Kuiper sets his squirrel-dar to 80% power in front of this heckin’ radar antenna from the USS South Dakota, a.k.a. BATTLESHIP X.
The USS South Dakota was one of the most decorated ships of WW2. She fought bravely in every major Pacific battle from 1942 to 1945. Shortly after embarking on her first mission, she made unauthorized contact with a coral reef and spent a month in the brig, er, the shop. This was in a way fortuitous, as during the repairs the ship was upgraded with much bigger guns, newly mounted in sets of four. This is meant to be strictly educational; we here at Kuiper J. Doggo Enterprises, LLC would never advocate battleship insurance fraud.
The Japanese believed on multiple occasions that they had sunk our battleship, and the US Navy was cool with this idea. The Navy started to refer to the ship as BATTLESHIP X (caps are mine because it looks cooler.) The press called it “Old Nameless.”
Most of the noble ship was scrapped in 1962, but there’s a neat memorial to it in Sioux Falls. The logistics of moving an entire battleship to South Dakota would have been challenging to say the least, so they instead chose to pour a concrete outline of the ship and display the anchor, the propeller, some big ol’ guns and this here radar antenna.
Radar systems were developed more or less right before WWII and had an enormous impact on the war. Radar was not only used to detect other ships, but also to warn of incoming aircraft (which often carried bombs ?), to aim anti-aircraft guns and searchlights, to track storms and buried mines, and tiny radar systems were even used as proximity sensors to automatically detonate artillery shells. I’ve run out of room now, Google “Chain Home” for more cool hist…
Original post: https://www.instagram.com/p/BX0_yKYg1IG/