Welcome back to Smarter Every Day! We are in the middle of a Deep Dive series into the US Coast Guard and all the amazing things they do. Today we’ll be looking at the Response Boat Medium (RBM), a 45 foot long, computer controlled jet boat with hyper maneuverability. We’ll be looking at public domain footage released by the Coast Guard to see what the RBM can do. The RBM is used to respond to distress signals, evacuate people from cruise ships, and even capture drug runners.
I recently went down to the Destin, Florida station to learn more about the RBM. I got an introduction from Senior Chief Cory Palmer and got to explore the boat. It has air conditioning, a survivors compartment, a rudimentary kitchen, and even a head! So we’re going through all the systems making sure that everything is working properly, that we got all the supplies that we need, and then we’re ready to go.
So he’s obviously another one, just like Beast. Yeah. This is a Detroit diesel. Yeah. Also empty you six cylinder diesel engine. 825 horsepower for both engines. It moves a lot of water. So how fast can these go? This or do anywhere from about like 41 to 43 knots? Golly. Yeah. This is a lot of boat to go that fast. Yeah, very maneuverable. It can also stop very quickly. Because you can throw down that what do you call it on the back we call buckets. Buckets? Yeah. So you’ve got the jet and the bucket comes up. Yeah. When you’re going forward, the buckets are up. And then when you want to go reverse the bucket or come down and redirect that thrust forward. I get a closer look at this bucket design. When I saw an RBM up on blocks and Coast Guard sector Mobile in Mobile, Alabama, when Lieutenant Trevor Vallet showed me around. Here we are at the back of one of these boats. These are two what you call them, jet drives. Jet drives. Okay. So I can tell that it’s clearly moving water here comes back out here. But look at this. So it’s got this I don’t know what you call this a scoop. The fluid can come here and then it gets parted and it changes that fluid momentum. So that would pull the boat backwards when it’s in this configuration. What’s the intake? So the water. Oh, wow. So the water goes in there and then it shoots it out here or it’ll divert it and it can go backwards. So down here, this is the the lazeret. This is the what. The lazeret. It is it okay if I go. In there? Yes. And what is the purpose of the lazeret? It this is it’s got our steering equipment. So the controls for those buckets you were just looking. At, this is all hydraulics, right? Yes. So these are. We call them DCVs directional control valves and that’s what the little solenoids are actuators that tell the hydraulic fluid where to go. Oh, that’s awesome. The little valves. Yeah. Oh, so that whole thing is a is a basically a block. It’s like a manifold. Yeah. And then those go in and out and I can see all the hydraulic ins and outs. Yeah. That’s awesome. That kind of tape taper portion right there. This one right here. Yes. Uh huh. That is where the the impeller kind of shaft comes through from the engine that way. Yeah. And there’s a big impeller in there or a little propeller, wherever you want to call it. That spinning and that’s that’s what’s forcing that water out. So you’ve got two controls here. One of them in my. Correct and saying one of them is for the bucket. Yeah. And then the other one, can you actually direct the. Yeah. You’re steering. Oh that’s not tell you what direction to send the thrust. That’s amazing. That’s really cool. Thanks for showing me that. Absolutely. This folds out, right? That folds up. Up. And then you can it’s a little stairwell down. You can walk down. If you look on this side, it’s this one is up at the moment. Oh, hey, fish. Yeah, okay. And why would you want to walk down? Because you want to get down here so you can interact with the other the other boat. Yeah, if we need to bring someone on board, like if someone was in the water, it’s a difficult task to pull someone 250 lbs out. You want to be as close to the water. So when you’re getting them up, you can, you can get about. Doing that from up here would be really challenging. So this this boat is extremely maneuverable. Yes. You have a. Human right there. Yeah. So that means steering this thing is very important. Yes. Instead of a steering wheel, it’s got to joysticks. There’s this boat can actually drive sideways if you need to. And those buckets will do their thing. And make the boat kind of go wherever needed to. The next morning, I got to go out to the RBMs as two of the crew members were getting the boats ready to go out to sea. Now, the interesting thing for me is this felt more like preflight check outs on a Blackhawk helicopter, then getting a boat ready to go out on the water. Okay, this is Ortiz and Machachi. Well, what are your ranks? And K three and K three. And I’m a Do you love this? Yeah, I love this.It’s great.
