Submarine Sunday

Ok, so to start off the official Submarine Sundays, I thought I would begin with the most exciting thing that a Trident sub can hope to do: Launch a practice missle. We are not allowed to do swimcalls anymore, we don't hit portcalls, we don't do supersecret missions, this is it. I got to do one once a couple runs ago. We were back in the engineroom, and when it went off, I had a momentary lapse of reality. Why? Because the missile leaving felt just like a very short earthquake back home. It took a few seconds to realize "oh, that was the missile leaving." Other people had been hanging around the tube to see what it was like, and some even said that yes, the boat really does bend a lot during the launch. Scary. So I thought I would put a few videos on here. The first one is a Google video and I don't know how to embed those, so here is the link:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5588388288256218328&ei=OFreSL3NN4T0-gGSy4yiCw&q=uss+maryland&hl=en
This link is from my boat, but before I got there. It shows the launch process from inside the ship. I did know several of the people on the video, including the Captain and Engineer who were still there when I got there. The video also shows both a day and night launch.


This is a much better video of a launch itself. And this is a double launch.

Finally, when I got on Youtube, I found this video of a recent Fleet Week I thought I would share...