How not to build a ship: the USS Ford

http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/military/guest-voices/sd-me-grazier-ussford-20170606-story.html

by smacktoward • 9 years ago

100 115 9 years ago

sandiegouniontribune.com

sosuke• 9 years ago

Unrelated to the content ...

Their ad setup is very interesting it all appears to be served through subdomains.

vermontdevil• 9 years ago

Seems these problems comes down to selecting a contractor with no experience in building these type of systems (whether steam or electrical).

ceejayoz• 9 years ago

Definitely sounds that way. I wonder if there'll be any significant consequences for General Atomics having these 5-10x cost overruns?

clock_tower• 9 years ago

The worst that can happen to General Atomics is that they don't get any new contracts after they're done building 3 (3!) fleet carriers. But building 3 carriers will give them enough expertise that they'll be able to bid on future shipbuilding contracts, and will probably land a few -- the Pentagon doesn't like letting contractors go out of business, and they'll recognize that General Atomics' giant Ford is at least half their own fault. It wasn't General Atomics that put out a contract for a fleet carrier that used every innovation at once...

Besides, I'm sure General Atomics had the sense to build factories in rustbucket towns and subcontract out to at least 26 states, preferably about half red and half blue; once your procurement system turns into a big enough jobs program, no one will dare to touch it.

Welcome to the cozy, comfortable world of defense contracting, dedicated to equipping the US to fight another world war, but only if the enemy is at least as cronyist as we are. The good news is that our only likely enemies for a world war actually are as cronyist as we are, or significantly worse -- but if any new Prussia ever rises in the world, we are _so_ dead.

gozur883• 9 years ago

The military is always in a bind with contractor selection. If the don't choose the lowest bidder they get hauled up in front of a Senate committee full of people grandstanding for the next election accusing them of taking care of cronies.

Particularly at the rate we build ships these days, if you only chose companies that have done it before you're not going to have many bids to choose from.

stcredzero• 9 years ago

Isn't there some famous economics paper somewhere that shows strategies like median bid produce much better outcomes?

dragonwriter• 9 years ago

The military is always in a bind with contractor selection. If the don't choose the lowest bidder they get hauled up in front of a Senate committee full of people grandstanding for the next election accusing them of taking care of cronies.

No, they (or, rather, contractors) solved that problem by assuring that all contracts are divied up between as many states and Congressional districts as possible, so that anyone in Congress attacking any procurement is attacking jobs in their own district, and cost controls are less important because the overruns are also producing work, often also widely distributed.

Of course, this also produces the problem (for the military, not contractors) that any attempt to impose accountability on contractors has political problems that are similarly widespread.

scottLobster2• 9 years ago

No relation to the Ford, but speaking as someone who works for one of the big defense contractors the underbidding thing is a real issue. One of our competitors (also not related to the Ford) that stole some business from us a while back is currently eating some serious crow on some promises they couldn't fulfill... but they did get the contract. That's serious money in their pocket.

Likewise I'm pretty sure the average Dog Dating App startup has better equipment than we're given, although to be fair what we have does the job, just not nearly as well as it could. Not to mention the mountain of legacy equipment and code that no one ever wants to spend money to replace or upgrade properly (once again, underbidding). For every F-35 or USS Ford there are hundreds of smaller programs wither much tighter (also underbid) budgets that you never hear about (either because they're classified or just too boring for media coverage). But it has to be that way, otherwise we don't get the business at all.

Don't get me wrong I like my work and my coworkers, I'd certainly rather be where I am than Silicon Valley, but the red tape and budgetary constraints are a repeating source of frustration at all levels, and it sucks that there's not really all that much we (at least anyone remotely close to my pay grade) can do about it. At the end of the day it's up to our customers to set the bidding process and pick the winners. A realistic bid is likely a lost contract.

jlarocco• 9 years ago

I partly agree, but it doesn't sound like the Navy did their homework to check that the systems would even work.

From the article:

It was also supposed to increase the lifespan of aircraft by putting less stress on their airframes. Unfortunately, recent tests of land-based prototypes showed that the system actually overstressed F-18 airframes during launch.

