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To build ships that break ice, U.S. must relearn to cut steel

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Re: To build ships that break ice, U.S. must relearn to cut steel

#131
post #56

Surprise, this is what happens when you shift everything in heavy industry or production in general off to India and China without keeping at least some production domestic or at least have everything documented and regularly (i.e. once every ten years) check if the documentation is accurate and workers can understand it to build a product that meets specifications.

>to India and China You probably mean just China. India's manufacturing output is less than 1/10th of China's manufacturing output.

India does a lot of steel, but especially medicine, which suffers from the same problem.

Here in Germany, we're lacking cough syrup and antibiotics for children and so fucking much more drugs it's not even suitable for making jokes about the situation, it's so dire. Decades of "cutting costs" by always going for the cheapest manufacturer - i.e. China and India - has led to serious issues now.

[1] https://www.dw.com/en/health-ministry-confronts-germanys-dir...

[2] https://www.deutsche-apotheker-zeitung.de/daz-az/2021/daz-30...

Re: To build ships that break ice, U.S. must relearn to cut steel

#132
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious as to whether manned ships will continue to prevail in the age of drones. Wire up a cheap boat with explosives and it can sink an expensive naval vessel. The Ukrainians are using this to massively great effect right now against the Russians. What if instead of building one new aircraft carrier, you build an autonomous submersible capable of launching drones with variable payloads? Or instead of a destroye…

> Wire up a cheap boat with explosives and it can sink an expensive naval vessel. This has been pretty obvious since the Millennium Challenge 21 years ago, when they just called them suicide attacks. Nobody seems to have cared then and not much has changed. I think the issue is pretty tightly limited to boats/sea drones, though. If you're even a few feet under the surface then sonar can see you. If you're a few feet…

> Why not have people on it?

Simply looking at costs and complexity "on paper" from an engineering / accounting perspective doesn't really capture all the differences between humans and machines, especially considering civilian morale.

The US military lost The current American public and political system simply isn't willing to tolerate large numbers of casualties. So it makes a whole lot of sense to take people out of the equation.

Re: To build ships that break ice, U.S. must relearn to cut steel

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I knew I'd be able to bait you out of hiding with my comment. The handful of resident anti-Russian zealots on here are so predicable. I mean goodness, can we just admire a cool boat for a second?

> bait you out of hiding with my comment What? With this [1] comment? Look at the time stamps. (Do we know each other?) > Don't you have anything at all nice to say about them? About the current Russian state? No. It’s pathetic and broken, and I don’t see a way to fix it other than devolving it—functionally, not legally—to China. About Russia as a culture, people and nation? Of course. Russian literature from the cla…

You love their food?

Totally misread you ;)

Re: To build ships that break ice, U.S. must relearn to cut steel

#134
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generally speaking, states try to avoid having critical dependencies on other states, because they become points of leverage for adversarial foreign policy. For the purposes of keeping America running, yes, we really do need to own icebreakers in the same way that we need to own powerplants, steel mills, chip foundries and and refineries.

In this case though we're talking about Canada - the Canadian and US economies are incredibly linked. Personally, I'm a Canadian who makes money examining the US healthcare market and reselling that data to other Americans - there's lot of crossover here.

I think it still applies, albeit much less than with an adversarial state like, say, China.

Re: To build ships that break ice, U.S. must relearn to cut steel

#135
post #24

Meta: What is it about this post that attracted so many flippant comments? Non-meta: Why does the US have so few of these ships? Were more just not produced? I didn’t see an answer in the article but it’s possible I missed it.

> Why does the US have so few of these ships

No need to ship goods from China to the West Coast through the Arctic.

Re: To build ships that break ice, U.S. must relearn to cut steel

#136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am Russian and I know what I'm talking about living in that place about corruption and business and institutions. Corruption data with sources: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/average-rating-of-corrupt... About demographics check these: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Aging_of_Russia&u... About education: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/pisa-score-of-the-worst-a... Let's not cite "Bloomberg" as a g…

To highlight, Russia’s future changed dramatically after 2014. You start to see this in ca. 2016 statistics. It’s damning by even the start of the war.

