US warship collides with tugboat in disastrous launch | Hacker News Reader

US warship collides with tugboat in disastrous launch

navytimes.com

24 pointsamelius49 comments

I think you'll find that this is actually a masterful success that demonstrates the forward thinking of the Navy leadership. The news media simply are unable to comprehend the genius of this, due to their lack of marine engineering expertise. They love to see people fail.

What was the ship which collided with a commercial freighter? The command culture seems just completely off kilter in the Navy. Running untrained skeleton crews sleepless.

Might just as well coke them all up, put them on a pirate ship and pretend to be sailing.

From the video it seems the individuals on the tugboat are running away from something (around 0:18). Do you think this was part of the plan as well?

Did it stall maybe?

That's almost perfect. I hope you work in PR. That's "Baghdad Bob" level.

Rather than spend millions, potentially billions on reports, enquiries, tribunals, commissions, leading to: decommissioning shipyards, etc... this armchair engineer recommends the navy use a longer chain / rope to the tug next time.

I was surprised to discover that the U.S. is still building LCSs.

I got a tour of one (LCS-2 [0], IIRC) docked at NAVSTANPT [1], and it just seemed so fragile. It's hard to imagine them being useful for real combat.

I have a working theory that massive organizations like the U.S. Navy tend towards foolishness / wastefulness until they're forcibly reset by existential threats.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Independence_(LCS-2)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_Station_Newport

IIRC the Navy doesn’t like these, and wanted to cut production early and decommission some of them early too. But more were forced on them by Congress.

Congress is run by invisible Steven Spielberg's Gremlins.

+ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gremlins

4d chess…

Navy doesn't want them anymore. Congress is forcing the Navy to build more, like what congress did with the A10 warhog and M1 tanks.

The A-10 Warthog is so cool, though :-(

The navy should give them to Ukraine.

Would they be effective?

The Su-25, which is roughly analogous to the A-10, doesn’t seem to be doing so well there.

The A10 is an amazing plane. Ugly, but really good.

This is clearly not at all the same class as the Independence, the Cleveland isn't a trimaran. But the obvious loss of competence is quite sobering.

I agree it's not the same class. But AFAIK (I could be wrong) my concerns about the Independence pertain to all LCS designs.

I read somewhere (can't cite the source), that the tugboat captain was asked if he was ready, and replied "almost ready" and that the 'almost' wasn't heard.

Jeez, just say "no" dude

A few years ago, I erroneously started a process on an unclean dataset, thinking it had been cleaned. This caused messages to be delivered to customers, asking them to take action, when in fact no action should have been taken on their part.

The cause? In a status update, the person cleaning the dataset said that she was "ready to begin". I interpreted that as "the processing process is ready to begin", not "the cleaning process is ready to begin".

When stakes are high, clear communication helps us all - even when whatever's happening is an SOP that you run every day.

This is why air traffic control sounds so repetitive and specific - even going so far as to say “niner” so it doesn’t sound like “no” in German.

Aviation uses niner instead of nine to avoid confusion with five which is also one syllable and contains the long-I vowel sound. The rest of the English numbers have distinct vowels and/or different numbers of syllables. If all you picked up over a weak radio transmission was the vowel sounds, you could still tell what number was spoken.

I get it, but it’s still wild to me that we build massive ships then just kinda dump them in the water.

You’d think they’d build it in a drydock and then open some locks, let it flood, and tow it out. But nope… they deploy ships like my kids do at bathtime.

Aren't those also tests of sea worthiness? A ship will have to withstand much harsher conditions. It is better for it to fail early than in the middle of an ocean in bad weather.

Hmm, maybe! Are they instrumented for test or otherwise reviewed shortly after? It’s not a test if we aren’t measuring.

I'm pretty sure you can't get anything else than roll frequency out of this.

I'm pretty sure they are tested again, in a real way, and that it starts with a static stability test before doing anything dynamic. Here is a video that explains a bit the endeavor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8F93a7A2ug8

I wonder the same thing, no other industry moves such a big load in close quarter that fast. I suspect it's some kind of supersitious tradition more than any engineering reason.

For big ships, you need a even bigger drydock. This way, you can do it in a smaller area. From the video, the canal doesn't look that big, and the process seems a lot faster than having to unfill/fill/unfill a huge drydock. Regardless, the ship will withstand much harder forces while crossing the oceans, so might as well make a spectacle out of it and drop that shit into the waters, see some splashing together with cheering.

'Disastrous launch' - turns out to be a dent well above the water line.

The amount of people saying this is ok in this thread is disturbing to me. Hitting the tugboat isn’t ok and you know how much everything costs in the Navy, repairing the damage will cost a fortune.

All I can say is that, after watching the vid, "disastrous launch" is not how I would describe it.

This seems to be the result of the clickbaity spirit that brought us "X destroys Y" when referring to uneventful disagreements.

The article title doesn't even say "disastrous launch"

I don't know if the article changed its clickbaity headline, but I definitely see other news sources using the headline "US warship collides with tugboat in disastrous launch".

Case in point:

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/uss-clevel...

The way this is being reported seems quite misleading to me.

"US warship collides with tugboat" seems to imply that the warship was at fault, when in reality my understanding is that it was completely unmanned and certainly not under power.

If someone tied their pickup to a dead tree in an attempt to uproot it, causing it to fall onto the truck and crush it, you wouldn't expect that headline to be "Tree collides with truck".

This is the fault of the shipyard, or of the tugboat crew.

>a Pentagon release ahead of the christening noted that Saturday’s “side-launch” would be the last at the Wisconsin shipyard, with follow-on ships being launched using a shiplift system.

Too bad. I always found side ship launches awe inspiring. Hurling gigantic and incredibly expensive masses of steel in the water to make a big show.

Can't tell if it was the Navy's fault or that of the shipyard. I'm sure there is plenty of blame to go around. Looks like future launches will be done a different way, so maybe it wad a known risk already.

Can't be the Navy's fault, it's a Navy warship-to-be.

It's crazy no one checked if the area was clear before launching the ship. You would think they had a protocol for clearing boats/objects prior to launch. Or is it so rare that there is no protocol?

Uh, the tug was actively pulling no the ship so it _had_ to be there I assume.

It couldn't have been 10 yards farther?

I'm guessing the tugboat was pulling the ship down the rails and possibly didn't accelerate fast enough and the ship caught up to it and collided.

Other videos of ship side-launches I've watched on Youtube don't involve a tug pulling at the same time the hydraulics are released. What was the deal with this one?

Best part of the video is the voice saying "I knew that was going to happen".

I hate this hand wringing that is ever so fashionable in white collar circles. Getting humped by an LCS is not outside the bounds of the "occasional mishap" a tugboat is meant to shrug off without expensive downtime. Should it have happened? No. But this isn't newsworthy. This is "get lectured about better communication in next week's safety meeting" worthy.

If you want to hand wring then go be concerned about the warship having damage that may require expensive drydocking from the ordeal. That's a more realistic concern.

Warships are expensive, and possibly made with special designs and materials. Tug boats on other side are cost effective.

> I hate this hand wringing

What hand wringing are you talking about?

The Navy is certainly covering itself in glory, lately. The only thing left to do is start sinking the rest of the ships.

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