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Spain builds submarine 70 tons too heavy by putting a decimal in the wrong place

o.canada.com

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Re: Spain builds submarine 70 tons too heavy by putting a decimal in the wrong place

#11

Post by ars »

tzs wrote: post #4

> And a former Spanish official says the problem can be traced to a miscalculation — someone apparently put a decimal point in the wrong place Sloppy reporting. Spain uses a decimal comma.

With the advent of computers and programming languages that only use decimal points, I wonder how long countries will hold out and continue using decimal commas.

I would not be in the slightest surprised to see that engineering would standardize 100% on decimal points (even if the public used commas), just like how in the US engineering (except houses) uses metric, even though the public uses imperial.

(Also, presumably he spoke in Spanish, so translating decimal comma to decimal point in English is not sloppy reporting - it's good translation.)

Re: Spain builds submarine 70 tons too heavy by putting a decimal in the wrong place

#12

Post by dm2 »

maskedinvader wrote: post #2

the article doesn't go on to explain more on how this could have happened, I would assume they run some tests on the specs, or some kind of simulations (I am obviously not an expert in making submarines) but considering they are so expensive, wow, amazing. Someone put a decimal in the wrong place and nobody noticed , what are the odds of that happening!

Say they have a CAD model with different types of steel/composites for material. If they select the wrong type of material, or the wrong weight for that material is used, or the thickness of a material is off by even a slight fraction, then an issue such as this could come up. Considering that there are millions of custom parts to a submarine, it's an amazing feat to ONLY be off by 70 tons.

Re: Spain builds submarine 70 tons too heavy by putting a decimal in the wrong place

#13

Post by mdigi »

rtanaka wrote: post #10
dm2 wrote: post #8

The other key figure is that the entire submarine weighs 2,200 tons. The sub was 3% too heavy and it will cost $14 million to fix, big woop, worse happens 1,000 times per day all around the world.

Just to add to that - it's $14 million on top of a $2.7 billion project.

This is a great example of an attention whoring headline. When you get into the details there's actually no news here.

Re: Spain builds submarine 70 tons too heavy by putting a decimal in the wrong place

#14

Post by muzz »

dm2 wrote: post #8

The other key figure is that the entire submarine weighs 2,200 tons. The sub was 3% too heavy and it will cost $14 million to fix, big woop, worse happens 1,000 times per day all around the world.

no, that's not the cost to fix

the $14M is just for "an assessment of the problem with the S-80 submarine program and the scope of the work that would be required to correct it"

Re: Spain builds submarine 70 tons too heavy by putting a decimal in the wrong place

#15

Post by Jare »

dm2 wrote: post #8

The other key figure is that the entire submarine weighs 2,200 tons. The sub was 3% too heavy and it will cost $14 million to fix, big woop, worse happens 1,000 times per day all around the world.

$14 million to find a solution, not to actually put that solution in place. A delay of two years in the $2.7B project will cost at least an order of magnitude more than $14M.

Re: Spain builds submarine 70 tons too heavy by putting a decimal in the wrong place

#16

Post by Jare »

ars wrote: post #11
tzs wrote: post #4

> And a former Spanish official says the problem can be traced to a miscalculation — someone apparently put a decimal point in the wrong place Sloppy reporting. Spain uses a decimal comma.

With the advent of computers and programming languages that only use decimal points, I wonder how long countries will hold out and continue using decimal commas. I would not be in the slightest surprised to see that engineering would standardize 100% on decimal points (even if the public used commas), just like how in the US engineering (except houses) uses metric, even though the public uses imperial. (Also, presuma…

Decimal points vs decimal commas is a common problem here (and other countries with similar locale details) with software, when exporting numbers in text format to be processed by other software. Over the years I have had to correct for this in 3DSMax and Excel scripts. Very annoying.

Re: Spain builds submarine 70 tons too heavy by putting a decimal in the wrong place

#17

Post by jsolson »

ars wrote: post #11
tzs wrote: post #4

> And a former Spanish official says the problem can be traced to a miscalculation — someone apparently put a decimal point in the wrong place Sloppy reporting. Spain uses a decimal comma.

With the advent of computers and programming languages that only use decimal points, I wonder how long countries will hold out and continue using decimal commas. I would not be in the slightest surprised to see that engineering would standardize 100% on decimal points (even if the public used commas), just like how in the US engineering (except houses) uses metric, even though the public uses imperial. (Also, presuma…

> US engineering (except houses) uses metric, even though the public uses imperial.

I don't know that I'd make this claim, in general. Everything from bikes to American cars can still be found with imperial nuts and bolts. Even the robotics work I did in school was mostly in imperial units due to the greater availability of, for example, 1/4" 6061 Aluminum stock.

People will stick to whatever system is most convenient for most tasks. It makes it difficult to escape local minima.

Re: Spain builds submarine 70 tons too heavy by putting a decimal in the wrong place

#18

Post by mpyne »

ars wrote: post #11
tzs wrote: post #4

> And a former Spanish official says the problem can be traced to a miscalculation — someone apparently put a decimal point in the wrong place Sloppy reporting. Spain uses a decimal comma.

With the advent of computers and programming languages that only use decimal points, I wonder how long countries will hold out and continue using decimal commas. I would not be in the slightest surprised to see that engineering would standardize 100% on decimal points (even if the public used commas), just like how in the US engineering (except houses) uses metric, even though the public uses imperial. (Also, presuma…

I wonder how long countries will continue to compare the U.S. to Myanmar because of the metric system, while these same countries refuse to switch their primary official language to English and their decimal separator to the '.'.

What's good for one is good for the other after all. ;)

Re: Spain builds submarine 70 tons too heavy by putting a decimal in the wrong place

#19

Post by [deleted] »

akiselev wrote: post #6
tzs wrote: post #4

> And a former Spanish official says the problem can be traced to a miscalculation — someone apparently put a decimal point in the wrong place Sloppy reporting. Spain uses a decimal comma.

This is an engineering calculation, it may not be guaranteed based on who they're working with and which standard they use.

[deleted]

Re: Spain builds submarine 70 tons too heavy by putting a decimal in the wrong place

#20

Post by fosap »

akiselev wrote: post #6
tzs wrote: post #4

> And a former Spanish official says the problem can be traced to a miscalculation — someone apparently put a decimal point in the wrong place Sloppy reporting. Spain uses a decimal comma.

This is an engineering calculation, it may not be guaranteed based on who they're working with and which standard they use.

I'm almost 100% sure engineers use the SI system. (unlike physicist that use a system that seems to be fitting). And the SI system says that 100.000 and 100,000 are the same. The Si system only uses space to group numbers like 12 343,123 12 for twelf thousand and so on.
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