>To highlight, Russia’s future changed dramatically after 2014.

Actually things started going south for the Russian economy in 2010-2014 when both US oil companies and Saudi Arabia started pumping out oil as no tomorrow.

Re: To build ships that break ice, U.S. must relearn to cut steel

#137
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

depends how hard you throw it

If you are a human you cannot break significant ice by throwing. Sure you can break 1cm of ice, but so any any other boat. We need ice breakers because there are cases where the ice is probably strong enough to support a the heaviest truck, but it doesn't quite have enough margin of safety on that probably to actually drive a truck so if you want to get through you need to send a boat through water.

you cannot break significant ice by throwing.

Don't skip boat throwing day!

Re: To build ships that break ice, U.S. must relearn to cut steel

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, they aren’t armoured nearly as much as WWII era ships; it shorten range, slows them down, and doesn’t really work against guided weapons

Yeah, the dreadnaught arms race of the first part of the 20th century was kinda an anomaly in ship design, especially considering how little big-gun naval battles happened despite two world wars. Turns out up-armoring ships hard enough that they end up legitimately surviving a close range nuclear shockwave (look up Operation Crossroads) is actually a massive waste of resources.

Yes and no, the ship and crew might have survived. But the steel wasn't thick enough to block all the radiation. Moreover traditional ship design up until that point didn't handle Nuclear Biological, and Chemical threats well. They weren't really designed to be completely sealed. It's important to recognize that the assumption that the next war would be atomic killed a lot of technology paths because the people with the money assumed it was a waste of time to continue in those directions. By the time the military started to re-explore those paths the tech had languished. It's why the Iowas went back to sea with the Mk8 fire control computer, a completely analog computer. Because nobody had really bothered to build a better one for large caliber shells since WWII.

But it's important to note that before the Iowas were given their final retirements into museum ships the Navy made sure to basically document everything they could about firing large caliber guns. Because when they initially pulled them out of mothballs in the 1980s they were woefully inaccurate, but by the time they were decommissioned for the final time they could hit a proverbial fly on a flag pole (allegedly).

The other part of it was that the Soviet Union didn't really have a surface fleet to really speak of. They invested heavily in submarines, so consequently the US Navy focused heavily on ASW. So... nobody really knows how 16" of modern armor would fair against modern weapons, it's literally never been tried. Whereas you can find pictures from way back when they were testing guns, of how various shells fared against various thicknesses and types of armor.

Long story short: We've forgotten most of what we knew about surface warfare, and we're starting to forget what we knew about shipbuilding and design. The US has outsourced all it's naval architecture and shipbuilding so long that the necessary skills are either all retired or lost.

Re: To build ships that break ice, U.S. must relearn to cut steel

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generally speaking, states try to avoid having critical dependencies on other states, because they become points of leverage for adversarial foreign policy. For the purposes of keeping America running, yes, we really do need to own icebreakers in the same way that we need to own powerplants, steel mills, chip foundries and and refineries.

But then market pressures for efficiency will lead to mergers and acquisitions...

Yeah, and then we'll enter a cycle of repatriation when it gets painful enough. Generally speaking, it's precisely the bean-counter mentality of aggressive cost reduction (with a narrow definition of "cost") that gets us into this position to begin with.

Robust systems need some overhead.

Re: To build ships that break ice, U.S. must relearn to cut steel

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The age of imperialism is not over, except where someone enforces it. That someone is mostly the US, but UK and France also do a lot of work that I know of. None of them are perfect, all have a lot of blood on their hands, but overall imperialism is mostly dead despite many who would turn to it if they could. In economic theory there are good reasons to say that every country has better options than imperialism - but…

> The age of imperialism is not over, except where someone enforces it. That someone is mostly the US, but UK and France also do a lot of work that I know of. I would suggest that “the age of imperialism is over only to the extent that what were among the last of the great imperial powers enforce that condition” is absolutely no different than “the age of imperialism continues, under some of the same imperial powers…

Imperialism has a specifc definition which is not what we are doing. I'm not claiming the US is good, but it is better than imperialism anyway.
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