USS Virginia Pictures

Cross-posted from The Stupid Shall Be Punished:

Vigilis recently demonstrated a lot of faith in me by predicting that I could get interesting pictures from the insides of USS Virginia (SSN 774). I was thinking, "Hey, I've seen pictures of the Virginia CCSM -- they'll probably be easy to find". I guessed wrong...

The Navy seems to be keeping a fairly close hold on pictures of the Virginia's control room -- this is a big change from when USS Seawolf was launched, and they had a nice full-color shot of the Ship's Control Panel out within a couple of months.

Anyway, looking through all my unclas resources, here's the only picture (from this Navy page) that I can tell is actually of the inside of the USS Virginia's control room -- and it's from the very early stages of construction, showing the BQQ-10 stacks and not much else:


Pretty sad. Anyway, the Navy did help me in my quest by releasing some other pictures from inside the USS Virginia (taken last year during Bravo trials, but based on their placement in the photo gallery, I think just released) -- deploying a towed array, a darkened passageway, two NUBs studying in front of a radiation sign, Torpedo Room berthing, the lock-out trunk, a couple of A-gangers with complicated computer screens, and a pic of the new Submarine Escape Immersion Equipment in the lock-out trunk.

I like the picture of the computer-literate A-gangers best...


So, I did provide pictures of the inside of the Virginia -- just not the ones you were probably looking for...

Update 0839 30 Oct: I had figured the pictures of the Virginia I linked to above were new, because 1) when I typed in "ssn" in the Navy photo search, they came up near the top, between two pictures put up between 26-27 October, and 2) I also looked at the USS Virginia page at NavSource, and didn't see them. It turns out that NavSource has a second USS Virginia page that has several other pictures from Bravo trials -- the ones I linked to aren't there, though, leading me to believe that maybe the Navy did just release them. However, NavSource did have a picture of the Virginia SCP, reprinted below, along with this Navy photo of the photonics display:

posted by Bubblehead @ 6:39 AM