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Comment by mjevans | Hacker News Reader

The article seems to claim the issue is with fabrication tolerances. Two issues come to mind.

1) How to fabricate to those tolerances reliably? (Robots come to mind).

2) How easy is it to operate these shafts in a degraded capacity if there is physical damage to the vessel during operations?

The first issue probably should be solved by improving automated construction tech. The second issue... these things need to operate well under worst case load scenarios, not just right out of the dry-dock... and it sounds like they can't even get the ideal scenario working.

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I wonder if this has anything to do with the decrease of blue collar skilled labor. Many skilled trade labor has decreased especially in VA.

https://www.dailypress.com/business/newport-news-shipyard/dp...

> 2) How easy is it to operate these shafts in a degraded capacity if there is physical damage to the vessel during operations?

This is my concern as well. I fear poor uptime during busy operations, and in a real shooting war, for it to end up in drydock after its first or second engagement.

I'm curious to know the military history regarding the relationship between (a) how much a country faces an existential threat vs. (b) the attributes of their weapon designs.

Ships also bend and flex. I wonder how these elevators will work out in the rolling ocean.

Robots do not come to mind when you are producing custom pieces.

Right - Part complexity is a big reason and so is volume. We're building carriers at a rate of 1 ship every 3 to 4 years. There's just no value proposition for automation on a lot of these parts.

You're thinking assembly line robots. I'm thinking more general purpose machines that are designed to move independently and automatically adjust themselves to the correct position relative to a design and perform the task. Alternatively, at least something that a set of humans can move in to place, bolt on, and have it do the above.

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