[Platforms] US Navy Pennants and Ship Names

[Donald W. Collins]

Hi, Roy, et al,
See inline comments below...

On 12/13/15 12:34 PM, Lowry, Roy K. wrote:
>
>
> Dear All,
>
>
> I am currently in the process of adding attributes for several 
> hundred US Navy Vessels into the ICES system as a part of the 
> synchronisation of the ICES list with the C17 list in NVS.
>
>
> This work has raised a couple of issues:
>
>
> 1) Pennants. US Navy practice is to only carry the numeric portion of 
> the pennant on the hull but this is prefixed by an alphanumeric 
> classification in all references to the pennant. For example, USS 
> Nimitz has '68' painted on her hull, but has the classification 'CVN' 
> to indicate that she is a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. However, 
> the syntax used for pennant references varies between sources. 
> Wikipedia hyphenates the two parts, such as 'CVN-68', but what I would 
> regard as more naval sources such as UK Admiralty naval callsign lists 
> and ship Facebook pages (e.g. https://www.facebook.com/cvn68), use a 
> space such as 'CVN 68'. I am currently following the navies 
> and standardising on spaces, but before I get too far down the path 
> (I've put 30-40 into the system so far) does anybody have strong 
> reasons for a hyphen to be included.
>
>
In addition to relatively authoritative self-managed sources (e.g., the 
USS Nimitz facebook page), I noticed that other 'authoritative sources', 
such as compendia published by Jane's (e.g., Jane's Fighting Ships), use 
a space as the separator not a hyphen. I agree with your approach and 
would follow the convention established in more authoritative and 
curated sources than Wikipedia and not use a hyphen. I will alert you if 
I am able to find a US Navy source that says otherwise.

>
> 2) Whoever set up the US Navy codes in ICES in the 1990s was fond of 
> brevity and certainly didn't approve of writing out Christian names in 
> full when these were a part of the ship name. For example the ship 
> widely listed as Forrest Sherman is 'F. Sherman'. This has been the 
> cause of a significant number of alerts put on the ICES system by 
> Frank Sejer. I am systematically working through ship class lists 
> (e.g. Forrest Sherman destroyers) which makes this contradiction 
> glaringly obvious. I strongly feel that the names should be expanded 
> to match the published class lists and am therefore putting name 
> change proposals into the ICES system. I am also proposing removal 
> of titles from names to the title attribute (e.g. USS Normandy to 
> Normandy).  Does anybody disagree?
>
>
As noted, there was a now-abandoned practice in the late-1990s and 
early-2000s to insert 'USS' into the name field for US Navy vessels. 
I've been slowly updating these entries to separate USS from the Name. I 
agree with making this change and to making any other necessary changes 
to update names as necessary. However, be advised that the staff time 
allocated in US NCEI (former NODC) for managing this information is 
minimal, so there will be delays in getting the US NCEI information to 
match ICES.
Cheers,
Don Collins
>
> Cheers, Roy.
>
>
> Please note that I partially retired on 01/11/2015. I am now only 
> working 7.5 hours a week and can only guarantee e-mail response on 
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> sent to enquiries at bodc.ac.uk. Please also use this e-mail if your 
> requirement is urgent.
>
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