How do they just now discover that? Nobody thought to build a prototype on land first before agreeing to put it on a carrier?

It sounds like some defense contractors sold a bunch of neat ideas to the Navy and decided they'd work the kinks out as they came up.

The other problem is that there just aren't many companies that build aircraft carriers, and it's a very small market. According to Wikipedia there are only 37 aircraft carriers in the whole world, so nobody's going to do the R&D if they're not getting funded to do it.

taneq2• 9 years ago

Nobody thought to build a prototype on land first before agreeing to put it on a carrier?

Sure, but that put their bid 10% above the bid of the guys who just ran FEA on it and said "she'll be right."

simplicio• 9 years ago

Nobody thought to build a prototype on land first before agreeing to put it on a carrier?

The article does talk about "land testing" so I assume they have a mock-up somewhere in the desert to test this stuff in a place where failure doesn't send the pilot/plane into the ocean.

I think the problem is that they were still testing these technologies at the same time that they were building the ship, so now there's only so far they can go in modifying them from their original assumptions while still staying withing the power/space/layout specifications the ship was designed around.

dubyah• 9 years ago

A big problem is the concurrency of development and production. I'm unaware of programs that have gone right, but the more substantial boondoggles have had that issue.

redthrowaway• 9 years ago

Sounds like General Atomics has a good lobbyist.

cottsak4• 9 years ago

they can afford it

Shivetya• 9 years ago

So in other words, just as the current Administration is finding fixing one ship will be met with great resistance, a war of buts, and gnashing of teeth the same can be said for any attempt by anyone in fixing the government.

there are just so many excuses to throw money at it and worse they are used to it. they purposefully create holes that are too expensive or painful to get out of.

being ex military and a Libertarian I always get the same result, we spend too much on the wrong stuff "just because". the sad part is neither party up there wants to fix it, it is not that they can't, they are just to invested in not

CaveTech• 9 years ago

The new EMALS stores an enormous electrical charge -- enough to power 12,000 homes for three seconds

It's hard to not love how prevasive arbitrary metrics are in modern day sports and reporting.

yongjik• 9 years ago

In other words, enough to power half a home for 20 hours. :/

WillPostForFood• 9 years ago

The time used isn't completely arbitrary, the system launch time is ~3 seconds.

B1FF_PSUVM• 9 years ago

Also lovely how carefully they avoided the pedestrian 'one home for ten hours', or the overwrought '36,000 homes for one second'.

Goldilocks and Aristotle on board.

ghshephard4• 9 years ago

It's because the charge is delivered over 3 seconds, that they used 3 seconds.

ghshephard4• 9 years ago

I don't think this is that arbitrary - presumably the charge is delivered over 3 seconds, and the question is, how much power did that represent - 12,000 homes is a pretty good way of mentally visualizing how much power is being delivered.

llukas3• 9 years ago

If only we could have arbitrary units that everybody would understand without ambiguity? Like kWh/MWh or Joules... no?

dghughes• 9 years ago

My go-to number is 1,234 J it's equivalent to a major league baseball player hitting a ball as hard as he can.

LeifCarrotson2• 9 years ago

The wiki says it's 484 megajoules, delivered in 3 seconds. That is equivalent to 134 mega-watthours,

For a potentially more useful arbitrary metric, that's a bit less than two Model S batteries. Except it delivers all the energy in seconds, and charges in 45 seconds, and isn't limited to a few hundred charge cycles. It's a kinetic flywheel storage system, but I wonder if it would be built today using a giant lithium-ion pack (many Tesla PowerWalls, basically) or a supercap array.

maxerickson4• 9 years ago

134 kilowatt-hours.

1 megawatt-hour is 3600 megajoules.

NikolaeVarius• 9 years ago

Doubt it. A large purpose of this kind of system is to make it non explosive,

johan_larson2• 9 years ago

Robert Farley has a good explanation of how difficult it would actually be to sink one of the fleet carriers:

http://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/what-it-would-really-take-t...

Spooky23• 9 years ago

You don't need to sink an aircraft carrier, just keep it at long range.

