Are there any startups working on disrupting US Shipbuilding?
Then think ship engines, the ones with blocks bigger than most houses. Order one of those out of the blue and, again not joking, it might be 10+ years. Those engines are targeting at future ships still on drawing boards, each is accounted for long before any metal is assembled. Any startup's order would be at the back of a very slow line.
A startup wanting to get into ship construction would have more success launching a new social media system, getting lucky, IPO, then use that money to purchase an existing shipbuilder. But at that point the "startup" is really just another a hedge fund investing in ship construction.
Is the payoff worse for ship builders?
No company in the world starts with massive state of the art. It is a recipe for failure, the engineers need to learn in a lower-risk environment.
Building crab fishing boats doesn't have an evolution that leads to building nuclear submarines anymore than manufacturing charm bracelets or ready-to-eat delivery meals. The requisite materials, logistics, and labor expertise are effectively unrelated to one another and separated by mountains in terms of capital and material resources.
As was said before, the only way in is basically to buy into an existing operation, at which point where you got the money from originally is irrelevant.
You're putting words in my mouth because that is probably not how people would start out.
But the literal incorrectness of that statement is so wrong it is puzzling. The shipbuilding industry, which builds nuclear submarines, started with some extremely modest boats. The path we followed to get to where we are was precisely starting with little fishing boats and evolving to where we are now. There is obviously a path from small boats to large boats. To suggest otherwise is absurd. As is the idea that small companies can't become big companies or move to make more sophisticated products.
You might be about to make the argument that government funding is necessary or something, but the big problem here is unusually simple - the US is not globally competitive at manufacturing, a startup would be expected to fail if left to compete in the market and that is why nobody is going to try (or succeed). They've already been beaten out of the market.
I'm making concrete your vague handwaving, feel free to provide a more complete explanation of how you think this goes.
> But the literal incorrectness of that statement is so wrong it is puzzling. The shipbuilding industry, which builds nuclear submarines, started with some extremely modest boats. The path we followed to get to where we are was precisely starting with little fishing boats and evolving to where we are now. There is obviously a path from small boats to large boats. To suggest otherwise is absurd.
No it didn't. And certainly not the military shipyards discussed in this article. While a couple (Newport News, Brooklyn Navy Yard) have origins as more modest shipbuilding sites, the vast majority were purpose-built sites for military construction built with US government dollars. Like the Manhattan Project or the Hoover Dam, there wasn't a smaller initiative that gradually developed into a massive industry. Massive industry was the go word.
These types of projects, continental railroads, interstate highways systems, and military naval shipyards, they can have private-public partnerships but they do not grow organically from more modest roots without public dollars.
> You might be about to make the argument that government funding is necessary or something, but the big problem here is unusually simple - the US is not globally competitive at manufacturing, a startup would be expected to fail if left to compete in the market and that is why nobody is going to try (or succeed).
This is irrelevant, pick your foreign military shipyard and you will find that the story is the same. Bohai, Zelenodolsk, Cherbourg, any of them. The government recognized a need for a new, larger, more powerful class of ships and either built or expanded the logistics necessary to construct the vessels.
Imagining counterfactuals is fundamentally vague. Someone would need see an opportunity to move in to shipbuilding at the low end and take it. But that is the low end, ie, probably not starting at 50kt tankers. You're imagining scenarios where it doesn't work. That is really easy, most business ideas don't work. But successful companies come from the unusual situations where ideas do work, so the fact that you are good at imaging how things won't work isn't really material. You're one of the approximately 8 billion humans that isn't capable of founding a shipping startup. I am too. But nonetheless we can be confident that the best positioned people in the US could do it.
The issue is not the path, the issue is that US companies can't compete. The existing, established, US shipbuilders got whipped by the Asians. The question here isn't whether startups work, the issue is the market that they'd inherit if they got big doesn't support US shipbuilders.
> No it didn't.
You are, and I'm speaking quite literally here, absurdly wrong. Modern ships didn't pop into existence from nothing. Nothing does. The whole modern economy is just iterations of smaller simpler designs starting with wood fires and spears. It is just a basic fact that there is a path from any industrial activity to any other.
And companies tread it fairly regularly. It isn't unusual for people to move from one vertical into another.
> Like the Manhattan Project or the Hoover Dam, there wasn't a smaller initiative that gradually developed into a massive industry.
The Manhattan project is within startup budget. OpenAI is talking trillions to develop AI, that is like 50 Manhatten projects. Nuclear science turns out not to be that hard once people know that splitting atoms is a very energy-plush operation.
And the dam example is silly. Are you suggesting the Hoover Dam was the first dam? No, the US had a huge dam building industry. It was a big project, but it was done by existing companies.
They didn't evolve from some minor capital investment. The problem is not one of ideas it is one of scale. In that sense, yes, they popped into existence from nothing.
The Panama canal is the result of centuries of technological development in the technology of canal construction generally, but fundamentally it is not the result of a startup or even a hundred startups building tiny canals until they had enough capital and expertise doing so to build a big canal.
