Active Service
The role which Bristol was built for never materialised and as such she spent most of her service in the 1970s trialling and building up experience using the new weapons and computer systems. A major boiler fire in 1974 destroyed the steam plant. Older ships may have been crippled by this, but Bristol was able to operate for three years using only her gas plant, demonstrating the flexibility and utility of the latter. The steam plant was repaired in 1976 and it was not until 1979 that she was fitted out for frontline service with ECM, Corvus countermeasures launchers and a pair of World War II-era Oerlikon 20 mm cannons. During this refit the Limbo weapon was removed; the well subsequently saw service as a makeshift swimming pool.
Read more about this topic: HMS Bristol (D23)
Famous quotes containing the words active and/or service:
“The most intellectual of men are moved quite as much by the circumstances which they are used to as by their own will. The active voluntary part of a man is very small, and if it were not economised by a sleepy kind of habit, its results would be null.”
—Walter Bagehot (1826–1877)
“In public buildings set aside for the care and maintenance of the goods of the middle ages, a staff of civil service art attendants praise all the dead, irrelevant scribblings and scrawlings that, at best, have only historical interest for idiots and layabouts.”
—George Grosz (1893–1959)