Funny you should mention that. The old style lead-acid batteries are being swapped out now for new style lead-acid batteries (valve-regulated). I think it was a matter of the old supplier no longer making them.

For now. The Navy is working on an all-electric drive for surface ships and subs.

Not coincidently, General Atomics is involved in that too.

Um, the Navy sort of does. Every nuclear submarine out there has a big diesel engine and an array of batteries on it. They are for use when the big tea kettle is down for maintenance and/or emergency situations.

Hell, I built those submarines (well, not all of them and I had help) and I can't have a camera at work. I hate having to shop on the "special" shelf at the phone store.

In the interest of completeness USS Ohio is no longer SSBN-726, it is now SSGN-726. It was converted a few years back from a Trident-carrying boomer to a "slow attack" capable of carrying 100+ Tomahawks, plus some SEAL capabilities.

Good question. Almost as good as what was a guy that sits on a space propulsion committee doing teaching Gaussian quadrature to a bunch of slacker engineers?

I may have combined a couple of his papers on that one, I'll have to look when I get home. It may have been one using fusion and one using anti-matter. I loved hearing his stories about some of the papers he had to review as part of the committee, some were downright interesting, but most seemed to involve some sort of device that pissed-off the 2nd law of thermodyamics and annoyed conservation of energy.

One of my grad school profs worked on a project like this. The concept involved a ship farting (for lack of a more appropriate term) out a series of small fusion bombs. When they went off the heat would cause the shielding at the rear of the ship to sublimate, and this ablation process would drive the ship. As I recall there were only two teensy problems with this: 1) even with the best shielding material available today, the intense heat from the detonation would still cause the maximum heat in the shield to occur at a depth greater than the surface (i.e. the shield would come off in great blobs instead of the slow steady ablation required for thrust) and 2) the amount of anti-matter required for the devices was only about a million times the total amount ever produced on Earth.

But apart from that it worked like a champ.

Oh man, I use that at least 3 times a week. Best $15 I ever spent (well, technical bookwise that is). Although it's up to $25 now, it's still a bargain.

I'd also add Roark's Formulas for Stress and Strain and the Machine Design handbook.