Kaboom

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There's no established protocol for decommissioning a naval ship, but Squadron Commander O'Neil never expected his request to stage a real-life game of Battleship to be taken seriously when it was time to take USS Quayle and the USS Bush out of service.

The rules were drawn up so that the ships would have to drop anchor somewhere off the coast of California and turn off their radars. The crews would load their respective ships with any artillery desired. Once the munitions were setup, the crews would be evacuated to a command station where they could control their guns remotely. They would then take turns firing on each other once per hour until only a single ship remained afloat. Approval from both captains was needed in the event that either ship desired to load additional munitions on-board. A series of cameras was mounted on the deck of each ship and video feeds were being broadcast to the mission command stations of the other squadron to provide confirmation if any hits were scored. The USS Bush won the opportunity to fire first with a coin-flip held before the match.

After ten days, each ship had taken 120 blind shots at the other. None of the shots had registered any signal on the video feeds from the ship mounted cameras. Then, on the eleventh day the USS Quayle fired on the USS Bush and an explosion of water was seen in the background of one of the cameras.

"We've got them," the captain proclaimed. What followed was a series of shots to accurately and precisely determine the position of the USS Bush. At noon on the twelfth day, the decisive missile was fired and the USS Bush was broken into two pieces. The game had been won, and the USS Quayle was the victor. She won the right to get an appropriate decommissioning ceremony, while the legacy of the USS Bush would be quietly covered by algae and corals as the accumulation of attached marine life would provide intricate structures for the assemblage of fish.

Original photograph was taken by the US Navy and posted here. The images shows the destroyer USS Hopper (DDG 70) launching a Standard Missile-3 as it operates in the Pacific Ocean on July 30, 2009. The missile successfully intercepted a sub-scale, short-range ballistic missile launched from the Kauai Test Facility, Pacific Missile Range Facility Barking Sands, Kauai, Hawaii. The launch was the latest Missile Defense Agency test in conjunction with the U.S. Navy. General details about the Missile Defense Agency are on Wikipedia.

The second photo was from the sinking of Destroyer Escort Torrens to test a new type of torpedo on June 14, 1999. The Mk-48 Torpedo warhead contains explosive power equivalent to approximately 1200 pounds of TNT. This explosive power is maximized when the warhead detonates below the keel of the target ship, as opposed to striking it directly. When the detonation occurs below the keel, the resulting pressure wave of the explosion "lifts" the ship and can break its keel in the process.

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