To build ships that break ice, U.S. must relearn to cut steel

Tell that to the US aerospace industry which is full of Russian and Soviet trained engineers (who are not in their 90s).

I knew I'd be able to bait you out of hiding with my comment. The handful of resident anti-Russian zealots on here are so predicable.

I mean goodness, can we just admire a cool boat for a second?

For those interested in a more analytical approach, this article/youTube video explains how the geographical vulnerability of Russia's western borders has led to both its high degree of overall militarization as well as its extreme sensitivity over Ukraine in particular:

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2021/12/05/caspian_r...!

Although it is usually ignored, geography is fundamental to understanding why nations act the way they do.

> And a very corrupted government and no rule of law.

Claim without evidence. Let’s throw in a bit of whataboutism- have you seen how improbably good pelosi’s stock market trades are? Almost like she’s insider trading.

> Also declining population and worsening education.

Population seems to be more or less in line with the rest of the world, and likely better once you factor for immigration.

“In 2014 the Pearson/Economist Intelligence Unit rated Russia's education as the 8th-best in Europe and the 13th-best in the world”

“In 2016 the US company Bloomberg rated Russia's higher education as the third-best in the world”

I mean really. I get that we all have biases, but lying about such easily verifiable things is pathetic, even for the average anti-Russian propaganda shill.

Key to understanding this is understanding the massive toll that was inflicted on Russia during WWII.

Yes, the later is much smaller and simpler...

Yes and no, the ship and crew might have survived. But the steel wasn't thick enough to block all the radiation. Moreover traditional ship design up until that point didn't handle Nuclear Biological, and Chemical threats well. They weren't really designed to be completely sealed. It's important to recognize that the assumption that the next war would be atomic killed a lot of technology paths because the people with the money assumed it was a waste of time to continue in those directions. By the time the military started to re-explore those paths the tech had languished. It's why the Iowas went back to sea with the Mk8 fire control computer, a completely analog computer. Because nobody had really bothered to build a better one for large caliber shells since WWII.

But it's important to note that before the Iowas were given their final retirements into museum ships the Navy made sure to basically document everything they could about firing large caliber guns. Because when they initially pulled them out of mothballs in the 1980s they were woefully inaccurate, but by the time they were decommissioned for the final time they could hit a proverbial fly on a flag pole (allegedly).

The other part of it was that the Soviet Union didn't really have a surface fleet to really speak of. They invested heavily in submarines, so consequently the US Navy focused heavily on ASW. So... nobody really knows how 16" of modern armor would fair against modern weapons, it's literally never been tried. Whereas you can find pictures from way back when they were testing guns, of how various shells fared against various thicknesses and types of armor.

Long story short: We've forgotten most of what we knew about surface warfare, and we're starting to forget what we knew about shipbuilding and design. The US has outsourced all it's naval architecture and shipbuilding so long that the necessary skills are either all retired or lost.

> Why not have people on it?

Simply looking at costs and complexity "on paper" from an engineering / accounting perspective doesn't really capture all the differences between humans and machines, especially considering civilian morale.

The US military lost <2.5k in Afghanistan over two decades, and that generated enough war weariness for us to quit.

The current American public and political system simply isn't willing to tolerate large numbers of casualties. So it makes a whole lot of sense to take people out of the equation.

there is evidence of major navies investing in autonomous surface vehicles: https://www.usff.navy.mil/Press-Room/News-Stories/Article/35...

Obviously not combat vehicles but it’s not hard to imagine such a thing being reframed in a similar way.

> Now just let me collect my plum consulting fee for this bit of genius business management advice.

Come on, you’ve got to at least offer them something other than what they’ve already been doing for years.

Though knowledge of experience is sometimes wrong as well. Sure it works - unlike print where mistakes (sometimes intentional to hide a secret) can tell you something that cannot work, but that doesn't mean it is a good way to do things.

Give some examples? That kind of 'undocumented' knowledge is lost because better tech has completely replaced it. I'm talking about inventions like the Spinning Mule or the steam engine. We have superseded them with electric motors and logic boards.

I call BS. Code and any process can be documented just fine.

> 3 different cooks will read his instructions and will end up with 3 different steaks

Either his instructions are shit, or the cooks are donkeys.

Sear steak at high heat, 1 minute, rotate steak 45 degrees, flip steak to sear back side for 1 minute, rotate steak 45 degrees. Move steak to indirect heat until internal temp probed at center of steak reaches 145F, remove steak and plate steak after resting for 4 minutes.

There. If you follow those instructions you can get a perfectly done steak every. single. time.

