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Putting a ship in storage. Usually the vessels are tied together (docked together) in a quiet bay, which has little water movement. As years go by, sometimes they are sold for scrap (metal re-cycling), or placed back into service, sold to other countries, or taken to sea for gunnery practice (target practice) and sunk.
Wiki User
∙ 15y ago
Wiki User
∙ 14y agoMothballs are balls that will keep away moths. People put them in there drawers also.
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What is happening with Japan's nuclear reactor?
They are 'mothballing' it. It is being decommissioned and made safe.
What does it mean when they say a ship is stricken?
The term "stricken" is typically used when removing a ship's name and hull number from official Navy records of commissioned vessels. In essence, the ship is removed (stricken) from the the official register of active ships, and scheduled for decommissioning, mothballing or scrapping.
Can space shuttles be reused?
That was the intent behind the Space Shuttle program: a reusable vehicle that could ferry astronauts to orbit and back to the ground. The biggest problem was complexity. A trillion parts and all had to work, again and again and again in the harshest of conditions. NASA is 'mothballing' (closing) the shuttles in 2010 - they are old and decrepit and get more dangerous by the day. The new project is named 'Orion' and will be one time use designs that are proven cheap and safe.
What rhymes with stalled?
Some words that rhyme with "stalled" are bald, balled, and hauled.
What did the US do with the Tanks from the Vietnam War?
The US used only the M551 Sheridan and M48A3 Pattons tanks in Vietnam. Generally speaking, only four things happened to them during and after the war: 1. Some were so heavily damaged that they were "blown in place" with demolition charges, this was mostly a US Marine Corps procedure. 2. Some were buried by the US Army Engineers; after they had been stripped bare of all usable and classified parts, this was primarily a US Army practice. 3. Several hundred were transferred to the South Vietnamese military; excepting the M551 Sheridans. These ended up in the North Vietnamese services, once they over-ran the south. 4. The balance (the rest of them) were transferred back to the US via naval and contracted sea going vessels. After arrival in the US, since they had been replaced with newer tanks like the M60 Combat Tank (aka Main Battle Tank), along with the M551 which was not replaced...they were mothballed, used for hard targets, and used for OPFOR (Opposing Force units for training). Slowly, they were taken from mothballing and re-cycled (scrapped). The Australians did nearly the same thing with their Centurion medium tanks. The Centurion was the only allied tank in Vietnam that came from that particular allied nation. All other allied nations in the war used US equipment.
What kind of issues do the Americans have at the beginning of the war of 1812?
The US had almost no Navy, and the Royal Navy was the most formidable in the world. The British had more than sixty line-of-battle ships, and the US had none. The next largest ships were frigates, and the US had six built in the 1790s, very fine ones, but they had been neglected, several "laid up in ordinary" (that era's equivalent of mothballing) and had much rot in the planking that had to be repaired before putting to sea could be contemplated. Individually the large US frigates were more than a match for British frigates, which were smaller and usually carried a few less guns, but the British had dozens and dozens of frigates. Of smaller ships the British had many multiples in every classification as compared to the few the Americans had. Jefferson was president from 1801-09, and his protege Madison was now in office. Neither had served in the Revolution in the military, and neither understood much about military matters, other than that they wanted no more than the irreducible minimum of it. This was what led Jefferson to embrace the idea of gunboats, which were basically overgrown rowboats, mounting one or two cannon, safe to operate only on the protected waters inside harbors. While the fine frigates rotted in ordinary the Navy acquired gunboats. This offered the dual advantages of ensuring the Navy lacked any seagoing offensive capability to go starting any trouble, and they were cheap. They also proved to be completely worthless in the war. Madison's Secretary of War was John Armstrong. His policy was that any commander in the field who wanted to expend more than $50 had to first write to his office and obtain permission, which of course could take months just for the letters to go back and forth, and meanwhile the troops did without the food or the medicine or whatever it was some spendthrift colonel wanted to buy to coddle the troops. During most of the decade before the war the Commanding General of the US Army was James Wilkinson, who liked to call himself a "scientific soldier". He was also a traitor, though it did not come out until long after he was safely dead, he was a paid secret agent in the service of Spain. Wilkinson had been Jefferson's main witness against Aaron Burr, when Jefferson had his former Vice President indicted for treason - in Virginia, Jefferson's home state, and the trial was held in Richmond, where Jefferson had been governor, with the jury picked from Jefferson's fellow Virginians, and the Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court, Jefferson's cousin, John Marshall on the bench (though to be fair Marshall did not much like Jefferson). The jury heard what Wilkinson had to say about Burr, then acquitted Burr and wanted to lock Wilkinson up. As late as 1809 Wilkinson took the entire US Army with him to New Orleans, all 2200 men, and encamped them in a malarial swamp and defrauded them of their rations, while he spent his time in town courting a Creole belle. By the time the dying from disease and the desertions ended from that fiasco, the US Army numbered 900 men. In the next few years as tensions with Britain increased congress did authorize a few dozen new regiments, but these had hardly begun recruiting when Madison obtained his declaration of war against the most powerful empire on the planet. Neither Madison nor Jefferson cared much for Andrew Jackson, so the most able officer in the US languished at home through most of the war, while individuals such as the peaceable, doddering old Henry Dearborn commanded on the northern front.
