIP BUCEPHALUS

Steve Cole muses to himself on a lazy afternoon.

When I win the $250 million lottery, one of my projects will be to buy and outfit a ship and go see the whales (and the Japanese whaling fleet) in the Antarctic Ocean. I will cooperate with the Sea Shepherd battle group (ships named Steve Irwin, Bob Barker, Gojira), but I want a crew of ex-navy people, not tree-hugging vegetarians. I plan to go in harm's way and to shut down the Japanese whaling fleet as the Sea Shepherds have tried to do. I do not plan to fail.

I want to carefully pick the ship I buy (not least because when I get bored I'll probably just give it to Sea Shepherds anyway). I want two engines (so I am not adrift if one breaks down), good speed (better than what the Japanese ships can do), and plenty of fuel. (I may rent a really cheap ship to tag along during the first two weeks and refuel my ship on the way to the battle zone.)

I plan to name my ship Bucephalus, after the warhorse that carried Alexander the Great in battle. I'll tell Paul Watson (the head of Sea Shepherds) that my name is Alexander, and I'll assign myself the naval rank of Commander (which leads to the almost musical Commander Alexander). Being a commander will make Paul Watson think that I am placing myself under his command. (He calls himself Captain, which is one rank higher than commander.) I'll take his orders as long as they suit me. I will have to make sure we (and the Sea Shepherds) have encrypted radios or maybe some secret codes in a copy of Darwin's Origin of Species.

My ship will be outfitted differently than his. For one thing, I want a stern ramp so I can launch and recover small boats easier than the Sea Shepherds can. For another, I won't have a helicopter, but half a dozen UAVs which are easier to launch and recover. I want two of those big fire-hose cannons so I can return the Japanese squirt guns equally (or better). I definitely want a real radar detector, not something that the second mate bashed together with a Fuzzbuster and a satellite television dish. (Ships in the Antarctic Ocean need radar to stay out of the way of ice, and we can detect their radar twice as far away as our radar can detect them. I suspect that the Japanese ships already have military-grade radar detectors.)

But I plan to take the battle to them. Not with guns, but with non-lethal weapons. Start with powerful lights, like a couple of those 60-bazillion candle power light beams that can blind pilots and cause aircraft to crash. If the Japanese get on my case, I'm going to teach them what it's like to stare into the sun. I won't make them crash their ships (I'm not going to blind any guy who is driving a ship within collision distance of my ship) but if they try to crowd in on me I will make it sting. I'm going to have some really big potato guns (hooked to a really big air compressor) so I can lob stink bombs onto their decks (and red paint onto their sides). I want to have my own LRAD (long-range sound gun) and I'll be using the music that Petrick programmed for the agonizer booth. (If the Japanese want to sound-blast my ship, I'll give right it back to them.) I also want an AESA radar which can be used as a "zap gun" to fry the electronics of any Japanese ship doing something I don't think they need to be doing (for example, harpooning whales).

I am torn on actual guns (which create legal and insurance issues), and any I carry will be kept below decks unless I am force to use them in self-defense. (To simply go down there and sink their ships by gunfire results in me and my crew being declared pirates or worse.) My first choice is to have a 20mm autocannon (which would neatly perforate the hull of any ship that tries to ram me, or that I see ram the Sea Shepherds). If the Japanese want to play hardball, I can fire a warning shot across their bow, and they will realize that I have the capability to actually sink their ships and go away. (No more of this nonsense where Japanese ships circle the Sea Shepherds while the factory ship steams over the horizon.) I may also want to have some 7.62mm or maybe 12.7mm machineguns, and probably some rifles as well. (An anti-tank rocket would do a dandy job on the bridge of a whaling ship, but let's not get carried away.) I might even bring a Barrett 50 sniper rifle and poke some holes in their harpoon guns. (That would be a swell and non-lethal way to put a stop to their slaughter of whales. I am betting that they don't carry spare harpoon guns, and that a harpoon gun with a hole through it sideways isn't going to work very well.)

I'm not just saving the whales; I'm saving the entire planet. When those aliens show up to check on the whales, I want to make sure that there are whales left to answer the phone.