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Comment by RandomThoughts3 | Hacker News Reader

I may or may not be aware of hull damage being caused or not caused by a rifle being fired from the flight deck of a ship. My point being, your safety officer had a point.

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> hull damage being caused or not caused by a rifle being fired from the flight deck of a ship

How did that happen? Our MarDet would occasionally do live-fire training off the flight deck (CVN-65); they naturally pointed their weapons away from the ship ....

Or are you talking about hitting the hull of a different ship, e.g., one of the tin cans in plane guard, or alongside during an UNREP? Seems like that would ... get noticed by a lot of folks.

Hypothetically, someone could have left a guest (like say an engineer from the shipyard doing sea acceptance testing) fire a rifle and an unlucky wave reflection might have bounced a round back towards the bow.

Wow what an incredibly unfortunate hypothetical situation. 1 in a million ricochet that one.

Draw a ship. Draw some waves. Note the angle from Crayon Eater those waves.

Also note how wide an angle "ship hull" represents both vertically and horizontally.

Not so 1 in a million.

Sure, if it bounces that's a very big angle.

But what's the chance of a bullet that hits water bouncing back the other way at high speed? I would have thought it was zero!

Would love to see someone fire a Phalanx for four hours just to generate enough test data to assess that probability

Seabees doing seabee things.

"A wave? At sea? Chance in a million."

I think they know that. I read their comment as sarcastic.

It's really, really close though. The kill distance of six miles is what tips me over the edge of reading it as sarcasm.

Really? To me, it is a very clear instance. Amongst my cohort, saying "The safety officer won't let us do anything fun" is going to generally always be sarcastic, unless the point is that some rules seem excessively and obviously pointless, which these aren't. It's more a backhanded way of saying "thank goodness the safety office stopped us / those boneheads from doing something that would have been incredibly stupid."

It depends totally on how you read it. In this case, my first thought after reading that was "play stupid games, win stupid prizes". There are plenty of people (especially on the internet) who actually do think that way -- by which I mean people that are serious when they respond with "you guys ruin all the fun" to others who bring up genuine concerns that will most likely have wide-sweeping ramifications.

> There are plenty of people (especially on the internet) who actually do think that way

Sure. That's why these safety officers exist. I think some other funranium posts state.that (paraphrased) "safety rules are written in blood."

That said, I suspect folks like that would tend to phrase the rule in a way to diminish the implied impact/likelihood, rather than enhance it or state as-is, as (afaict) the original did.

like finishing a comment with, "we walked away with all our fingers -- perfect to flip the safety officer the bird"

OK, you have a bunch of kids, who, under different circumstances, might be playing grabass on campus, instead, are in charge of incredibly deadly stuff.

What could possibly go wrong?

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