How not to build a ship: the USS Ford
sandiegouniontribune.com
sandiegouniontribune.com
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...
I happened to find this interesting video of the EMALS being tested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1Icd3MFmWc
This is a real U.S. Navy railgun.[1] One big energy burst energizes the rails, and the projectile comes out at Mach 7.
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.
[1] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02/06/defence_committee_ca...
Adding EMALS to the UK carriers would only be useful for future naval UAVs. The UK really doesn't want to have to keep pilots current at doing conventional deck landings, it is too expensive and you can't rapidly change the mix of F-35 and helicopters on each carrier.
The expectation is that if the new carriers were ever full of F-35s then a fair number would have USMC markings.
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]"
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...
The maintenance hours per flight hour of military aircraft are huge.
Does anyone have statistics on how projects of similar complexity performed in terms of their budgets and timelines?
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm not sure what the ultimate solution would be that keeps the reliability aspect but allows for more risky/rapid development.
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.
https://www.slideshare.net/petecheslock/the-vasa-redux
And he actually did a quick lightning talk (5 minutes) on it the year prior at Monitorama:
It was a very funny and well done presentation. Definitely worth watching.
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.
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.
Even down to the serious opioid problem we are having.
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...
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.
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."
It's hard to not love how prevasive arbitrary metrics are in modern day sports and reporting.
Goldilocks and Aristotle on board.
I don't think it is much to expect that one would be able to connect a electricity bill where one pays for monthly energy usage stated in kwh to article where energy is also stated in kwh.
Also, what does the ambiguity matter in this situation? This isn't a technical paper.
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.
1 megawatt-hour is 3600 megajoules.
It seems like this sort of energy could be very feasible with supercaps, lithium-ion, or lead acid, at that level.
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.
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)
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...
http://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/what-it-would-really-take-t...
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.
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.
http://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/sweden-has-a-sub-thats-so-d...
Their ad setup is very interesting it all appears to be served through subdomains.
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.
1. Nobody really knows what you'll need until the fighting starts.
2. Once the fighting starts, the necessities of wartime production begin to dominate the necessities of peacetime politics.
But frankly, I hope never to find out whether the USA's carriers are necessary, sufficient or useful in a roughly-equal bunfight.
(edited for wording)
Not a perfect analogy in the details, but I think reasonable in the dynamics.
From our sample set of n=1, this isn't realistic. Production would rise, by hook or by crook. If it ran long enough, you'd see carriers coming off the docks every month or two, with their battle groups completely filled.
Again, I hope we never find out.
> Modern weapons are just too accurate and destructive to make long wars of attrition possible any more.
I think this I agree with and it renders the rest of the argument moot.
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.
Isn't there some famous economics paper somewhere that shows strategies like median bid produce much better outcomes?
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.
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.
I had a relative in the Air Force, and his group was in charge of salvaging programs that failed because the contractor couldn't deliver. They would get half-finished satellites and boxes of parts arriving at the loading dock and then try to figure out what to do. Is someone criminally culpable? Can we do a contract to finish this, or do we need to start over?
According to him you could just never tell - sometimes the contractors you were sure would fail actually delivered, and sometimes the old reliables went belly up or just kept asking for more money.
Thankfully I'm no longer attached to that program, had to continuously bite my tongue and pick my battles in code reviews to avoid getting a reputation. Even nicely telling people 15-20 years my senior "go spend two days refactoring this crap" was a non-starter. To be fair the code did work, I doubt a user would ever notice. But I felt bad signing off on the review all the same.
I sdhould point out that not all the old-timers are a problem. I'm currently working with some 20-year guys who are VERY up to date and open to new ideas; and the company is trying to modernize from the top-down, but some programs have taken to it better than others and some have outright resisted. Given that these programs are only staffed after a bid is won, I'm not sure what kind of vetting process could catch these kinds of inefficiencies.
But when you're building an aircraft carrier there are just too many unknowns, so you run into trouble in the very beginning when nobody wants to bid on it. Then if it looks like the overrun will be too large the contractor goes bankrupt and you end up with a half-finished ship and a gaping hole in the capability it was supposed to provide.
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.
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."
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.
Either they will do that, or simply cut corners and fail to report it accurately. This will fly under the radar until some tragedy. But the root cause of that will likely be covered up too.
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.
https://warisboring.com/how-not-to-build-an-aircraft-carrier...
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