LAST EDITED ON Sep-29-18 AT 06:26 PM (EDT)
Notes from Gryphon
Notes from Phil1966 Volkswagen Type 2 Deluxe Microbus - The VW Type 2 was available in a dizzying profusion of configurations and trim levels in the '60s and '70s. There was the Transporter, which was a two-seat cargo version. There was the Kombi, short for Kombination, which had a second row of (removable) seats and cargo space behind. There was the Hochdach, a high-roof panel delivery model. They made a pickup, and a flatbed pickup, and a 4-door crew-cab pickup, which rejoiced in the delightful German name Doppelkabine ("double cabin"). There was the Westfalia, the classic VW camper van. And there was the Microbus, which was set up for all passengers, all the time, with three seating rows and plenty of windows.
And then there was the Deluxe Microbus, which had even more windows and a huge roll-up canvas sunroof.
Yep. Counting the two panes of the windshield and the one in the back (but oddly, not counting the quarterlights), that's 21 windows.
The Westfalia version is available from the LEGO Company as the 1962 Volkswagen T1 Camper Van!
mysterious warrior women appearing aboard Einheri ships - One was the aircraft carrier Zuikaku, as seen in Lucky Crane.
Club Yasen - "Yasen" is Japanese for "night battle". In Kantai Collection, Naka's elder sister Sendai is obsessed with night battles, to the point where the other kanmusu have nicknamed her yasen baka ("the night battle idiot"). In the context of the game, night battle literally means continuing the battle after nightfall; in the fandom (and encouraged by a number of winky-face dialogue lines in game) it has The Obvious Other Meaning as well.
Navy Special No. 5 - Marine heavy fuel oil, also known as Bunker B. As Mark Knopfler teaches us, if you wanna run cool, you got to run on heavy fuel.
aidoru style - Canonically, Naka does consider herself an idol (in the Japanese pop singer sense); that is in fact how she introduces herself, as "the fleet's idol, Naka-chan." Here we've branched her out a bit, musically speaking.
fairies - Equipment fairies turn up a lot in KanColle. They pilot the miniature airplanes launched by carriers, and represent damage control crews and various pieces of equipment (radar sets, particular weapons, and so on) in fit-out screens. In some fan interpretations, they also operate equipment at sea (gun turrets, for example, are sometimes shown being worked by fairy guncrews).
Not all equipment in the game is represented by fairies; sometimes the weapons themselves are "personified" as sort-of-robotic sidekicks (such as the gun turrets of Amatsukaze, Shimakaze, and the Akizuki-class anti-aircraft destroyers). There seems to be no consistent pattern to this beyond what a particular ship's artist thought would be cute.
TR-808 Rhythm Composer - The iconic drum machine of the 1980s and '90s, in hip-hop and rap as well as techno and pop (which is why the 808 fairy, who can be seen on the 808, directly in front of Naka, is rocking the hip-hop style).
2-4-11 Projekt - Scrapping Naka in-game yields two units of fuel, four ammunition, and 11 steel. She's a common drop and her personality annoys some players, so the running (rather cruel) joke in fandom is that she gets scrapped a lot. The above is presumably not what the name of her act means in-story, but...
Also, here's a clearer look at the logo:
Why "Projekt"? I don't really know. It just seemed more techno when I was making the logo. :)
scrapped once before she was even launched - The Sendai class was planned to consist of eight ships, but only four were under construction when the Japanese government signed the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922, which severely limited Japan's options in regards to new construction. The IJN brass decided that all future cruiser development would be focused on heavy cruisers; the four Sendai-class ships on which construction hadn't yet started were canceled, and the two least far along were ordered scrapped on the ways. Naka, ship number three, was one of the latter, but her demolition was delayed by the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake, after which someone reconsidered and she was completed and launched after all.
The Washington Treaty and the 1923 earthquake figure large in the histories of a number of the most famous IJN ships of World War II, and thus of a number of KanColle characters, most notably the aircraft carriers Akagi and Kaga (both of which were converted from other ships rendered superfluous during construction by the treaty, in Kaga's case because Akagi's sister ship was too badly damaged by the earthquake for her planned carrier conversion to be finished).
Sangheili coast interdictors - The homeworld of the Elites (from Halo), Saghelios, has a strong naval tradition due to the fact that their major nations are set on coastal island archipelagos.
Many beings are bemused, to say the least, when they are killed in combat and find themselves in a modernized version of the medieval Norse afterlife. Few, however, I think it's fairly safe to say, have been more bemused than the Elites of Sanghelios.
