91–98 of 98 posts
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That sounds like a great way to make sure no company ever bids to build an aircraft carrier.
Then it's a wide open field for a company who can do it to get the contract at whatever price they want. See how markets work?
In WW1, the Dreadnoughts were too valuable to be risked. So they were really only used once, in the non-conclusive Battle of Jutland which only lasted a couple of hours.
Millions of Pounds (the equivalent of Billions of Dollars, in today's money) were wasted on ships that were locked safely away because they were too valuable to be actually used in combat. That money could have been far more usefully employed elsewhere.
The same can be said of today's billions of Dollars wasted on useless slow, very expensive targets (= carriers).
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Actually ships are very water constrained. Especially Nuclear as they can't risk sea water contamination to the reactor cooling.
Modern aircraft carriers have reverse-osmosis desalination systems on board. These can supply hundreds (thousands?) of tons of potable water per day.
Thus, I don't understand the lack of fresh water.
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Try $400 a gallon off gas--after paying the enemy (the Taliban) to allow the shipment though. https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/63407-400gallon-... My guess is that the liquid is toxic and also might have to be processed after.
Article from 2009. They now use long haul truck convoys through Russia and Central Asia to avoid this problem.
It's interesting that there's so much focus on the toilet problem, and not the other $139 billion in unexpected maintenance costs
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My guess would be that this figure also includes costs for downtime and the like, but that's just a guess. Would be interested to see a more detailed breakdown of the $400k.
How would you measure the cost of downtime for a toilet system? Number of people in the infirmary with constipation?
It's the same with things like outages, an outage lasting a day may "cost" $1 million, but what's actually meant is that you missed $1 million in profits for the day, not that you had to pay $1 million. If operating a carrier costs $400k/day then you could say then fixing something for a day "costs" $400k, but that's kind of a simplistic way of putting it.
What problem is solved by using aircraft-style toilets on Navy ships?
Well, the old way to do it is to use sea water flushing which leads to its own problems over the life of the ship with pipes corroding. New(ish) environmental regulations dictate that you can't just flush everything overboard anymore, it needs to be processed through a sewage plant. Despite probably being able to ignore most environmental laws, the Navy normally at least tries to abide by the current laws to be a goo…
For example, suppose that you move part of the "processing" into the mechanism of the toilet itself, i.e. you use some kind of lever-operated press to pass your own output through a sort of a sieve; only soft items will pass, or items you break apart - but then you notice you've broken something apart which demotivates throwing those things in the toilet.
Just a thought.