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How To Make 96,000lbs of WWII Machinery Into High-Tech Research Platform
coondoggie writes "The US Naval Research Laboratory is taking a 96,000-pound piece of World War II-era machinery and turning it into a test-bed for leading edge communications and radar applications. The equipment was originally known as a three-axis tilting platform designed to simulate the movements of a large ship at sea. It was built by Westinghouse in 1943 as a gun platform requiring only primitive motion in roll, pitch and yaw, according to the Navy Lab. Specifically it was used as a mechanically operated deck with a heavy machine gun director and a machine gun mount installed. Gun crews and director operators could be trained on the platform under conditions that approximated the movements of a vessel at sea."
This type of reuse of ex-military kit quite often happens, although not normally so long after it was originally used. I'm not sure if it's still running on the same engines but I know that the Lovell Radio Telescope at Jodrell Bank (UK), at one time the largest movable dish telescope, originally had a lot of parts cannibalised from engines taken from two battleships. Lovell, the maker of the telescope, had also previously been using quite a lot of reclaimed military kit for his astronomical observations before the actual radio telescope was built.
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While what your saying is correct, I think it's more for the ability to handle weight. ...
while the platform is about 42MT ( 96,000 lbs in case someone needs that )
the original machine gun turret has a low weight of about 80MT ( the Yamato's were in excess of 2200MT )
so I'm thinking it's for that ability.
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Clearly the parent hasn't read much history. Military over-expenditures and boondoggles go way, way back. Hell, I was just reading about similar problems in the 14th century.