A country like Egypt, Iran or China could keep carriers out of territorial waters or block key choke points in their region with diesel subs or mine. A moderate projection of force could block the straight of Malacca and damage operations.

Even if you didn't sink the carrier, you could wound it, which would be worse than a sinking in some ways. At best you can keep it a few hundred miles away, which will render its future complement of short-range F-35s safely neutered. Alternatively, you probably just need to sink a few container ships to get the desired outcome.

vacri• 9 years ago

You don't need to sink an aircraft carrier, just keep it at long range.

At which point you haven't neutralised it; it's just become a 'fleet in being'. You still have to account for it. You may be able to protect your home waters from it, but you can't project power when it's around.

Analemma_• 9 years ago

It doesn't matter how difficult it is to sink them if they can't launch any planes because the catapult is broken.

coldcode• 9 years ago

Plus they might not be able to land, so basically kamikazes.

stevenwoo3• 9 years ago

Those are just the new carriers which can't be deployed until they can prove it works as long as the Senate (from the article) is forcing the Navy to do according to established protocol.

stevenwoo3• 9 years ago

The counterpoint is that foxtrotalpha article where when we borrowed a Swedish diesel attack sub for testing and it managed to get multiple attack runs in every time in simulated attacks on US carrier groups without getting caught.

http://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/sweden-has-a-sub-thats-so-d...

meric2• 9 years ago

Zumwalt

F-35

USS Ford

It reminds me of Qing China in the 1890's.

"On paper, the Beiyang Fleet had the superior ships,[2] included two pre-dreadnought battleships, Dingyuan and Zhenyuan, for which the Japanese had no counterparts. "....."Though well drilled, the Chinese had not engaged in sufficient gunnery practice beforehand. This lack of training was the direct result of a serious lack of ammunition. Corruption seems to have played a major role; many Chinese shells appear to have been filled with cement or porcelain, or were the wrong caliber and could not be fired."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Yalu_River_(1894...

"Li wanted to delay the battle against the Japanese fleet, thus allowing the Chinese more time to equip their ships with additional ammunition. However, the imperial court called him a coward and his recommendation was turned down."

"Defense spending analyst Winslow Wheeler concluded from flight evaluation reports that the F-35A "is flawed beyond redemption";[196] in response, program manager Bogdan suggested that pilots worried about being shot down should fly cargo aircraft instead."https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_Martin_F-35_Lightning...

I don't think U.S. is at the terminal stage yet, as Qing China was at that time - but it certainly rhymes.

abraves10001• 9 years ago

On another failed warship note, the Vasa, built in Sweden in the 1620's barely made it off the dock before sinking but was amazingly well preserved. Worth seeing if you are in Stockholm.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasa_(ship)

ams61103• 9 years ago

The story of the Vasa is a great lesson on the dangers of changing specifications while a project is underway. Not exactly the lesson of the apparent debacle of the Ford, which is more a lesson on the dangers of using a lot of new unproven technology in a major project.

mjbellantoni• 9 years ago

Don't forget the LCS.

johan_larson2• 9 years ago

Yeah, I don't know why the littoral combat ship was such a big problem. It's for near-shore patrol, which has to be the easiest job any navy has to do. Even the really piddly ones have to deal with that, and they do so with a wide variety of patrol boats, corvettes, and frigates. The USN could have picked any one of dozens of designs in current operation, made a few tweaks for taste, and put them in service.

justicezyx• 9 years ago

The analogy seems poor.

Qing's warships are just good on paper, but the men in charge of them lack actual real-world experiences wielding them effectively.

While F35 Zumwalt Ford are all products driven by US military's real-world experiences, guided by their requirements, and addresses real issues. And I have no doubt that these weapons can be used effectively in their designated use cases.

