Road to 350: What Does the US Navy Do Anyway?

[hscs]

In layman's terms: The navy discovered a 1940s manufacturing process in the 00s to save money. Apparently this required a hull change from the seawolf class to virginia class. Everyone high-fived themselves about this "novel" discovery.

The engineering of ship's hull and propulsion systems is mostly optimized with very small room for improvement, aside from ensuring quality of work from our barrel bellied, alcoholic, felony-convicted shipyard bubbas. Combat system sensors (radar, sonar, ew, etc.) and things that go boom are where we can make meaningful technological advancements.

Sorry for the jargon.

You oversimplified this - building a car vs building something to Subsafe / NR standards with HY100 that is thousands of LT in displacement.

And anytime you want to try and do some of the work that these alcoholic, felony convicted workers do, be my guest. And OBTW, you get your badge clipped if you even get charged with a felony, much less convicted.

When you actually know what you’re talking about, then start posting.

 

[Spekkio]

You oversimplified this - building a car vs building something to Subsafe / NR standards with HY100 that is thousands of LT in displacement.

And anytime you want to try and do some of the work that these alcoholic, felony convicted workers do, be my guest. And OBTW, you get your badge clipped if you even get charged with a felony, much less convicted.

When you actually know what you’re talking about, then start posting.

I didn't say building a submarine is the same as building a car. What I implied was that 60 years was far too long for the Navy to discover that building a sub in modules and assembling it at the end saves a ton of money. Especially when the technology improvements over its LA class predecessor are extremely incremental.

There's a man sitting in prison right now for being the first person to destroy a submarine since the Japanese sunk the Bullhead on Aug 6, 1945. According to you, he should've had his badge clipped. Oops.

Sorry if I struck a nerve.

Second shift bro. Mahalo! 🤙

 

[BigRed389]

I didn't say building a submarine is the same as building a car. What I implied was that 60 years was far too long for the Navy to discover that building a sub in modules and assembling it at the end saves a ton of money. Especially when the technology improvements over its LA class predecessor are extremely incremental.

There's a man sitting in prison right now for being the first person to destroy a submarine since the Japanese sunk the Bullhead on Aug 6, 1945. According to you, he should've had his badge clipped. Oops.

Sorry if I struck a nerve.

Second shift bro. Mahalo! 🤙

Shipyards are very tribal in how they operate…so I’m not surprised it took them a while to get there.

But there’s also the fact that machining extremely large irregularly shaped objects made of unforgiving materials to very precise tolerances are basically opposing requirements.

The other point related to shipyard workforce quality is…if you want better workers, pay more. Or build a glut in the labor pool of skilled laborers. The shipyards aren’t incentivized to go better/faster on their own via fixed price contracts. Which may sound totally insane and counter to how fixed price works in theory land…but that’s pretty much how that goes more often than it should.

 

[Faded Float Coat]

From what little I've seen and heard about him he is a bit like Ward Carroll, but with less actual experience and credibility.

Two different kinds of unserious. One is a look-at-me court jester that wants everyone to take him and his #deepintel super seriously. The other, John Konrad, is...something much worse.

 

[Spekkio]

Shipyards are very tribal in how they operate…so I’m not surprised it took them a while to get there.

But there’s also the fact that machining extremely large irregularly shaped objects made of unforgiving materials to very precise tolerances are basically opposing requirements.

The other point related to shipyard workforce quality is…if you want better workers, pay more. Or build a glut in the labor pool of skilled laborers. The shipyards aren’t incentivized to go better/faster on their own via fixed price contracts. Which may sound totally insane and counter to how fixed price works in theory land…but that’s pretty much how that goes more often than it should.

We were technologically capable of adapting the Heny Ford assembly process well before the VA class submarine. What prompted the change was the fall of the Soviet Union and political pressure inside the beltway in the 1990s whereupon policy makers kept asking "why do we need submarines?" instead of writing the Navy blank checks to combat the Russian boogeyman. Along with that, policymakers railed against the Seawolf's design requirements to be able to unilaterally defeat a CSG in a blue-water engagement as wasteful because haha who else operates CSGs besides the USN? The output was a cheaper platform infused mostly with intel community design requirements that sacrificed ASUW capability for INT, especially because the engineers royally fucked up the propulsion efficiency curves.

Again, oops.

So we just self-flagellate over the analogue of trying to defeat a company sized element with a 6-shot revolver and a bandolier of 50 extra bullets.

As for workforce quality - yep, shipyards were paying what is now sub minimum wage just a few years ago for journeyman level craftsmen. The poor wages and spartan working conditions were captured in this riveting documentary about how a shipyard bubba worked hard to send his son to the federal boxing academy USNA.

But in the meantime, the average idle time for a sub undergoing a depot level maintenance period is 225 days. Of course, this doesn't account for all the shoddy patch-jobs they sweep under the rug to let the crew fix in a pierside maintenance period to get the boat out 'on time' (meaning, they meet the date that was already pushed back 3 times), because that doesn't actually exist anywhere on paper. And this practice of buttoning up broken shit to meet already overdue deadlines isn't unique to submarines.

Also, did you know that if you had a master's degree or PhD in clinical psychology, that the Navy will pay you up to $48,000 a year to provide mental health treatment to sailors?

Yes, I used some hyperbole, mostly for humor. But apparently that was lost on some overly sensitive people.