Gerald R. Ford-class fusion super-carrier - The Gerald R. Ford class is a real class of ship, being constructed to replace the original nuclear-powered Enterprise (CVN-65) and the aging Nimitz-class carriers. At present only one actually exists, though the second is under construction and several more are planned. If the program goes according to schedule, Enterprise (CVN-80) will be laid down in 2020 and launched five years later.
In the UF universe, these were the first US Navy ships to be built from the keel up for fusion power, as opposed to being converted from fission-powered vessels when Earth obtained fusion reactor technology post-Contact. When initially constructed, since pre-Contact nuclear-fission-powered ships were still in inventory and the conversion program was going to take decades, fusion-powered ships were given a parenthetical (U) in their hull classification codes to distinguish them from those with the now-outmoded fission systems. ("U" because fission and fusion both begin with F, you see.) These addenda were then dropped in 2027, when the last fission reactor was finally removed from Navy service. As such, Enterprise entered service with the hull designation CVN(U)-80, but finished it as simply CVN-80.
The Ford-class ships were also the last carriers built for the US Navy that were not capable of what the Navy called "diverse theater operations"—i.e., operating as both waterborne surface combatants and spacecraft. Consideration was given to converting them for the purpose, but it would have been more expensive than just completing them, and the first-generation space-only carriers, as planned, and then building the capability into the next class of ships, which would then replace both.
Of course, since both the Ford-class surface vessels and the Alan B. Shepard, Jr. class of spacecraft carriers were completed just in time for the Fog War, that plan took longer to implement than the Navy brass were expecting, but hey, no plan survives contact with the enemy.
USS Blue Ridge - LCC-19, first of the US Navy's two Blue Ridge-class command and control ships. IRL, the oldest active ship in the fleet, having been launched in 1969 and commissioned the following year.
two American ships, Midway and Growler - USS Midway (CV-41), first of the three Midway-class carriers completed just after World War II, and USS Growler (SSG-577), a 1950s cruise-missile submarine. The former is a museum ship in San Diego; the latter is part of the Intrepid Sea, Air, and Space Museum in New York.
USCGC Alexander Hamilton - WPG-34, one of the seven Treasury-class high-endurance cutters the US Coast Guard constructed in the 1930s, all named after former Secretaries of the Treasury. (The Coast Guard was part of that department at the time.) Hamilton was torpedoed and sunk by a German U-boat off Iceland in 1942. Bears her namesake's full name so as not to be confused with her contemporary, the Wickes-class USN destroyer USS Hamilton (DD-141).
Republic-class Dìqiú battleship ... Zhu Li - The United Republic and Northern Water Tribe's battleships built in the era of Avatar Korra, these catamaran-hulled warships were notably used in the Equalist Crisis and the Water Tribe Civil War.
Southern Water Tribe shipping magnate Iknik Blackstone Varrick purchased the first Republic-class battleship ever built and named it after his assistant (and future wife) Zhu Li Moon, who then offered it to the New Team Avatar as transport to their final confrontation with the Northern Water Tribe's forces in the South Pole.
Higbee - USS Lenah H. Sutcliffe Higbee (DDG-123), a Flight IIA Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer. IRL, currently under construction. Named for Chief Nurse Lenah H. Sutcliffe Higbee (1874-1941), head of the US Navy Nursing Corps during World War I. Not to be confused with Nurse Higbee's previous namesake, USS Higbee (DD-806), a Gearing-class destroyer launched in 1944.
Fordy - The Ford-class Enterprise received this nickname from her colleagues to distinguish her from the many, many other Einheri ships named Enterprise.
It comes from "Ford-class Enterprise" or "Ford-E".
a soot-smudged figure in a grubby coverall - This is repair ship USS Vestal (AR-4), some of whose adventures we've discussed previously on these Forums.
Mutsu muttering something in her ear - "You know, neesan, if you swapped out your turrets, you could carry all four of them at once."In the Kantai Collection game, Yamato's triple 46cm main gun turret, including all its components, weighs 2800 tons. This is heavier than many destroyers, including the Akatsuki class (1980 tons). In the game, the main battleships can all equip the 46cm gun... including Nagato. There is in fact fanart of this:
source: http://www.pixiv.net/member_illus.php?mode=medium&illust_id=40306489 (dead link)
"(Yūdachi's gone bye-bye ... I'm terrified beyond the capacity for rational thought,)" - it wouldn't be UF without this reference somewhere in the text.
that explains why she isn't wearing a swimsuit - The speaker, not identified in-story, is USS Seawolf (SS-197), a Sargo-class submarine. After an illustrious career in World War II, she was sunk in October 1944, almost certainly by USS Richard M. Rowell (DE-403), a John C. Butler-class destroyer escort, who has, you had better believe it, never heard the end of it since the Personification.
you're starting to sound like Akebono - One of the Ayanami-class (improved Fubuki-class, Special Type-II) destroyers in Kantai Collection, Akebono is one of several destroyers known for their acid tongues and disdain for the fleet commander, whom she is in the habit of addressing as "kuso teitoku" ("shitty admiral"). In the fandom, even when she develops the dere side of tsundere, she usually still calls the commander that.
