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Why the U.S. can't build icebreaking ships

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Re: Why the U.S. can't build icebreaking ships

#181

Post by Spooky23 »

Sakos wrote: post #177
cpursley wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Russia is out producing the US on guided munitions and rockets fired from the ground as well (and missile defense). And icebreakers, of course. So it’s doable - just depends on priorities (ie, moving chip manufacturing back which seems to have us recent success).

US shipyards and military production are extremely low on any number of metrics. It's unclear even now whether the US has enough stockpiles and enough production of modern munitions to maintain an active war against a peer adversary like China with such massive production capacity and such a massive population. At some point, you do need constant production of enough munitions, doesn't matter how smart or precise tho…

I think the Navy is mostly obsolete and they are focused on key assets. Ship acquisition seems too dumb.

Re: Why the U.S. can't build icebreaking ships

#182

Post by hintymad »

throwup238 wrote: post #156
hintymad wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious why the US does not think this is a big problem. I mean, look at the US 80 years ago. The US easily out produced the Axis. We could produce faster and cheaper. There's really no excuse that the cost of making canon shells is 10x higher than Russia. Isn't being able to manufacturing cheaply the signature of a highly developed society? Besides, expertise is not just volumes of blueprints, right? We can only kee…

The US outproduced the axis towards the end of the war but it was a real mess for the first few years while industries retooled and the government broke through obstacles like the aluminum cartel. It was only after Pearl Harbor and the formation of the War Production Board in 1942 that manufacturing really picked up because everyone felt the existential threat and organized against it. The US can’t make cheap artille…

> We use mostly guided munitions dropped from planes and rockets fired from the ground, whereas Russian doctrine has always focused on artillery.

Thanks for the specifics. I don't know about guided munitions, but I'd imagine a million dollar a rocket will be quite expensive for a prolonged war. Also, the US debuted a killer zone, Rogue 1, a few months ago, and it cost about $94K. $94K! I'm sure the drone is more advanced than DJI Mavic 3 Pro, but is it really 50 times more advanced even if we take the cost of military-grade into consideration? It looks to me the only explanation is that without a healthy manufacturing sector in the US, the cost of anything would go through the roof because we have lost the economy of scale.

Re: Why the U.S. can't build icebreaking ships

#183

Post by polairscience »

vasco wrote: post #38

I'm afraid this might be too much of a stupid question (and I promise I'm not American), but can't they just shoot at the ice as they go?

I'll answer this as someone who has spent some decent chunk of time on icebreakers. It's hard to really picture what travel through sea ice is like if you haven't done it. Breaking ice isn't that hard... at least if you only have to do it once. But breaking ice for hundreds or thousands of miles is really really hard. Articles like this one tend to gloss over just how specialized every single icebreaker is. And when they build new ones they often try new things to make it easier. My favorite thing I've seen is a set of compressor nozzles that attempt to make it easier for the ship to glide through the ice.

FYI, people hear icebreaker and they imagine that the ship literally cracks the ice like a wedge. It's very much less graceful. Icebreakers work like a beached whale where they propel themselves onto the ice and smash it under their weight. When they get stuck many of the ships have the ability to roll to try to break it further.

All that said, a projectile system could surely be made to work kinematically if it were effectively a large caliber gun. But carrying enough ammunition to functionally break ice at that scale would be its own challenge. And if you wanted to bomb or nuke ice or something at a much larger scale then I hope you don't need me to respond to the social or environmental considerations.

Re: Why the U.S. can't build icebreaking ships

#184

Post by hintymad »

wakawaka28 wrote: post #169
hintymad wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious why the US does not think this is a big problem. I mean, look at the US 80 years ago. The US easily out produced the Axis. We could produce faster and cheaper. There's really no excuse that the cost of making canon shells is 10x higher than Russia. Isn't being able to manufacturing cheaply the signature of a highly developed society? Besides, expertise is not just volumes of blueprints, right? We can only kee…

>There's really no excuse that the cost of making canon shells is 10x higher than Russia. Isn't being able to manufacturing cheaply the signature of a highly developed society? We have prioritized high wages for workers in the US, a phenomenon also driven by the reserve currency status of the dollar. Russians, Chinese, and Indians work for a fraction of the price we do. We have high labor costs and have to import man…

> We have prioritized high wages for workers in the US

I'm not sure if this is the dominating factor. Russia fired around 10,000 shells a day, and each costs about $1000. So for a year, Russia would have fired 3.65M shells that cost $3.6B. Let's say we need 100 workers to produce these shells. Then, he wage of the workers would cost merely $10M a year, if each one earns $100K a year. $10M over 3.65M shells, and that's just $3 a shell, or 0.3% of the cost of a Russian shell, or 0.075% of the cost of a US shell.