Their failure is that the engineering work did not finish quick enough to land their impact in appropriate time frame.

meric2• 9 years ago

Prompted by the November 22, 2016, break-down of Zumwalt in the Panama Canal with both propellers seized, Mike Fredenburg analyzed the program for the National Review and concluded that the ship's problems "are emblematic of a defense procurement system that is rapidly losing its ability to meet our national security needs."[93] After detailing problems relating to the skyrocketing costs, lack of accountability, unrealistic goals, a flawed concept of operations, the perils of designing a warship around stealth, as well as the failure of the Advanced Gun System, Fredenburg concludes:

The Zumwalt is an unmitigated disaster. Clearly it is not a good fit as a frontline warship. With its guns neutered, its role as a primary anti-submarine-warfare asset in question, its anti-air-warfare capabilities inferior to those of our current workhorse, the Arleigh Burke-class destroyers, and its stealth not nearly as advantageous as advertised, the Zumwalt seems to be a ship without a mission.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zumwalt-class_destroyer

cameldrv• 9 years ago

The analogy seems perfect. http://www.defensenews.com/articles/new-warships-big-guns-ha...

Even down to the serious opioid problem we are having.

killjoywashere2• 9 years ago

The F35 was a Lockheed bureaucratic coup: they got buy in from the Marine Corps, which has very little organic technical prowess compared to the Air Force and Navy, by pitching the VSTOL version up front. Once they had buy-in from the Marines, DoD released a short-fused competition announcement, which gave the Boeing team very little lead time to produce a competent competitive airframe, the X-32, which looks like an obese guppy (1).

As for airworthiness, it should be noted Lockheed has no, no commercial airframe business. Boeing's commercial business exceeds all military programs in production scale. Observers of the competition generally agreed (1) Boeing could have produced better airframes given a more reasonable timeframe, (2) separate airframes (as Boeing proposed and eventually happened in the F35 anyway) would provide better performance per dollar.

As for the Zumwalt, I'll just leave Robert Work's paper (2) as an exercise for the reader.

The Ford is too big to say much of anything about "the Ford". Carriers are huge investments. On investment scale, it's equivalent to building a city from scratch. If you haven't been on one, you probably can't wrap your head around the scale of the thing. Nuclear reactors, an airport, 5-6000 people, enough munitions to level a small city. And it's own flotilla of warships.

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_Strike_Fighter_program

(2) http://awin.aviationweek.com/Portals/AWeek/Ares/work%20white...

myrandomcomment3• 9 years ago

This story lacks perspective. They are 25% over budget. For a government defense program that just is not that bad. The reason they are over budget is because they are using a ton of new systems and new technology and guess what it is buggy. NASA blew up a ton of rockets before they got one to work, and blew up even more getting them to work reliably. Given the new technology 25% is pretty damn good. They will work out the issues. There are numerous military technologies that where less then stellar in the 1st run. It is like anything else, it gets better over time and effort. If you say hey, this worked for the last 50 years we should not change then I guess we should be flying bi-planes?

maxerickson4• 9 years ago

They choose to push the capabilities envelope pretty far.

The maintenance hours per flight hour of military aircraft are huge.

ozgune• 9 years ago

+1. Many large scale projects (for example the Boeing 787) end up over-budget and with delays.

Does anyone have statistics on how projects of similar complexity performed in terms of their budgets and timelines?

taneq2• 9 years ago

Yeah, it all sounds like tuning / refinement issues rather than fundamentally flawed systems. "Rip it all out and replace it with steam" is a non-technical kneejerk, not a reasoned response.

mturmon2• 9 years ago

Bingo: https://www.navytimes.com/articles/trump-says-navy-should-di...

jessriedel• 9 years ago

Obviously we'd need expertise to tell if (say) the budget was already hugely cushioned in expectation of bugs so that the overrun really is outrageous. But agreed, this is not obviously bad at all, and the author hasn't given us detailed info to think otherwise.

More importantly: the Ford is the first in the new generation of as many as ten aircraft carriers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_R._Ford-class_aircraft_...

Basically, all carriers currently in service are of the Nimitz class, and will be replaced one-by-one over the next 40 years with ships based on the Ford. Lessons learned and tech developed will be amortized over those future ships.

stevenwoo3• 9 years ago

I think there is a huge difference between NASA trying to find a viable rocket design for manned flight and building an aircraft carrier - they already have designs for catapult and arresting systems that are much more reliable and cheaper than the new ones they decided to try out on the new class of carrier ( and using the same metaphor with NASA, they chose a company that had never designed a rocket engine to design rockets for manned space travel to put on top of a Saturn V stage 1), and if they continue to stick with the new unproven designs, they won't be able to deliver for many, many more years, if ever.

