Birth of the Blue Missile

Ive had no time to work on the car, much to busy with work and church, but here is some more on the ship and the crazies we were back then.

A little background on the prior life of the research vessel is called for before I tell the next tale.
In its prior life the ship was used for “lightning research”.
The ship was an electric/diesel power craft. In the forward compartment (where the wood shop now was) there were a huge amount of capacitors the size of five gallon rectangular gas cans, around two hundred. This capacitor bank was used to store electricity to supplement the diesel generators that powered the electric motors that turned the screws. There was also in this room, de-gauzing equipment to keep the stored charge from dissolving the ships hull, along with the zinc ingots welded to the exterior of the hull.

I’m sure there are some who are getting ahead of me with “you’ve got to be kidding”…

OK… here is where the lightning comes in. Their mission, which they obviously accepted, was to get lightning to strike the ship and store some of that energy in the capacitors. After which it was sent on to the motors for propulsion.
I want to see the hands of all of those who think, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out, this is crazy dangerous.
However it did take a rocket scientist to make it work. They would launch two different size rockets into the storms towing an ultra thin wire, which was attached back to the ship. The smallest was a 2” line throwing rocket (with a range of a thousand feet or so) used in merchant shipping rescue operations, and a 6” rocket that had a two mile apogee, which means it had the potential to land four miles away.

The other method was to take and tow a stainless steel braided cable 1/8” up into the storm with a helicopter. The other end was attached to a large reel mounted to the main deck…. That must have been much safer. LOL
The new owner did tell a story of one of the mates walking out on the deck during a storm, not knowing the helicopter had picked up the line, seeing the reel free wheeling and throwing the brake on the reel almost yanking the helicopter out of the sky.

When we got the ship all of the rockets were taken off the ship and stored at Stanley’s house in his garage. After we got the new diesel motors installed into the ship and most of the main systems were functional, the investor flew down from up north and we took a sort of shake down cruise.
We went down to the ocean side of marathon key and would spent the day diving for lobsters and spear fishing, and consuming large quantities of beer and getting well adjusted.
We thought since we could send it out into the middle of the Atlantic it would be fun to launch a rocket that night from the bow of the ship.

So the day of the cruise we went to Stanley’s house and assembled one of the six inch rockets. The six inch rockets were about eight feet tall and had fins that were about three feet at the base. The nose cone was threaded onto the one piece body and the fins were attached with screws onto the casing. Just one of these barely fit into the back of a pickup truck. So here we were going down I-95 with one of these in the back of the truck from North Miami to the river. Talk about a paranoid bunch of guys in a truck.
We made it to the ship without incident and took our cruise. That night we strapped an improvised launch rail to the front railing of the ship and slid the rocket on it. Stanley got some zipcord and a twelve volt battery, connected the whole affair to the igniter, and we lit the thing up. The problem we had not counted on, was that the threads for the nose cone were incredibly fine. Even though the rocket looked properly assembled those threads has stripped during assembly. So when he ignited the charge there was a big boom and all we managed to do was launch the nose cone a hundred feet from the boat.
In retrospect this was probably a very good thing. You see we had forgot to take into account that right off the coast of south Florida is the Atlantic shipping lane which has cruise ships and super tankers running up and down the coast at all times. Let’s say within four miles of the coast. You fill in the dots.

After that incident we all decided launching those rockets was a lost cause and Stanley became the very proud owner of all that stuff.
Some time after the ship lost funding and we all went our separate ways word got back to me that Stanley had gotten busted, not by the DEA which was not that big back then, but by the ATF.
For some reason they went after him. When they walked into his living room ( what we now would call a man cave) they found his arm chair, which was strategically located right in front of and centered between his massive stereo speakers, surrounded on either side by two eight foot rockets with the smaller ones on either side of the end tables. What can you say, Bubba existed even in Miami.


more later, hope you enjoy
Andrew