What the US lost was not advantage of labor cost, but the economy of scale. By the way, this is also what Tim Cook said. He said that Chinese labor not cheap anymore, but China has so much scale and expertise so that the output from China is still cheap. Again, economy of scale.

Re: Why the U.S. can't build icebreaking ships

#186

Post by shiroiushi »

nostrademons wrote: post #113
toomuchtodo wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What industries? Steel? Protectionism. Batteries? Protectionism. Solar? Protectionism. Autos? Protectionism. Aircraft? Protectionism. Agriculture? Protectionism. Why? Because efficiency is a tradeoff where you give up security and resiliency.

Music, movies, microcode, and high-speed pizza delivery.

Music? I don't think anyone listens to American music these days outside of America (and maybe Canada). America used to produce great music, back in the 60s-80s, that people around the world wanted to listen to, but that went away after the 2000s.

American movies, however, are still quite popular abroad. Offhand, I'd say it's one of America's biggest exports. "Microcode" is the other one, if you mean things like CPU design: all the biggest CPU makers are in America: Intel, AMD, Apple, Qualcomm, etc. (Many of the CPUs are manufactured elsewhere, usually by TSMC, but all the design work is done in the US.)

Re: Why the U.S. can't build icebreaking ships

#187

Post by morkalork »

beloch wrote: post #133
jahewson wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is it that the US ship builders aren't competent Yes, they are woefully uncompetitive. They produce single-digit numbers of commercial oceangoing ships annually, at 2-4x the cost of elsewhere. It’s an industry on life support.

Canada has the same problem with building icebreakers. The problem with icebreakers capable of dealing with multi-year ice is that they're a very expensive and specialized kind of ship that's hard to construct, but also the sort of ship that has a very long lifetime. Only a few governments in the world have any need of such ships, and they typically only need a few in the span of many decades. By the time Canada got…

Like this? https://www.reuters.com/world/us-canada-finland-launch-effor...

Re: Why the U.S. can't build icebreaking ships

#188

Post by stevekemp »

mmooss wrote: post #65
cgh wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Canada has 20 light and medium icebreakers and just started a new project to build two more that will apparently "be among the most powerful conventional icebreakers in the world": https://www.canada.ca/en/public-services-procurement/service... Given the close economic and cultural ties of these countries, surely some kind of knowledge transfer could happen, if not actual nearshoring the construction. Could NAFTA (or…

Finland is a NATO ally; but sure Canada makes sense too. And Norway and Sweden and whoever else might have the skills and experience.

For clarity Finland is a full member of NATO, as of 4 April 2023.

Perhaps that's what you meant, but Ally makes it sound like they're friendly with NATO rather than an actual member.

Re: Why the U.S. can't build icebreaking ships

#189

Post by xyzzyz »

mmooss wrote: post #37
cyberax wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How about we let Finland build the icebreakers We can't. Jones Act.

We can change the law. It happens every day.

Yes, but repeals of very actively enforced law that's over 100 years old do not happen every day.

Re: Why the U.S. can't build icebreaking ships

#190

Post by closewith »

Spooky23 wrote: post #180
hintymad wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Curious why the US does not think this is a big problem. I mean, look at the US 80 years ago. The US easily out produced the Axis. We could produce faster and cheaper. There's really no excuse that the cost of making canon shells is 10x higher than Russia. Isn't being able to manufacturing cheaply the signature of a highly developed society? Besides, expertise is not just volumes of blueprints, right? We can only kee…

You adapt. Ukraine is emptying the US armories to kill Russians at scale. You get smarter/more accurate with the constrained supply of shells, adopt drones etc. In the 80s, expensive Maverick missiles were the primary airborne tank killer. Now the Ukrainians are dropping mortars into tank hatches from cheap drones.

That just moves the issue onto the production of drones.
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