If they had stuck with the proven design with just improvements, they might have been able to deliver the ship three years ago on time.

The new electric only system means they committed to not routing steam from the nuclear power plant to the catapults so that would be a major retrofit for that one completed new style carrier. The new electric systems when they do fail, they disable the entire catapult launch capability of the aircraft carrier, the contractor made a really poor design decision here that they apparently cannot fix. The steam catapults can be taken offline individually and worked on, leaving the others in service.

myrandomcomment3• 9 years ago

They did not just say, hey this steam thing sucks, let's do something different. While a mature technology it has its issues. The routing of the steam pipes and battle damage issues, the fact that it cannot be tuned exactly based on weight load, etc. They had a reason beyond steam sucks. It will get worked out.

killjoywashere2• 9 years ago

The big issue is that the EMALS system is easier on the airframes. In a conventional steam catapult, the steam head hits the piston face at max pressure and expands as it accelerates the aircraft, but max acceleration occurs at the beginning. This means there's much more load on the aluminium components of the airframes. As aluminium has no elastic limit, all deformation is bad. The Navy goes through a lot of airframes compared to the air force.

The EMALS system is intended to spread the load out continuously during take-off so the max load is much lower, thereby dramatically increasing the lifespan of the airframes.

mturmon2• 9 years ago

Yes, it really is an op-ed that is being read by many here as objective reportage.

mysterydip2• 9 years ago

"This is the way we've always done it" is the reason why this ship is so over budget in time and money.

Anyone who has been in IT should have seen the story play out at least once in their career: some legacy system that's been hobbled together to keep running for so long because it worked... but now that a decade or more has passed there's finally some catalyst that says you _must_ upgrade. The problem being that now the upgrade is rip-and-replace rather than micro updates over time. That's what's happening here, on many systems at once.

cottsak4• 9 years ago

#lean, #agile and the fundamental principals of Small Batches seem to be at odds with programs like carrier development and defence contracts in general. It's very unlikely that the lessons from IT fields will ever make their way into projects like this.

Boothroid2• 9 years ago

Why not design the thing such that new systems can be swapped in over time?

ghshephard4• 9 years ago

Referenced from a recent HN posting on "What really happened to Vista" - seems amazing prescient about precisely this sort of situation, master writing and a super quick read:

http://www.mayofamily.com/RLM/txt_Clarke_Superiority.html

Just a short sample (It's all worth reading - and it involves battleships!):

"...do you realize that there has been no basic change in armaments for over a century? It is, I am afraid, the result of a tradition that has become conservative. For too long, the Research Staff has devoted itself to perfecting old weapons instead of developing new ones. It is fortunate for us that our opponents have been no wiser: we cannot assume that this will always be so."

andreasgonewild• 9 years ago

Wait, I think I heard this story before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasa_(ship)

AnimalMuppet• 9 years ago

I have a little different take on this.

We aren't fighting a major war right now. We aren't facing off against a similarly-powerful navy. So if you see the need for carriers at all, going forward, then now's a good time to experiment. Throw all the new systems in one carrier. If some of them take years to make them work right, well, we learned at a time when we could afford to learn.

maxerickson4• 9 years ago

The existing fleet is being stretched pretty hard:

https://news.usni.org/2015/11/04/navy-half-the-carrier-fleet...

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2016/12/30/no-us-carrier-at-sea-le...

They could have deployed something like 2 Nimitz class ships for the unit cost of the Ford (more when you consider the money spent on developing the Ford class).

Work has started on the second one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_John_F._Kennedy_(CVN-79)

Animats5• 9 years ago

The EMALS system's big problems seem to be with the motor-generator-flywheel system used to power them. The ship doesn't generate enough power to drive the catapults directly from ship power. They have to wind up a flywheel, and then dump that energy using a generator when launching aircraft. The hardware for that weighs 12 tons. Whatever problem they're having has resulted in damage to the motor/generator windings, requiring pulling out the rotating component. This is apparently a difficult repair.

