USS Zumwalt gets Panama tug job after yet another breakdown The US Navy's most advanced ship yet, the $4.4bn stealth destroyer USS Zumwalt, has had to be ignominiously towed through the Panama Canal after its engines failed yet again. While cruising down the intercontinental waterway, the crew spotted water leaking from two of the four bearings that link the destroyer's advanced …
Advanced != reliable, clearly.
And that is a surprise, to anybody? UK electric drive warships have had their share of problems, and the same is true of just about anything cutting edge and clever, civil or military.
My guess is that Zumwalt may have overdosed on new tech, but since this is a tech website, I moot that we should be APPLAUDING experimentation, breakdowns, accidents and failures.
And that is a surprise, to anybody? UK electric drive warships have had their share of problems
Yes, but bearings?
Come on, WTF? How is a bearing on an electric ship any f*** different from a bearing on a normal ship? How is a bearing on an electric destroyer (albeit ultra-obese one) different from a bearing on a nuclear submarine? In fact a nuclear submarine bearing has to survive considerably harsher conditions - it has to manage 10+ Bar pressure differential while making virtually no noise.
This is just somebody reinventing the wheel and charging an arm and a leg for it abusing the procurement system. Both UK and USA case. Should I mention the 3 letter acronym? Guess not, we all know it anyway.
UK electric drive warships have had their share of problems, and the same is true of just about anything cutting edge and clever, civil or military.
Correct, but electric drive is hardly new. Turboelectric drive was routine in the 1920s. Colorado, New Mexico, and Tennessee class battleships, USS Langley and the Lexington class aircraft carriers. In WW II, 102 Buckley class destroyer escorts, 25 T2 class oilers, and close to all of the US submarines. Many ships of other nations, including ocean liners. It was a very reliable technology right from the beginning.
"UK electric drive warships have had their share of problems, and the same is true of just about anything cutting edge and clever, civil or military."
this has been tried before:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Tullibee_%28SSN-597%29
My nuclear prototype was the S1C in Connecticut, _the_ prototype for the power plant on the U.S.S. Tullibee. So I'm kinda familiar with problems associated with this design, and how it compared to, let's say, an L.A. class sub in the 80's. But the thing was built, and might as well get used for SOMETHING. Note that it suffered a broken shaft at least once, and had to be towed. Oops.
Electric *CAN* be quieter. It also limits your propulsion speed (among other things). Apparently, in THIS case, it can't tolerate shaft seal leakage very well (that's mostly me speculating).
OK has NOBODY designing this thing ever heard of BATTLE DAMAGE??? You get a torpedo shoved up your backside (hint: acoustic homing torpedos going for the noise) and the shaft seals will more than just LEAK or seize up. If you don't simply get a catastrophic hull breach, the back end of your propulsion system is likely to be FLOODED and maybe one shaft still works, but it's better than 'dead in the water'.
A good steam turbine design (with reduction gears) will STILL WORK in flooding conditions, at least for a while, possibly long enough to abandon ship or NOT get hit AGAIN by another missile or torpedo... [or launch a counterstrike, or whatever].
Also reminds me of M-16's that didn't ship with a cleaning kit, because "they did not need it". Then in battle conditions, they misfired and had other problems. Issue cleaning kits, MOST problems solved. And so on.
New ships need testing to find this sort of thing. It's a normal part of the process.
As a comparison, HMS Ark Royal (the WW2 one) was regarded as a pig of a ship to serve on due to excessive vibration caused by having to move the shafts for her props. This was done as there was leakage in the shafts, just like here.
Hence there being no sister ships for any of the subsequent aircraft carriers in the RN.
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Yeah not really. A 25 year old carrier should have all such issues long since sorted out.
And the ocean sneers at your nanometres. Even in the 1930's tolerances were 1/1000th of an inch for turbines and so forth. Which didn't stop errors and problems from happening. The best way to test for these things is... (SHOCK HORROR!) to test them. At sea. Like this.
Yeah not really. A 25 year old carrier should have all such issues long since sorted out.
Yes and no. It has had the propulsion system candidate for an overhaul and replacement every effing time it was in dock including a drop-in replacement by a modified nuclear unit from one of their subs.
