Top all-time · #2740
Naval Gazing
Personal blog · navalgazing.netpoliticshistory
Naval Gazing is a personal blog at navalgazing.net about politics and history. Since 2019, 28 different Hacker News readers have linked it 69 times, most often “Millennium Challenge 2002 (2018)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-11-01, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (25) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Naval Gazing, a blog on naval affairs, for long, detailed series on naval history and weapons, including missiles, lasers, aircraft carriers, the F-35 and Millennium Challenge 2002.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 25 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Millennium Challenge 2002 (2018)4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2020-01-09
- /Carrier-Doom-Part-14 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2019-11-01
- How destructive are nuclear weapons really?4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2022-04-10
- /2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-01-01
- The Case for the F-352 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-11-20
- Cool Facilities – The David Taylor Model Basin2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-01-17
- /About2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-04-17
- Vertical Launch System2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-09-25
What Hacker News says?
This blog post has a great detailed description of Operation Black Buck: https://www.navalgazing.net/Falklands-Part-6
Comment linking /Falklands-Part-6
on “Eliud Kipchoge Breaks Two-Hour Marathon Barrier”Submitted Rolling Airframe Missile as a story · 191 points
HN discussionYou're still vastly overstating the scope of the Posse Comitatus Act. As a matter of policy, the US military is cautious about intercepting hostile aircraft in American airspace[1], but the Posse Comitatus Act doesn't prevent it from doing so. In particular, your claim that "any action (or effectors traveling) outside base boundaries would generally be illegal" is not only false but facially absurd, since it would i…
Comment linking /Thoughts-on-the-Chinese-Balloon
on “Missiles are now the biggest killer of airline passengers”Submitted How destructive are nuclear weapons really? as a story · 117 points
HN discussionhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_semaphore would have been good if you needed to send arbitrary text. Naval flags would be higher bandwidth if you could pre-arrange a modest-sized dictionary of the words and phrases you’d need. https://www.navalgazing.net/Signalling-Part-1 is a good read.
Comment linking /Signalling-Part-1
on “FTP is 50 years old”Submitted In Defense of Missile Defense as a story · 70 points
HN discussionIf you're at all interested in ships, history, or the intersection of ships and history, I can wholeheartedly recommend Naval Gazing: https://www.navalgazing.net/
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: What niche blogs are worthwhile to follow?”Submitted The Case for the F-35 as a story · 54 points
HN discussionApropos: https://www.navalgazing.net/Fire-Control-Part-1
Comment linking /Fire-Control-Part-1
on “Basic Mechanisms In Fire Control Computers (1953) [video]”Submitted Cool Facilities – The David Taylor Model Basin as a story · 8 points
HN discussionThe SSC diaspora is collecting in a number of locations. The two I am most familiar with are Naval Gazing (a blog about naval affairs) and Data Secrets Lox (a new discussion forum). Data Secrets Lox is set up as a replacement for the SSC open threads, and is run on actual forum software, which means there are topic-specific threads for easier navigation. As membership increases, I expect we'll add subforums, also. h…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: After Slate Star Codex, where are the nuanced discussions?”Submitted Naval Gazing Main/Exotic Hulls Part 1 as a story · 4 points
HN discussion> What does the F-35 actually offer in the field that couldn't be provided by a cheaper, simpler, more reliable weapons system? I've yet to hear a good answer to that question. I think this line of criticism stems from confusing two mission types which are superficially similar, but actually have very different requirements: - Attack missions like Close Air Support involve hitting enemy tactical targets on or near t…
Comment linking /Strike-Warfare
on “The Pentagon is battling the clock to fix serious, unreported F-35 problems”Submitted US Military Aircraft Part 1 – Fighters and Bombers as a story · 4 points
HN discussionAlways important to look critically at the person speaking (I mean to imply nothing about them, just sharing what I found): It [the blog] grew out of my time as a tour guide on the battleship Iowa (BB-61) in Los Angeles, and although I now live halfway across the country, Iowa is still one of the mainstays of this blog. It also came from my frustration with existing sources, which tended to be either way too high-le…
Comment linking /About
on “Rolling Airframe Missile”Submitted No it's not a Battleship as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThe article on VLS is also quite nice https://www.navalgazing.net/VLS
Comment linking /VLS
on “Rolling Airframe Missile”Submitted Scuba Part 1 – Basics and Recreational Diving as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSo many great articles on this site. This rainy Sunday is in serious jeopardy of falling off the cliff and being sucked into the gravity well wormhole that is navalgazing.net. https://www.navalgazing.net/Phalanx I've always wondered how the Battleship guns with the white dome cylinder chamber above the gattling gun worked, but the background story is way more interesting than I expected. Apparently it's called a Pha…
Comment linking /Phalanx
on “Rolling Airframe Missile”Submitted Naval Gazing Main/Military Spaceflight – Orbital Missile Defense as a story · 2 points
HN discussionhttps://www.navalgazing.net/ESSM says the range is estimated to be 50km, Block II no longer needs illumination from the firing ship, but may not be fully integrated into AEGIS such that it can take targeting data from other ships. “But despite its capabilities, ESSM still had the drawback of all previous versions of Sea Sparrow. It relied on semi-active guidance, requiring illumination from the firing ship. It did h…
Comment linking /ESSM
on “Revitalizing US Navy Shipbuilding”Submitted US Military Aircraft Part 3 – Information Airplanes as a story · 2 points
HN discussionIf you just read the wiki article, you get a distorted view of the exercise. Gen Van Riper was more interested in "winning" than he was in following the requirements to actually have the exercise result in usable data. Examples: the wiki article mentions small boats. As in about the size of your average fishing boat. No, not your commercial fishing boat, your weekend fisherman fishing boat (Boston Whaler). And it wo…
Comment linking /Millennium-Challenge-2002
on “Pentagon Puts F-35 Full-Rate Production Decision on Hold”Submitted Carrier Design and Organizational Structure as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> https://www.navalgazing.net/Nuclear-Weapon-Destructiveness I'm a bit skeptical of this article, which seems excessively optimistic, since the estimation it does at the very beginning: > Arms-control treaties limit both nations to 1,550 deployed warheads, although FAS estimates 1,588 for Russia and 1,644 for the US seems to interpret numbers differently (deployed strategically/readily deployable). Edit: the two art…
Comment linking /Nuclear-Weapon-Destructiveness
on “What science says: Could humans survive a nuclear war between NATO and Russia?”Submitted Thoughts on the Iranian Missile Attack as a story · 2 points
HN discussionHere's a recent well-researched post that comes to essentially the opposite conclusion: The basic conclusion of all of this is simple. Nuclear war is definitely not an existential threat to humanity, much less to all life on the planet. Most people even in major urban areas would survive the initial attack, along with a surprising amount of infrastructure. This isn’t to minimize the effects, as it would be a humanit…
Comment linking /Nuclear-Weapon-Destructiveness
on “What science says: Could humans survive a nuclear war between NATO and Russia?”Submitted Freedom of Navigation and American Policy (Part 1) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionhttps://www.navalgazing.net/About Surely part of the ruse!
Comment linking /About
on “How destructive are nuclear weapons really?”Submitted Thoughts on the Lost Submersible as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