That has to create huge stresses on the windings. You wind up the flywheel, and then suddenly apply field current to activate the generator. They may be trying to ramp up field current slowly to reduce the stress. Some articles mention problems with a voltage regulator causing machine damage. Maybe the rotating machinery can't take a full-power turn-on.

Details on the system seem rather vague. Some published articles say there are four motor-generator-flywheel sets; others say only two. Isolating failed units electrically for maintenance is apparently difficult. Unclear why.

This unit "passed factory acceptance testing" in 2008.[1] These problems should have been discovered and fixed years ago. The manufacturer is Kato Engineering, part of Emerson Electric, acting as a subcontractor to General Atomic. They make a range of generators for various applications. So this is coming from a company with a long history of making generators. But generators are usually continuous-duty, not something that experiences shock loads like this flywheel rig. Apparently nobody insisted on some serious testing like running this thing through 50,000 cycles into a dummy load.

The linear motor of the catapult itself seems to be working OK.

The new arresting gear shouldn't have been a problem. That's mostly a paddles-in-water brake, something that's centuries old. How did that get screwed up?

Overall, the Ford series of carriers uses electricity for functions that, on other carriers, involve piping steam around. Most newer Naval ships are Diesel or gas turbine powered, and don't generate steam as a by-product. Nuclear plants do generate steam, which has been convenient for carrier catapults. The new British carrier series (if it gets built) is to be non-nuclear, and they want to use the EMALS launcher on some of the ships (maybe). That's part of a big mess - without a catapult, they have to buy the VTOL/STOL version of the F-35, which has its own problems.

There's an amusing book, "Ships, Machinery, and Mossbacks", by H.G. Bowen, from WWII. Bowen was a U.S. Navy engineering officer and eventually was in charge of most Naval propulsion systems during WWII. He was a real hard-ass on contractors, and often sent back large, expensive items like final drive gears back as rejects. Admiral Arleigh Burke ("31 knot Burke") wrote that his ships wouldn't have been able to go 31 knots without Bowen's work. When it really has to work, you need people like that who can say no.

[1] http://www.ga.com/emals-motor-generator-passes-acceptance-te...

jshelly2• 9 years ago

So the EMALS is basically a rail gun?

I happened to find this interesting video of the EMALS being tested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1Icd3MFmWc

Animats5• 9 years ago

It's more like a linear motor, as used with maglev trains. Coils are turned on in sequence.

This is a real U.S. Navy railgun.[1] One big energy burst energizes the rails, and the projectile comes out at Mach 7.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i737rM6FxqE

chrisseaton• 9 years ago

The new British carrier series (if it gets built)

The first is already physically built and is starting sea trials this summer.

and they want to use the EMALS launcher on some of the ships (maybe)

They've got ski-jumps, not catapults.

Animats5• 9 years ago

There was a plan for an upgrade, removing the ski-jumps and adding an EMALS.[1] This would allow using F-18 aircraft, among others. But that didn't work out.

[1] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02/06/defence_committee_ca...

mathperson• 9 years ago

you are mis-citing Arleigh Burke's nickname. You are TECHNICALLY correct but quite misleading. The nickname was actually deeply sarcastic (at least initially). The design speed for the Fletcher class was THIRTY FIVE knots not 31. He was limited to 31 because of I think mechanical issues was the USS SPENCE. He was initially called 31 knots as a way of calling him tardy and slow..

from arleigh burke wikipedia

"He usually pushed his destroyers to just under boiler-bursting speed, but while en route to a rendezvous prior to the Battle of Cape St. George, a boiler casualty to USS Spence (DD-512) (a jammed boiler tube brush used for cleaning) limited his squadron to 31 knots, rather than the 34+ they were otherwise capable of. Thereafter, his nickname was "31-knot Burke," originally a taunt, later a popular symbol of his hard-charging nature.[2]"

dreamcompiler2• 9 years ago

I wonder why they didn't use a large capacitor bank (e.g. Marx generator) instead of flywheels and motor-generators.

sxates• 9 years ago

In theory a flywheel should be smaller and virtually maintenance free. Or maybe it's just cooler and more expensive.