It was postponed every time for budget reasons up to this time. This time it was postponed for political reasons as it was pulled out of dock on the Syria voyage one year ahead of schedule and the propulsion replacement postponed once again (for the 6+ time) until next time.
The budgetary reason is that the existing propulsion unit is buried deep in the ship and they'd have to effectively half dismantle her to replace it. Dropping in a nuke to replace steam turbines is not like swapping a video card.
It's rate it next to zero as any chance of it happening at all. She'll be scrapped and a replacement built and a better one thanks to the experiences with this one.
(Especially) as the first of it's class undergoing "Sea Trials", the ship will be pushed to the limits precisely in order to expose weaknesses and also to ascertain actual performance of the class of vessel.
The other term that is more generally used is "Shakedown Cruise", after any major overhaul, modification, crew changes etc
As @GrumpyKiwi says The best way to test for these things is... (SHOCK HORROR!) to test them. At sea. Like this.
No different to what happens in any industry (e.g cars, aircraft, medicine*). Though one could argue that it is the IT industry (both software and hardware) that has been getting complacent about extensive testing before product launch.
*in the case of medicines, the equivalent would be the human trials - some work, some don't, some are fatal to the participants. Nevertheless, a vital step in order for the product to be licensed.
"Yes, well, we have CAD nowadays, laser alignment systems accurate to a few hundred nanometres, and a whole lot of other stuff that means we shouldn't be relying on suck it and see. I don't totally buy the argument."
The number of graduate engineers who have said that to me is astounding. Nothing works the first time. It's just the scale of the problems that changes.
Can't afford the ship, can't afford the ammo for the guns, WTF?
When building these things, they need to have stop limits. If the budget says $100M for one, then stop at just one when it hits $100M. It's far better just to scrap it out than have only three instead of a hundred.
What's more, doing this increases the price per ship and that only makes the expense look worse.
There's $10 billion of R&D sunk (!) into this ship. Over 3 ships that adds $3 billion to the cost of each. Given a cost of $1 billion per ship that makes each cost $4 billion. Spread over 30 ships, however, each would cost $1.3 billion.
Quite a lot of that 10 billion R&D won't just be thrown away either.
Quite good in terms of $/lb of hardware?
Isn't this an example of what Mary Caldor called "The Baroque Arsenal?"
IIRC she estimated each generation of "modern" weapons was about 3x the cost of the last.
I always questioned the vast cost of modern weapons. A B-17 cost about $250,000 in WW II, which inflates to approximately $3.4 million today. Manpower costs and losses aside, which do you think would do a better job of pounding jihadis, one B-2 with 18,000 kg of bombs for $1 billion, or 294 B-17s with 294,000 kg of bombs for the same price? Even against a first-class military opponent, I think the 294 would have a better chance of at least some of them reaching and damaging the target than I give the single B-2. Or take the P-51 at $50,000, inflated to $700,000. Compare 143 P-51s to one F-35 at $100 million. My money's on the 143 in a dogfight. The F-35 would run out of ammo long before it could shoot them all down.
"The schedule for the ship will remain flexible to enable testing and evaluation in order to ensure the ship's safe transit to her new homeport in San Diego."
Translation: right now we have no idea what's causing the problems or how long it will take to fix them. So we"ll just try a couple of things until we find something that works at least well enough to limp home.
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.
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"Do you have a backup?" means "I can't fix this."
Isn't salt water & fresh water a somewhat different density? Hence submarines bouncing off holoclines (I think that's the word)... And getting sunk.
If the seals on the bearings are marginal for sea water won't they leak like a sieve when they've got fresh water running through them, more to the point why would you pull water from outside into them when people will possibly be firing at you, one hit in the wrong place, cooked bearings and you're dead in the water.
This thing seems to be about as bright an idea as a liquid sodium reactor, a device that made the Chernobyl style reactors look fantastic. I mean what could possibly go wrong with a reactor coolant that explodes in fresh air, explodes even more in water and leaks more readily than a Royal Oilfield or Driptroit Diesel.
Given some of the stuff that's been designed recently, recent election results, and other bright ideas (electric cars, when our electricity grid was designed by Lucas) I am beginning to think humanity has reached peak fsckwit.
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