Okay, cool. We’re going to secure the shore power which gives the boat power. While it’s at the pier, turn the alarm off and check everything. We’ll go down in the middle and check the engine oil to make sure the quality’s good. We’ll also check the radiator oil and the jet drive. Justin took the shore power away and we’ll check the starboard engine which is at three fourths. We’ll put oil in it and then check the vector control system breaker panel. We’ll make sure there’s water sloshing around in the holes for the raw water discharge. We’ll turn the generators on and when the green lights start blinking, it means the generators are synchronized and ready to put the most generator power. We’ll also check the floodlights, the spotlight, and the reversing buckets. We can see the bucket move back and forth and the hydraulic actuator is linked to the feedback that tells us that the bucket is actually going back. Do you love this? Yeah, I love this. It’s great. No, you don’t have to have forward momentum.You can actually use the steering nozzle and the buckets to stop the boat.
This is why the back of the display panel shows the bucket’s location. This is our direction of control. All the hydraulic fluid comes here and this is what actually controls the right perspective. There are two valves on one side and three on the other because the manifold is larger. Behind you is the only controlling bucket for the starboard side and interceptor for the starboard side down there. That one’s got a steering bucket. After that steering grab is the big one right there. This is the whole thing with the steering wheel. You have one hydraulic actuator, and these two are mechanically coupled together. So when you adjust it, they run in parallel. You can change it here so that the nozzles are aligned. This is the raw water strainer and the other filter. Ortiz can show how maneuverable everything can be by putting the boat into a special mode called docking mode. This allows the boat to go in any direction. The steering nozzle gives control of the bow and the other joystick controls the front, side, back and back. The buckets split, one facing board and one facing aft. This allows the boat to do donuts in the water. The one on the left is steering, but you don’t need forward momentum for it to work. You can use the steering nozzle and buckets to stop the boat. So you can use the buckets to generate a sideways motion, and you can also use them to generate a rotational motion.
With a jet drive, the boat can move without any propulsion engaged. It is controlled by three variables: engine speed, steering, and bucket position. By using these three variables, the boat can move forward by turning the jets on, and can create an imbalance by revving up one engine higher than the other. This results in a torque or rotation around the boat’s center of mass. Additionally, the two jets can be moved in tandem to create rotation and steer the boat.
The unique feature of jet boats is the ability to drop the bucket down into the flow of the rear jet. This splits and redirects the flow, and can pull the boat backwards. This is why the boat can stop so quickly. The buckets can also be used separately to create a rotational force, and the boat can move sideways by putting the port side bucket down and angling the jets to the starboard side. Furthermore, the buckets can be used to generate a rotational motion. Thankfully, we have the starboard side and bucketed jet, which would both move the boat forward and create angular rotation, pushing the nose away from it. So now by also adjusting the variable thrust in each engine, we can create a balanced maneuver where we control how fast we go sideways with the ability to control the rotation of the boat. If we wanted to go sideways the other direction, we could reverse the buckets, angle the steering in the other direction and adjust the engine speed to get the desired motion that we want. All this maneuverability from just a few little inputs in the back is incredible. That’s why they need an onboard control computer, because it’s taking those joystick inputs from the human and translating that into boat valve speak to give the desired outputs to get the boat where it needs to go or do what the human wants it to do. Bonus, there’s even another variable - there are these little wings called interceptors that control the trim of the boat. Before they go into a turn, they can dip one of these into the water. And there’s even more. This is an awesome boat, and now you can see why I wanted to make a video on the RBM. It’s fantastic. Anyway, let’s get back on the boat. So I’m going to come out. Okay. Well, coming up, I I. Coming up. Machachi. So you’re looking for people in the water. Yeah. Any boats, any jet ski that I can really see, there’s small, anything like that. Well, make sure we’re not going to hit anybody, he’s moving fast. You’re looking out as well. Yeah, I’m checking radar, making sure he sees everything. He’s going to keep his eyes open. I’m going to look for it. He’s not looking just to make it. There’s no boats that come out of nowhere. What’s your hand on over there? Is that the traffic control? What is that? This is the exact same that he has got it just so you can switch controls to either side. Okay, this comes down. I can drive from here. Got it. So this right here is running normal. And this is what happens when I bring the interceptor all the way down. You can tell the displacement of the water is coming up and move forward. So if you bring it back up. Justin. Yeah, by the way, water will move back up, which means our bow came up. What? You have a camera in the engine compartment yeah. Yeah, you can see the CCTV camera. Are you serious? Yeah. So that’s for when umm. That’s like some spaceship stuff, man. That’s legit. So whenever anything goes wrong with the boat, we have something called a becky. Making Fun of me. Just not because I love how excited you. I’m just really excited about your camera and your engine. So every time something goes wrong, it’s all right. We have a checklist. Yeah. Anything that can go wrong? Pretty much. Yeah. These are all problems. You go into the index, your table contents find, which everyone is going to be. So main engine, high water temperature. Actually, we’ll do this one, cause it’s more fun. We’ll do the foul water jet. Okay, so a foul water jet number 23. This is. You want to run this becky and let’s just run for good. So first thing’s first and we’ll come down oh, hot water before the starboard engine coming down. Pretty much. We come back here, we’ll go out of the water, make sure there’s no line that may have been sucked up in so we don’t see any we’re in clear water. Everything looks good out here, so we’re good to back flush. Plus he’s going to bring it up to 1200 RPM. Those intake grates I was telling you about it’s only about going to shoot more water and through the nozzles shoot water out that way. So in that case, you know, it didn’t clear that I would go down in the lazeret and enter in lazeret at the back and strainers would say, you know, this one’s got a bunch of debris in it. Yeah. All it to do is pull this lever up and switch around all over there. It’s going to use the strainer instead. And then when we get back later, I’m going to clean that strainer out well. It’s literally a valve. That’s it. Now we’re switching over to the other strainer. We’re going to go, okay, by engaging. Engaging I. We get in the way. We usually do at least a few. Becky’s is making its basic engineering casualty control exercise so it’s how we train for if we do have an actual casualty. And so when it does happen, you know, it’s muscle memory. We already do exactly what we need to do. We pull up the becke book in case we miss anything, make sure we don’t miss anything. But, you know, it’s just it’s training for us.
