This is the coolest boat the United States Navy never wanted. It was designed during the Cold War to demonstrate what a next generation navy could look like with advanced automation and stealth technology. It will be sold to a scrap yard about three days from now.

As the ‘pedia will tell you, the Sea Shadow is an experimental ship built by Lockheed in the early 80’s. Shortly after the F-117 Stealth “Fighter” was delivered, the Lockheed Skunk Works proposed applying their expertise in radar stealth to ship design. They built the Shadow from 1982 to 1984 just up the road in Redwood City. It’s a tricky thing to hide the construction of a 563 ton, 164′ long boat in Silicon Valley, so assembly was cleverly hidden aboard the Hughes Mining Barge. The HMB-1 is a storied vessel in its own right, a submersible barge designed for a secret mission to recover a sunken Soviet submarine from the sea floor, and whose fate has been linked to the Shadow’s since the latter was built.

Aboard the Shadow’s floating dock.

The Shadow’s distinctive shape is a necessity for radar stealth, but that’s not the only thing that makes it unconventional. To minimize wave disruption, the majority of the ship’s displacement is below the surface, further reducing the radar signature and maximizing stability in rough seas. This configuration, known as “SWATH”, is poetically described on the wiki page as like “creating a ship that rides atop twin submarines”. Operation of the boat was largely automated to minimize crew size, and while there are twelve bunks aboard, the minimum complement is just four sailors. Lieutenant Kennedy's comparatively tiny PT-109 was built for a crew of 17.

A quarter of the ship’s crew, monitoring the state of the art graphics.

In 1985, the Sea Shadow went for sea trials to test Lockheed’s stealth claims. They towed the whole barge to southern California and conducted the tests off of the Santa Barbara Channel Islands under cover of darkness. Navy submarine spotting airplanes were dispatched to try to detect the stealth ship while it hid off the coast of Santa Cruz island. The powerful radar equipment had no trouble spotting a submarine’s periscope peeking above the surface from miles away. The Shadow, however, remained invisible. Even when the pilots were given the exact location of the boat, it was still incredibly difficult to pick it up on radar.

This is where the story starts to turn sad. More than 25 years later, ships in the US Navy don’t bear much resemblance to this amazing boat. Astute readers may note that the ship is not named the USS Sea Shadow: it was never commissioned as a Navy ship, who abandoned the program altogether. It remained secret for years, but was later unveiled on San Francisco Bay in 1993. It sat largely unused for the next decade in San Diego. They dragged it out occasionally to run a test or two, and supposedly the technology is finally being used to inform future ship designs, but the original ship remains unused. In 2006, it was reunited with its old pal the HMB-1, when the ships were decommissioned and towed out to join the Suisun Bay mothball fleet. The Shadow is still kept hidden inside the barge where it was built, not too far from the Benicia Bridge on Interstate 680. At that time, the Navy announced that both ships were available for donation to a suitable maritime museum.

The Hughes Mining Barge visible in Suisun Bay.

Six years later, the Sea Shadow is up for auction, and not in a museum at all. Before you try to figure out whether you and a few friends can afford to buy the most awesome party boat ever, be aware that the terms of the auction are exceedingly clear: “Scrapping shall be accomplished by melting, cutting, tearing, crushing, or breaking the item or component such that no resultant piece has a dimension exceeding five (5) feet.” The Navy has given up on finding a home for these boats, and decided that it’ll be easiest to sell them to the scrapyard.

These guys know they’ve got the ultimate party boat.

This is kind of bumming me out: I think the Sea Shadow is beautiful, an inspiring example of clever engineering and technology. I’m not a fan of warships particularly, but I’m fascinated when creative people of any discipline design something that makes you rethink the entire category. It’s less inspiring when groundbreaking artifacts are reduced to scrap. I remind myself that art is not eternal, but I'm also idly wondering how hard it would be to start a maritime museum.

Some more stories about these boats:

• Ben Rich, former head of the Lockheed Skunk Works, wrote about the Sea Shadow in his memoir Skunk Works.
• Photographer Scott Haefner and friends snuck into the mothball fleet a couple years ago and took some amazing photos, including some of the Shadow.
• In 2009, the Wall Street Journal published this article about the hunt for a home for the two ships.

Sure, Helvetica the movie was pretty good, if you like mainstream movies about typography. Incorrigible hipster that I am, you could find me at last Tuesday’s west-coast premiere of Linotype: The Film, presented by director Doug Wilson and hosted at the beautiful Typekit offices in San Francisco.

It was pretty swell! Linotype machines are marvelous to behold. The dizzying array of moving gears and cams and belts and pulleys make other complex contraptions, like, say, sewing machines or manual transmissions, seem trivial by comparison. As you might expect, the film chronicles the invention, rise, and fall of the typesetting machines, and the printing revolution they sparked. The explosion in availability of books and newspapers made possible by hot metal type was on par with the invention of the printing press before it, or of digital publishing afterward.

The story is told through the voices of operators, historians, and the community of artists and tinkerers who keep the remaining machines running. It’s the sort of documentary that reveals a glimpse into a fascinating subculture you would never otherwise hear about.

The DVD should be available sometime this summer. I’ll probably host a showing, but if the movie becomes too mainstream by then, I’ll have to make it a double feature with Farewell, Etaoin Shrdlu, the other documentary about Linotype machines.

Check this out:

That used to be a solenoid that opens the drain on our washing machine. Now it’s a lump of fused plastic and metal. A dishwasher that does not drain its gross, used dishwater is hardly a labor saving device at all.

There are, of course, corners of the internet devoted to forums where old-timers share advice on maintaining household appliances. The consensus seems to be that this solenoid will fail if the timing mechanism holds it open too long. The old solenoid is obviously busted, but to keep the new one from suffering a similar fate, the timer should be replaced, too.

$74.82 to partadvantage.com later, and we’re back in the dishwashing business.

Make sure to transfer the WD16X10007 cam to the new timer.

I’ve been messing with some Posterous settings that invalidated the entire RSS feed, so posts you’ve already read may be reappearing in your inbox. Uh, sorry about that. In other news, you can now reread some of your favorite recent posts from my blog thing.