Safety guys always ruin the fun. I was in the Marine Corps and every time we got to test some new piece of gear the safety officer was like "No, you can't live fire it off the flight deck of the ship" or "No, not here, that village is down wind of the dust you will kick up when it goes off." No, that has a kill distance of 6 miles, you have to fire it into a hill." Blah, blah, blah.
I may or may not be aware of hull damage being caused or not caused by a rifle being fired from the flight deck of a ship. My point being, your safety officer had a point.
> hull damage being caused or not caused by a rifle being fired from the flight deck of a ship
How did that happen? Our MarDet would occasionally do live-fire training off the flight deck (CVN-65); they naturally pointed their weapons away from the ship ....
Or are you talking about hitting the hull of a different ship, e.g., one of the tin cans in plane guard, or alongside during an UNREP? Seems like that would ... get noticed by a lot of folks.
Hypothetically, someone could have left a guest (like say an engineer from the shipyard doing sea acceptance testing) fire a rifle and an unlucky wave reflection might have bounced a round back towards the bow.
Really? To me, it is a very clear instance. Amongst my cohort, saying "The safety officer won't let us do anything fun" is going to generally always be sarcastic, unless the point is that some rules seem excessively and obviously pointless, which these aren't. It's more a backhanded way of saying "thank goodness the safety office stopped us / those boneheads from doing something that would have been incredibly stupid."
It depends totally on how you read it. In this case, my first thought after reading that was "play stupid games, win stupid prizes". There are plenty of people (especially on the internet) who actually do think that way -- by which I mean people that are serious when they respond with "you guys ruin all the fun" to others who bring up genuine concerns that will most likely have wide-sweeping ramifications.
> There are plenty of people (especially on the internet) who actually do think that way
Sure. That's why these safety officers exist. I think some other funranium posts state.that (paraphrased) "safety rules are written in blood."
That said, I suspect folks like that would tend to phrase the rule in a way to diminish the implied impact/likelihood, rather than enhance it or state as-is, as (afaict) the original did.
OK, you have a bunch of kids, who, under different circumstances, might be playing grabass on campus, instead, are in charge of incredibly deadly stuff.
Most US insurance will cover this at 100% even if you haven't met your deductible. Something about how babies cost more than a 3 digit outpatient procedure....
Yeah, but one that immediately make you sterile will likely burn out your eyes and cook the brain. In any case I was just pointing out this is urban legend of sorts.
> that village is down wind of the dust you will kick up when it goes off.
I'm always happy to hear that there are people saying these sorts of things in the military. I'm sorry it wasn't fun at the time, but the Safety Officer really was looking out for you. You really don't want to be the unexpected cautionary tale, like Bob.
> I was in the Marine Corps and every time we got to test some new piece of gear the safety officer was like "No, you can't live fire...
I thought the whole point of the Marines was to cause maximal amounts of damage. Are you implying there is a constraint on that?
But now I understand why the marines hate the navy: I had a buddy who'd been in the navy and he said they kept the kids busy by cleaning and painting everything but frequently they'd let 'em blow off steam by tossing cardboard boxes and stuff off the end the flight deck and shooting at them with the 50 cal machine guns.
We were good friends, attended MIT together, but if I thought the Navy would take many people like him I'd doubt their ability to fight a war. He was only in the navy because it would pay for school and AFAIK he managed to avoid getting any rank advancement at all. MIT requires, or used to, a lot of all nighters and he once said "I'm probably only sane with these all nighters because I did so much extra sleeping in the navy"
> I thought their point was to expose themselves to maximal amounts of damage.
I hate to be pedantic, but technically the whole point is to expose the enemy to maximal amounts of damage. Whoever that is. Anything else is incidental.
> But now I understand why the marines hate the navy: I had a buddy who'd been in the navy and he said they kept the kids busy by cleaning and painting everything but frequently they'd let 'em blow off steam by tossing cardboard boxes and stuff off the end the flight deck and shooting at them with the 50 cal machine guns.
If anything this should be why the taxpayer doesn't like the navy.
So after I got out I joined the National Guard.