Red Castle Burgers & Fries - "Red Castle" is the English translation of Akagi (赤城), the name of a stratovolcano in Japan's Gunma Prefecture. In the early 1920s the second of the planned Amagi-class battlecruisers was named after Mount Akagi, in accordance with the IJN's naming convention of the time; when the Amagi class was subsequently outlawed by the 1922 Naval Limitation Treaty, the partially completed hull of Akagi was converted into an aircraft carrier. Nearly 500 years later, the spirit of that aircraft carrier, embodied in Valhalla, founded a small chain of hamburger shops. And so, here we are.

In terms of its presentation and décor, Red Castle owes more to Five Guys than White Castle, with overtones of other diner-style burger chains such as Johnny Rockets. In keeping with Akagi's personal style, it is known for its ample portions, even for diners with more normal appetites than an early-twentieth-century aircraft carrier. The French fries are also widely held to be the finest available in Valhalla.

Red Castle proudly serves Chock Full o' Baux coffee, which is available in a version containing no aluminum for patrons to whom it is toxic (or just unappealing).

unidentifiable but appetizing soft drink - Kaga has never encountered Pepsi Max before.

kanmusu who were sunk in battle or scrapped - The phenomenon is not exclusive to kanmusu, of course; most Einherjar have similar dreams, off and on.

Fubuki's journal entry - Originally published in 2018 as the Forum Mini-Story "The Dying-Dream".

a bottle of tarhun - Also known as tarkhuna, a carbonated soft drink that originated in Georgia (the country in the Caucasus, not the American state) in the 1880s. The Soviet government began to promote it throughout the USSR in the early 1980s, and it remains popular in Russia and other former Soviet member-states today. It's bright green and tastes like tarragon.

light cruiser Yūbari - The real-life cruiser Yūbari was an experimental ship constructed in the early 1920s as a testbed for various advanced shipbuilding and propulsion technologies. She was never duplicated, but the techniques pioneered in her development influenced Japanese shipbuilding thereafter. Probably for this reason, the producers of the Kantai Collection TV anime depicted her as the Naval Base's chief mechanic in place of Akashi. I think Akashi was still just the game's unnamed "item shop girl" NPC when the anime was made, and hadn't been implemented as a repair ship.

Saint Isambard help me - Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806–1859) was an English civil and mechanical engineer and naval architect who pioneered the construction of really large all-metal steamships. As such, he is something of a hero to many kanmusu, particularly from the English-speaking world (although not an actual saint).

HMS Vindictive - If Vindictive strikes you as an odd name for an unarmed repair ship, it may help to know that she was converted from an aircraft carrier.

a scruffy, lovable mutt called Victory - Victory, or Vicky as he was familiarly known, was a real dog who belonged to USS Iowa's first commanding officer, Captain John L. McCrea. He served aboard the battleship for the entirety of her first commission, from 1943 to 1949, rising to the rank of Mascot First Class (although he was once busted back to Mascot Third Class for going AWOL and fighting). In the course of his naval career, he transited the Panama Canal and crossed both the Equator and the Prime Meridian, with appropriate ceremonies. The Battleship USS Iowa Museum has more information about Victory on its website.

USCGC Acushnet - The fifth of the U.S. Navy's 19 Diver-class salvage and rescue ships, originally named USS Shackle (ARS-9), Acushnet was transferred to the Coast Guard and renamed after the town of Acushnet, Massachusetts, in 1946. For the next 22 years, she was homeported in Portland, Maine, then served stints in the Caribbean, the West Coast, and finally Alaska, concluding her service in 2011—not a bad career for a 213-foot seagoing tug constructed in a hurry during World War II. Along the way she was redesignated several times; her final hull number, WMEC-167, denotes her as a Medium Endurance Cutter, a designation usually reserved for somewhat larger ships. WMECs are defined as cutters with accommodations suitable for the crew to live aboard, capable of patrols lasting six to eight weeks.

Over the course of her long career(s), Shackle/Acushnet cleared wreckage in Pearl Harbor and at Midway; performed rescues and field repairs on Allied warships damaged by kamikaze attacks; cleared mines off Japan; participated in the International Ice Patrol out of Portland; rescued sailors from the tanker SS Fort Mercer during the great Cape Cod winter storm of 1952 (another Coast Guard rescue of another tanker sunk by the same storm, SS Pendleton, is recounted in the book and film The Finest Hours); spent a few years as an oceanographic research ship; received the Coast Guard's Humanitarian Service Award for her work during the 1980 Mariel Boatlift from Cuba; and finished out her career patrolling the Bering Sea out of Ketchikan, Alaska. She has seen some shit, is what I'm getting at.

it took half the United States Navy to bring me down - Musashi is exaggerating, but she did require an awful lot of sinking. It took dozens of aircraft from three separate carriers a whole day to do the job, by which time it's estimated that she'd taken 19 torpedoes and at least 17 direct hits from bombs. She finally capsized and sank hours after the battle, when efforts to control flooding failed and her engines stopped before she could be beached.

a Cumbrian accent - As a product of Vickers-Armstrongs of Barrow-in-Furness, England, Kongō has never quite shed the dialect of her birthplace (which was technically in Lancashire in 1912, but still). Here in UF, her spoken English is mostly Home Counties/RP, but the North slips through now and then, particularly when she's excited (which is a lot of the time).

I go by Goya, dechi - "Dechi" is Goya's verbal tic (a relatively common feature in Kancolle character designs). Like most Japanese subs' nicknames in Kancolle, hers is derived from one way of pronouncing the digits in her name ("go" = 5, "ya" = 8).

Balao class... there's a lot of us - 120 Balao-class submarines were completed, which, combined with the 77 members of the preceding (and very similar) Gato class and the 29 boats of the succeeding Tench class, adds up to quite a big family for the submarines of that design lineage.

Amazingly, one Balao-class sub is still in operational service as of this writing: ROCS Hai Pao (SS-792), formerly USS Tusk (SS-426), which is one of two WWII-vintage submarines still operated by the Republic of China Navy (the other is the Tench-class Hai Shih, ex-USS Cutlass). A further eight Balao-class subs are preserved as museum ships, including USS Lionfish and USS Bowfin, both mentioned in previous RCFR episodes. You may have seen USS Pampanito starring as USS Stingray in the 1996 motion picture Down Periscope.

the full UDT rig - "UDT" stands for "Underwater Demolition Team", the World War II US Navy's highly specialized force of scuba divers trained in advanced dive techniques, search-and-rescue, reconnaissance, combat swimming, explosives disposal, and sabotage. UDT eventually picked up even more of an emphasis on the commando end of things and evolved into the Navy SEAL program. Tang is referring to the uniform the un-remodeled form of U-511, the Kancolle U-boat character who turns into Ro-500 when remodeled, wears, which is a full-body tactical wetsuit as opposed to the more customary Japanese school swimsuit.

United States Navy fleet collier - Colliers were a type of ship designed to transport large quantities of coal and supply them to other ships in their fleets, back in the days when warships burned it for fuel. Having colliers along extended the range at which groups of ships could operate without needing to return to port to resupply. Vestal was commissioned in 1909, only a few years before the US Navy converted most of its ships to burn oil instead. The conversion left the fleet's colliers out of a job (evidently they weren't good candidates for conversion to fleet oilers, which took their place), but some of the newer hulls, like Vestal, were refitted for other types of support operations. Vestal was taken out of service as a collier in 1912 and relaunched the following year as one of the first dedicated repair ships.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
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