Talk:Technical research ship

Category
Please check the other articles in the US Navy ships category. You'll see that no other ship type is listed, because they belong in the Ship types category. You're welcome to ensure that each of these individual ships are in the proper category, but this article is about the type of ship, not a ship. Jinian 03:04, 6 September 2005 (UTC)

TRSSCOM
Currently, the article says: "In order to transmit intelligence information that had been gathered back to United States for further processing and analysis, these ships had a special system named Technical Research Ship Special Communications, or TRSSCOM (pronounced tress-com)." This is a misleading statement.

Not all TR type ships had TRSSCOM. TRSSCOM provided a slow-speed, encrypted Teletype channel, not a high-speed data channel capable of transmitting large volumes of raw "intelligence" data for processing elsewhere, as implied in the quote. Instead, large volumes of collected "intelligence" data (mostly the form of magnetic recording tapes) was physically sent to NSA by means of a courier -- the equivlent of what is known these days as "sneakernet."

A more accurate statement would be: "In order to transmit some collected intelligence and operational information back to the United States, some of these ships had a special system named Technical Research Ship Special Communications, or TRSSCOM (pronounced tress-com), in addition to transmitters and receivers for the U.S. Navy's standard high frequency radio communications network."Ken (talk) 17:17, 17 March 2012 (UTC)