Shit is only subjective if you don’t have a repeatable way of measuring things.

You absolutely can learn steel working and foundry type of stuff from books, but you have to find ways of measuring what you are doing. E.G. heat to this temp, control cooling process by means of $X, $Y, $Z. Inspect crystal structure of coupon, X-ray for porosity.

It isn’t easy, but it can be done.

If that's true ... then how were the engines ever built in the first place?

You know, back when they had neither the plans nor people that had built such large engines before?

Or maybe this is bad news, because the youth do not realize what is at stake. After all the article is talking about skills that we have lost relative to other countries which may not like the U.S. very much.

I don't really disagree with you, but that's very misleading to say.

64% of the federal budget goes to social security, medicare/medicaid, disability etc. That is, it goes to individuals. It's not meaningful to call that economic planning. It's not in the slightest like paying for defense contractors or research or infrastructure.

11% goes to interest payments, ie people who bought bonds etc. For individuals that's certainly not central planning, since they are the ones who decided to buy. A large amount goes towards paying of quant. easing etc, but it seems a little goofy to count that like we spend it every year still.

Ok, so those company dictators are interested in national security instead of profits? The entire topic here is how to maintain or build skills within the U.S.

ive been at a few F500 companies, and while internally that might be true... you can just quit.

if anything, that "I can just go" leads to more of a cult or prison than a dictatorship.

Weather on the great lakes in winter is generally bad enough that shipping shuts down first. There have been a lot of shipwrecks on the great lakes - much more than the oceans, even though a lot more ships cross the ocean.

1-2 active. that also means 1-2 in repair, reserve, training, mothballed, etc.

and the Great Lakes are Great -- bigger than you'd think, and highly traversed.

Versus being quite literally held hostage by a non-cooperating foreign power for political gain?

Things like energy independence sound cute and quaint until you find yourself being taken advantage of at best, or ground to a halt during armed conflict at worst.

Yeah, and then we'll enter a cycle of repatriation when it gets painful enough. Generally speaking, it's precisely the bean-counter mentality of aggressive cost reduction (with a narrow definition of "cost") that gets us into this position to begin with.

Robust systems need some overhead.

I think it still applies, albeit much less than with an adversarial state like, say, China.

> The post-WWII world order is predicated on the agreement that the age of imperialism is over and that invasion by force to annex another country is illegitimate.

Why bother with the 'annex' part when you can just overthrow governments you don't like and replace them with ones you do?

> OK, the who would you suggest should be the world’s police?

> The post-WWII world order is predicated on the agreement that the age of imperialism is over and that invasion by force to annex another country is illegitimate.

If that was true, it would be inconsistent with any one nation or narrow relatively fixed set of nations being the world’s police, as that would indicate that the age of imperialism was not over and that the world had a single imperial power or small group of such powers.

The central institution in the aspirational design of the order you describe had a solution to the problem: the UN would itself be the world’s policeman, via a centralized military command to which all member nations would subordinate command of designated units of their armed forces for the purpose.

This…did not work out in practice, and is one of the very many pieces of information suggesting that your accurate description of the aspirations which people at the end of WWII had for the postwar international order were never realized.

> Anarchy, or unpoliced random aggression would be a very bad option.

It would be, but its mostly what we have between the major powers, with the major powers (alone or in combination) policing everything else, with…issues where the policing desires of the major powers conflict.

Just like in past ages of imperialism.

The main difference is that the fact that the major powers are also nuclear powers exerts constraints on the form of their direct conflicts mostly to forms that are at least partially deniable to prevent pressure of uncontrolled escalation which could lead to nuclear annihilation.

I like the cut of your jib, @fragmede. Though it's probably more like "Move at a moderate speed and break ice." (Which DOES sound like my company's product development process.)

On Earth's surface, it's not like gravity is optional.

That's because pounds use force as a base unit, mass is kind of incorporated into it the notion of a pound, whereas the metric system generally handles the units for force and mass separately.

The imperial system actually does have a rather obscure unit called a slug which is equivalent to the kilogram (in terms of being purely a mass quantity) in the metric system, but since the pound already incorporates that term ( bundled together with the gravitational acceleration factor) it seldom sees action.

Would water be enough ballast for a cutter built with organic biocomposites that weather sea air and water?

If you are a human you cannot break significant ice by throwing. Sure you can break 1cm of ice, but so any any other boat. We need ice breakers because there are cases where the ice is probably strong enough to support a the heaviest truck, but it doesn't quite have enough margin of safety on that probably to actually drive a truck so if you want to get through you need to send a boat through water.