Stumbled upon Tyler Childers sometime last year thanks to listening to “outlaw country” playlists because of the show “Yellowstone”(thanks Kevin Costner!). Since then, I’ve been listening religiously and my wife got these tickets for my birthday. I rarely go to concerts, but he is someone I really wanted to see so I was very excited. He did not disappoint. So so so good. Opened up with “Shake the frost” I wasn’t ready, none of us were ready. Multiple times throughout the night my wife and I exclaimed “he sounds EXACTLY like his records.” His voice and the musicians are incredible.
The venue(salt shed) in Chicago is also amazing. A beautiful view of the skyline coupled with perfect weather made for a magical Evening. It was a little chilly but luckily we scooped up a few hoodies right when we got there because they sold out FAST.
I know I’m preaching to the choir here. But if for some reason you’re on the fence about seeing him live, don’t be.
Can’t wait to see him again.

Despite the game’s inherent silliness, I think it’s worth considering some realistic advantages and disadvantages Kansen would provide.
I want to specifically focus on things I think are overlooked. More obvious things like that Kansen are small targets are fairly self-explanatory.

Capabilities:

Manpower:
To me this is their single greatest advantage. A ship may require anywhere from a few dozen crew, such as on a U-boat, to thousands on Battleships and Carriers. A Kansen requires only one person, reducing the considerable operating expense and possible bottleneck on trained personnel associated.
Something Something, Decisive Battle:
To put it simply, a Kansen is more portable than a comparable warship. Depending on interpretation one may be able to transport them by air with little difficulty. For some reason I do not think this is currently SOP in the USN. This Strategic mobility allows for one to very quickly concentrate forces to contest an enemy’s sea control or generally respond to situations in a timely manner, amplifying certain elements of power-projection.
Data Fusion:
If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, smells like a duck, tastes like a duck, and you conclude it is, in fact, a duck, you are utilizing data fusion. A Kansen could utilize similar principles with radar, optics, and other sources. A real WWII warship could do this, the key being it takes time. A Kansen could do this far quicker, employing a shorter cycle OODA loop when responding to threats as they have a direct connection between the observation, decision, and action portions of the ship.
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A diagram of the OODA loop.
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Signature reduction:
Most low frequency (L band and lower in IEEE) will generally struggle to pick out a Kansen from the clutter of even small waves due to their small size. This isn’t without limitations and a high-frequency radar, say in the X-band could be expected to pick a Kansen out to a reasonable range (This is why most surface-search radars are high frequency), provided you have a competent operator and suitably advanced filtering system.

Limitations:

These elements here aren’t to say Kansen are worse than their comparative ships, they are better, but there are some striking limitations that they may face that are consistently overlooked by people.
They’re short, even FDG:
Unless the fluoridation (PBF/POE) has been reprogramming my mind, I’m fairly certain we live on a roughly spherical planet. Regardless of potential Communist infiltration and subversion (I mean seriously, have you ever seen a Commie drink water?), this has the annoying effect of limiting line of sight to a distance largely dependent on the height of the sensor, be it the Mk1 Eyeball or an AN/SPY-6 Phased Array. Now radars can see a bit past this visual horizon due to refraction and some other complicated physics like Ground Wave Propagation that I really don’t feel inclined nor qualified to try to explain here. Still, the height of the sensor largely dictates the detection range for low altitude objects like ships or sea-skimming missiles. With a Kansen this range is somewhere between short and “Jack Shit” with a theoretical range for radar visibility of around 17-18 nautical miles for a particularly tall Pagoda mast.
This isn’t to say a surface-search radar on a Kansen would be useless but it would be limited by the horizon and probably, more importantly, by the clutter produced by a Kansen bobbing up and down in waves as tall as them (I will get to this later). Some radars like the SG may not see much, if any, limitation on range against conventional ships because the tall objects stick up above the horizon and they are relatively short range (about 15 nautical miles), but filter settings may reduce this to well below the maximum depending on sea-state. Additionally, higher frequency radars like the SG see little if no refraction though again, this really depends on many variables beyond the scope of this post.
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A basic diagram of how curvature effects radar detection.
Seakeeping:
On a flat calm your average speedboat or RHIB will easily exceed the speed of most naval vessels. However, this changes once you get into rough conditions. With a low displacement Kansen are bound by these same limitations. Their excellent strategic mobility is detracted by, if not poor, limited, tactical mobility.
Where a full-sized ship can cut or just bash their way through waves, a Kansen is liable to catch air and smash into the next wave, killing forward momentum. This makes sustained endurance, as may be the case when trying to catch an enemy, incredibly hard. However, Kansen do seem to be very maneuverable, which does compensate to a great degree, but this is almost exclusively a defensive advantage and can’t be applied in offense to the same degree as speed.
Generally, Kansen operations in rough weather seem somewhere between pointless and purposefully inflicted misery. It would be slow going, completely miserable, and good luck spotting things when you have a wave over your head half the time and kiss being a stable gun platform goodbye.
A useful chart for sea conditions. keep in mind these are general rules and can vary heavily.
Station Keeping:
Kansen on their own cannot reasonably perform long-endurance missions. Where a ship can post watches 24/7, a Kansen can’t. This isn’t an insurmountable obstacle, indeed assigning a fast transport or light warship to act as a Kansen tender would be very easy, it simply requires consideration.
Steam Sucks:
Most of the ships in AL use Steam Turbines and boilers for power. This is not great.
In case you didn’t know, with steam turbines it takes hours, sometimes even days before the systems can reach full power or they risk damaging the pipes. Time to build up steam pressure could easily invalidate the advantages in portability that a Kansen has
This gets to the second element of this. Kansen, even if they can summon their rigging on land, would face a power issue. Steam systems require condensers. These use relatively cold sea water to turn the steam back into liquid so it can be used again. Without this process the steam turbine sees back pressure build up and will generally cease to function.
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A diagram of a Steam Condenser.
To Illustrate how much of a problem this is, let's look at USS New Jersey. Generally ship’s power used an octet of smaller steam turbines that drew from the steam of her main power plant. These generated around 1.25 Megawatts of Ship’s Power each, depending on surrounding environmental temperature. She also had a pair of diesel generators. These generated a total of 500 kilowatts. That’s not good.
Let's look at the power requirements for one of her turrets. Training was handled by a 300 horsepower (220 kW) motor, each gun had a 60 hp (45 kW) motor for elevation, three sets of rammers of 60 hp (45 kW), three shell elevators of 75 hp (56 kW), three powder hoists (100 hp/ 75 kW), and two motors for her shell rings with a power of 40 hp (30 kW) a piece. This is a total of around 940 kilowatts per turret, almost double her non-steam ship’s power. You can also kiss using radars on land goodbye because of these limitations.
Paralysis by Analysis:
To what degree a Kansen can process and respond to multiple threats is unknown. Still, I think it is fair to assume that tunnel vision that may not occur on a conventional ship, is far more likely to happen to a Kansen. There is a reason why one-man tanks are not a thing and the comparison to tank warfare is apt because in many ways Kansen perform more like tanks than traditional warships. Even if one is incredibly perceptive, individuals are generally inclined to distractions, and this could have “suboptimal” consequences.
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Are there any advantages/disadvantages you could see Kansen having in an operational setting?

A wild ass storm out of nowhere exploded with energy in the greater Houston area this afternoon with crazy frontline winds at 50+ mph sustained for over 10 minutes. Many areas reported 70mph sustained… Trees, trash cans, trampolines, all over the place, on houses, in streets, and cars and power lines. Hailed a little. Rained….. A LOT! I mean, it really did rain hard af, but THAT MUCH!?
Either the meteorologist had nothing to work with because power to the weather stations were out, and had to make the best guess without being wrong, or likely has that fatter fingers of the alert system analyst team…. But I’m more convinced they’ve implemented a new AI Alert System Generator and this was its first one…. Lol. It just seems to fit so perfectly.
Any meteorologists in here? Whether it was AI or a real living human meteorologist… they gave the same type of answer… so weather needs out there like me…. If you still think you’re going to be a meteorologist one day. That ship has sailed. And apparently it was Noah’s Ark in Houston. 99 Inches!!!?

Anyone from the Houston area definitely felt this unbelievably wild ass storm pop up in the country and came in hot like it was madder than hell! No tornadoes, but ripping winds 50-70mph sustained, 1”-ish hail, and whole lot of sideways rain. Trees, fences, trampolines, trash cans, you name we’re strewn about all over, dented & dinged, and then apparently either drowned or floated all the way away. The rain was coming in so fast… the chatGPT AI alert writer was giving it its best guess, I guess. Or I mean the meteorologist nailed had to write something, but just knew one thing…. It’s gon rain!