It's awesome that they have overcome what others perceive as a disability. And in this case, they might have actually turned it into an advantage. But make no mistake, the reason they are beating people is because they are good at football, not because they are deaf.
well no? Line-of-sight communication with zippy sign language is not distance dependent, or as dependent on environmental audio considerations (jamming). Incidentally, I have always wondered why naval ship-to-ship communication isn't with a LOS tight beam laser -- unjammable and uninterceptable. Conceivably, a football team could learn to adapt by physically blocking line-of-sight between QB and receiver but it's too niche. Same goes for reading sign language.
If indeed they are winning because they have a communication advantage (which is and always has been in american football), true it is not strictly because they are deaf, because any other team could learn to use a similar system, but let's be real. It's because they are deaf, fluency especially at a high speed takes near-zero effort.
" Incidentally, I have always wondered why naval ship-to-ship communication isn't with a LOS tight beam laser -- unjammable and uninterceptable."
Because they do not work when there is mist, which is quite often the case at sea and also I can imagine, it is a nontrivial issue of aligning them, when both ends are constantly moving, due to waves and cruising direction.
Also it might give the position away, if you power up the beam to counter humidity.
Though it's mostly because fencing (or boxing) a lefty as a righty is unusual enough that you have less practice doing it. While the lefty pretty much only fences (or boxes) against righties. It boils down entirely to comfort. Someone with a good lefty in their club/team that they regularly practice against won't have much difficulty with it.
What's really funny, by the way, is watching two lefties fence against each other when neither of them have a second really good lefty to practice against. It just looks... awkward.
Of course then you get to a high enough level and it's 100% footwork, and the lefty/right bit mostly stops mattering.
Not to mention the horizon limiting communication to those ships that are close enough. Naval warfare doesn’t take place between ships that can see each other anymore, so one needs to be able to communicate over the horizon anyway, so why bother to have two systems?
seriously? It's 2021. Maybe there's something I'm missing, but it shouldn't be hard to track and aim a 30cm object at 100 m with a laser that is moving +/- 5-10 meters at a speed of 5m/s
There is something you are missing obviously. Naval engineers are not dumb.
> it shouldn't be hard to track and aim a 30cm object at 100 m with a laser that is moving +/- 5-10 meters at a speed of 5m/s
Boats don’t move only in one direction. They have side-way vibrations along the three special axis and constantly rotate along two. The 100m is extremely close for two boats and I think you don’t realise what a heavy sea looks like (understandable if you have never been far from shore). Navigating in nine meters high waves is not exceptional for a military boat. You are constantly losing line of sights with distant boats.
Keeping a laser on something fast is doable (that’s part of what an optical targeting system does) but staying fixed on a small receiver gets tricky. I don’t think the win in bandwidth and latency justifies the hassle which is why I don’t believe ship-to-ship laser communication will ever happen. Ship-to-space however, that wouldn’t surprise me.
Why would the ship to space need to be a laser? We're already doing ship to space with radio waves, even encrypted, with a much more forgiving benefit of not needing to be so damn precise to hit the target.
Free space optics links are quite finicky even between stationary ground stations. Additionally, LoS communications are limited by the horizon. The mast antennas on most warships are something like 40 meters tall, meaning it's only 20 km to the horizon. Ships operating as one group routinely spread further than that.
NoS communications on ships just use satellite links, which are also difficult to detect or jam if you're not along the axis.
There are directional LoS microwave links used in some contexts, such as China's stations scattered around the South China Sea. The pointing/stabilization issues are much less severe with these.
The navy was dragged into that against their preference by Rumsfeld and the rest of the "Revolution in Military Affairs" people. The original plan was for the first Ford class ships to use conventional catapults, etc, while the new stuff was developed and refined in parallel, to be integrated once it was proven ready. That wasn't fast enough for the Revolution folks, who insisted that the most aggressive timeline possible be followed. Nearly everything those people touched has turned into a disaster, costing tax payers billions.
The US Navy has a lot of active carriers and few superpower-scale threats, so they're taking an opportunity to experiment (USS Ford) and can afford to do it (for now). It seems like the right thing to do while they can. Ford is the largest warship ever constructed, it's not very surprising they might have problems with a new class.
It's awesome that they have overcome what others perceive as a disability. And in this case, they might have actually turned it into an advantage. But make no mistake, the reason they are beating people is because they are good at football, not because they are deaf.