Animats5• 9 years ago

Each EMALS flywheel unit stores 121 MJ.[1] This is roughly the energy in a gallon of gasoline.

Here's a big ultracapacitor bank, from Maxwell. This one is intended for temporary energy storage for buses, trucks, and trains, so it can take some banging around.[2] Capacity is 144 Watt-hours, or about half a megajoule. Weighs 64Kg, not including fans. So it would take about 250 of those units to equal one flywheel unit, for a weight of 16 metric tons.

The flywheel unit weighs about 11 metric tons. So using ultracapacitors increases weight, but it's not out of the question. Might be simpler. If the system were being designed today, it might well be capacitor-powered. No moving parts, unit-replaceable if damaged, and low-maintenance.

The EMALS system doesn't actually need 121MJ to launch.[3] Each launch uses maybe a quarter of that. Apparently the idea is to have enough energy stored for several launches on several catapults.

(A Marx generator is a setup for getting a high voltage at low current, by charging capacitors in parallel and then switching them to series. They're useful for powering some physics experiments and for making big sparks. The Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago used to have a big one, their old "Million Volt Lightning Generator". Not useful in this application.)

[1] http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/ship/systems/... [2] http://www.maxwell.com/images/documents/125vmodule_ds_101469... [3] http://vtb.ee.sc.edu/vtbwebsite/downloads/publications/emals...

hangonhn• 9 years ago

Wow, one of the contributors is Pierre Sprey. I would take his criticisms very seriously. He's basically the father of the A-10, which he came up with when he studied WWII records and interviewing soldiers the aircraft was meant to support. The Air Force hated it and still does to this day but that plane proved to be cheap, durable, and useful. The A-10 is pretty much the opposite of these fancy weapons projects.

throwaway76452• 9 years ago

I understand that ground troops love the power of the A-10, basically the "tank of the skies". Not sure why we can't have classes of distinct planes now like bomber, fighter, ground-support, and reconnaissance. Pick 1 area and be the best possible plane at doing that. The jack of all trades plane seems to perform poorly at all those things.

dingaling• 9 years ago

The USAF could transfer the A-10s to the US Army ( as has been proposed many times since the 1970s ) and focus on the supra-tactical missions, but that would require them to swallow their pride and end the Johnson-McConnell 'agreement'.

That dates back to 1966 and forbids the Army to operate armed fixed-wing aircraft. The USAF would rather keep the A-10s, no matter how unenthusiastically, than ever permit the Army to take control of the air-support mission. It is ridiculous that such 'pride' has any part in national security decisions.

dreamcompiler2• 9 years ago

The Air Force hates the A-10 because it's ugly and low-tech, and the AF is all about sexiness. The A-10 is the most Soviet-looking piece of hardware in America's arsenal. But it works very, very well.

eric_h• 9 years ago

It sort of follows the unix philosophy ;) It does one thing very, very well. It's literally a massive gun with wings attached.

dten• 9 years ago

Seems to be a more concise version of the warisboring article from a couple of days ago (the author is the same):

https://warisboring.com/how-not-to-build-an-aircraft-carrier...

nategri• 9 years ago

Tomorrow on HN: How not to ship a build

rndmize• 9 years ago

I think we're at a point where the value of a traditional aircraft carrier is questionable (for the cost), and likely to decrease in the coming decades.

A smaller, possibly submersible craft that could launch and catch drones would probably be able to replace carriers in a variety of missions at vastly reduced cost. Pilots can be offloaded to military bases; launching/catching systems can be as powerful as the drones can be engineering to support, for shorter landing and takeoff distances; required storage space is less, crew is less, and cost is less for drones. DARPA has already done a little work in this direction - http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/darpa-develops-system-launch-retrie...

Robotbeat2• 9 years ago

This article is a bit too one-sided for me to take seriously.

The cost overruns seem modest compared to what I see occur regularly in big aerospace projects (not just 25% or 50% but 300 or 500%). F35 cost is absolutely absurd, for instance.

I saw basically no mention of the extra capabilities that a fully electric ship like this could provide, it all was just a long list of down sides.

How not to build a ship: the USS Ford

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