Amatsukaze and Rensōhō-kun - The Kagerō-class destroyer Amatsukaze was the testbed for the high-pressure boilers and turbine designs later used in the one-off "super-destroyer" Shimakase. In Kantai Collection, this is reflected in a partial resemblance between the two, and often leads Amatsukaze to be depicted as the closest thing to a sister ship Shimakaze has. They also both have Turret Buddies, being designed by the same artist (who also did the Akizuki class).
Borie - Clemson-class destroyer USS Borie (DD-215) served in the Atlantic Fleet during World War II protecting Allied shipping from German U-boats. Her fandom predilection for divesting herself of her clothes whenever she can get away with it stems from her final battle with U-405, where not only did they expend all their ammunition on the surfaced submarine, in order to attempt to prevent their own ship from sinking, the crew jettisoned all the topweight possible from the ship, before they eventually threw in the towel and abandoned ship.
a mere 45 knots - It's worth noting that this is considerably faster than all but a handful of ships could go in World War II, and far faster than the real Kongō-class ships, which, though they were "fast battleships", were still only fast for battleships (ca. 30 knots). It's still markedly faster than most surface combatants can go nowadays, come to that. Fog ships' immense speed advantage was one of the many things that made them so easily capable of outmatching the world's navies in the 2030s.
Average maximum Fog ship speeds are from 75 to 90 knots depending on ship type; if this doesn't seem physically possible to you, you now have some idea of how various Earth navy analysts felt when the reports started coming in.
a selection of music Kongō did not know - I didn't tag it in the story, mostly because of the maddening impermanence of YouTube content, but for the record (and for as long at it lasts), this is what I had in mind for Maya's selection of choice, hammering away in the background, during this scene.
Tenryū's... fur-trimmed leather coat - I'm not a fan of Tenryū's recently released second remodel in KanColle—as is sadly customary with Ayaki's second remodels, it's overdone in ways that put me off (what the hell is up with those shoes?) and bizarrely malproportioned (as Juni noted when it came out, her legs go all the way to her diaphragm). However, a couple of fan artists have shown that the coat looks pretty cool if she bothers to actually wear it.
"Cold this morning, Commodore." - They are, of course, re-enacting the first scene of the 1990 motion picture The Hunt for Red October, which they'd just watched the night before.
And no, it's not a mistake on my part that Tenryū is using binoculars.
Rear Admiral John {Alfred} Richardson, USN, 1970-2059 - not to be confused with the real life Admiral John M. Richardson, who is currently serving as the 31st Chief of Naval Operations (and who, prior to taking up that post, oversaw the USN's nuclear propulsion program, which, in UF, included overseeing the fission-to-fusion conversions noted above with Enterprise). And yes, they're both in Valhalla, and no, they're not related. The easiest way to distinguish between the two is that one of them served with submarines and became CNO, while the other served with destroyers and cruisers and was involved in the Fog War.the #Kuchikukan discord has blown up - Kuchikukan is the Japanese word for what Western naval taxonomists would call a destroyer.
I get RSS feeds in my head - Atomic Robo had a similar lament in The Ghost of Station X, Chapter 4: "Transformation".
Coast Guard assets - in the post-Personification era of New Yokosuka, Coast Guard ships of many nations serve as MP's and Shore Patrol assets, capable of wrangling any class of shipgirl, regardless of their tonnage. Their ability to haul even Iowa-class battleships to the base's drunk tank is something out of legend.
a battleship and four escorts - We'll see who they are next time.
Special Type destroyer, fifth ship, Murakumo - One of the five starter ships in Kantai Collection. Despite being a Special Type-I (Fubuki-class) ship, she doesn't look anything like any of the others, who all very strongly resemble each other in character design, costume, and rigging, because she's the only one not designed by the same artist. (Her designer was the same one who did the Tenryū class, hence the levitating head thingies.)
I'll be expecting great things from you - In-game, Murakumo is another of the tsundere destroyers, although she is considerably less hostile than, for instance, Akebono or Kasumi.
unmistakably a cardboard packing box - The admiral's starting office in Kantai Collection is, I understand, similarly minimalist. (Redecoration coins are one of the earnable in-game currencies.)