The RBM can do way more than we discussed here. It’s got an onboard flare to help find survivors at night, and it’s able to operate in crazy icy environments and big swells. I found both the RBM in the young men and women operating it to be equally impressive. Like the RBM these folks are versatile, they’ve got drive and they get stuff done.
As we return to base, I had a casual conversation with Justin, who also likes photography and listening to him. Maybe excited about our future as a nation, knowing that motivated leaders like this are coming up through the ranks of the US Coast Guard.
You’re only 20 years old. I just turned 21 actually. Oh, wow. That’s amazing. Yeah. So it’s like. It’s like fast forwarding your life. Yeah, it’s. It’s a very definitely a fast track. Ortiz. Yes. Do you mind me asking how old you are? I just turned 20. Really? Yeah. You feel like this is a lot for a 20 year old. I mean, I love it. It’s preparing me. If this is a lot, then like I’m going to be prepared, like for whatever comes to me. What do you want to be like? Is this what you want to do? You want to make a career out of this you said you wanted me out of my whole life.
We got to go back to station; we have to spot something off shore. Station Destin had received a call about a possible incident offshore, and since we were so close to the station, they decided to swing back in and pick up one of their local law enforcement officers. My buddy George was at the station when the call came in, so he turned on his iPhone and recorded the return to station. From his perspective. On deck actually just. What was the call was taking on water. Now they can’t get a hold of him. Natalie. Sleep Guy called in about a capsized vessel at this position. They can’t. They tried calling the number back and can’t reach him. They can’t reach him. Six miles offshore, south of Sarah’s Island, next to the rudder. Nice to meet you. All right, well, I didn’t get to say goodbye. Because they’re going to try to get somebody that capsized, but thank you very much.
Coast Guard station Destin. This is quite the experience. I hope they find him. This episode of Smarter Every Day is sponsored by Kiwi Co. So Kiwi Co is a really cool setup. They send this box to your house and the kids get to open it, and all the instructions are right there. They get to go through everything and get to learn about science, technology, engineering, arts and math. It’s amazing. My kids have straight up grown up with Kiwi Co in the house. Check it out. Koala crate. Who’s that? Here you can see my kids when they were younger. I don’t like seeing this because that means they’re growing up before my eyes. And yes, Kiwi Co Does a great job of helping them learn all kinds of great things and preparing them for whatever they want to do in the world. They get self-confidence. They do a thing themselves. When they get done, they look at you and they’re like, look at what I built. But that means that they’re growing up. I’m feeling things. But if you want to try this, go to KiwiCo.com slash smarter 30. You get 30% off your first month of any crate. There are nine different lines of Kiwi co crates, and this covers all ages, all kinds of different topics. You’re going to love this. Go check it out on the website. I love my kids. I love the fact that they love Kiwi co, and I love everything they’ve learned through the whole Kiwi co journey. And it’s been a part of our lives. As my kids are growing up, Kiwi Co has been a great part of our journey as a family. They offer 30% off on any crate of your choosing for the first month. I’m thankful for their support.
When Ortiz had to choose between the Coast Guard and Air Force, he chose the former because he wanted to be on the water and he felt like he could actually help. Even though people make fun of the Coast Guard, they still have their own apartments and cooks that cook for them. Ortiz is proud to be a part of the Coast Guard and says they’re living their best life.