It is a result of governments (plural, the first attempt failed), in a one-off immense expenditure of capital and manpower unable to be mustered by the entirety of the global shipping industry (for everyone with eyes and a map could see the potential), constructing something that was not there before. "From nothing".
With drug trafficking, it need for new manufacturing is because they had an illegal use case. And those subs usually don't last more than one journey. It's not really comparable to the shipping industry at large.
Shipbuilding is much larger. Shipping is a huge industry with many parts. It is not necessarily impossible for a new company to come in to any single area, but they wouldn't be able to break into something like military ship building.
A possible avenue for 'disruptive startup' is the USV area, see Anduril. But even then that required immense amounts of capital because you are competing against the big dogs (Raytheon, Northrop Lockheed, Boeing, BAE etc.)
Sounds like yet another reason supporting concrete ships
https://www.asce.org/communities/student-members/conferences...
A big problem for US shipbuilding is the Jones Act, which is so protectionist it's easier for the industry to flee the country entirely than deal with it. It's really harmful to our overseas areas like Hawaii and PR too.
Boeing is learning this the hard way currently, for example, and is in talks to buy the subcontractor (Spirit AeroSystems) it spun out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39571819
The union maintains a YouTube channel at https://www.youtube.com/@HHIUN87728. It was established 1987-07-28.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uXqkbpy-6s is an official music video of The Song of Hyundai Heavy Industries' Labor Union. Lyrics is like "Comrades, remember, the spring of '89, we will fight with our lives" etc, referring to one of the most legendary event in South Korean labor history, 128 days strike at HHI of 1989.
The union is a sectoral union, a chapter under Korean Metal Worker's Union, but it is so large it has a special carveout solely reserved for it. Korean Metal Worker's Union otherwise forbids company-specific union.
The Song of Hyundai Heavy Industries Union
Brothers of Hyundai, standing tall,
Piercing violence and suppression's call!
Forward! Forward! Let us rush on through!
Towards the liberation of workers, true!
Even if the power's violence is widespread,
We'll fight with our lives, ahead we'll tread!
Liberation! For liberation we fight!
Struggle! For struggle we unite!
At the vanguard of the workers' liberation call,
Hyundai Heavy Industries Union, standing tall!
The Sun is rising over the Mipo bay,
The hot tears of our mothers, they say
Forward! Forward! Let us rush on through!
Towards the liberation of people, true!
Comrades! Don't you remember the spring of '89?
We'll fight with our lives, our destinies entwine!
Liberation! For liberation we fight!
Struggle! For struggle we unite!
At the vanguard of the people's liberation call,
Hyundai Heavy Industries Union, above all!In theory, protectionism should help the industry. The government has opened a niche for a US shipper and a US shipbuilder (or maybe a vertically integrated shipper and builder) to get mainland goods to Hawaii, PR and Alaska.
Doesn't seem like a wide enough niche to get much traction though. It's easier to simply not serve that shipping market.
And shipyards are hard to start. They've almost certainly got to be in environmentally sensitive areas, that are often pretty expensive real estate, and then you've got all the machinery and what not. Hard to get that done these days.
People think of the NLRA as a legacy of the New Deal and therefore inherently pro-labor, but conveniently forget that the deal was changed by a bipartisan alliance of corporatists over Truman's veto.
Sectoral/sympathy strikes were historically the backbone of union power in the US and remain so today in jurisdictions with strong unions. Legally protecting ineffectual strikes but not effective strikes traps labor in a local maximum, where there's just enough to lose to disincentivize going for more substantial gains.
See paragraph about labor unions.
And
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Overpass
from same link.
There's a long history of this in both world wars, eg. auxiliary cruisers and escort carriers, and they were fairly effective. See eg. the Battle of Samar, where 18 escort carriers and their destroyer escorts took on most of the Japanese battle fleet and won.
Today such vessels are so susceptible to anti-ship missiles and submarines that they're laughed out of any serious military planning meeting where the participants aren't already desperate for tonnage.
An escort drone carrier could follow that strategy as well, and much more cheaply. The point is to make them expendable and cheap. Yes, if they get hit they're gone - that was always the case in WW2 as well - but there are now so many more options for blowing everything else out of the water that might get close.
This is incorrect.
> been born out by Russian experience in Ukraine
Defending your assumption with the Russian fleet is certainly a thing you are doing right now
This is without getting into the obvious problems of "lol how do you plan to control your USV? Pacific ocean spanning tether?"
As long as there are blue water navies, there will be military shipyards servicing them.
[1] https://www.navalnews.com/event-news/sna-2024/2024/01/us-nav...
Autonomous ships will probably also be a big thing.
Autonomous trains already exist, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_driverless_train_syste... for a long list of places where it's been implemented. The related article at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_train_operation#Adva... has a list with six advantages of autonomous trains. Many of these advantages would probably also apply to autonomous ships (and other kinds of vehicles).
The biggest benefit of remote, drone or automated piloting is the way you could make better use of a person's time, and maybe save a tiny amount of wages, but it's mostly the resulting functionality/features/business processes that is the benefit, not the headcount cost.