I think you'll find that this is actually a masterful success that demonstrates the forward thinking of the Navy leadership. The news media simply are unable to comprehend the genius of this, due to their lack of marine engineering expertise. They love to see people fail.
What was the ship which collided with a commercial freighter? The command culture seems just completely off kilter in the Navy. Running untrained skeleton crews sleepless.
Might just as well coke them all up, put them on a pirate ship and pretend to be sailing.
Rather than spend millions, potentially billions on reports, enquiries, tribunals, commissions, leading to: decommissioning shipyards, etc... this armchair engineer recommends the navy use a longer chain / rope to the tug next time.
I was surprised to discover that the U.S. is still building LCSs.
I got a tour of one (LCS-2 [0], IIRC) docked at NAVSTANPT [1], and it just seemed so fragile. It's hard to imagine them being useful for real combat.
I have a working theory that massive organizations like the U.S. Navy tend towards foolishness / wastefulness until they're forcibly reset by existential threats.
IIRC the Navy doesn’t like these, and wanted to cut production early and decommission some of them early too. But more were forced on them by Congress.
I read somewhere (can't cite the source), that the tugboat captain was asked if he was ready, and replied "almost ready" and that the 'almost' wasn't heard.
A few years ago, I erroneously started a process on an unclean dataset, thinking it had been cleaned. This caused messages to be delivered to customers, asking them to take action, when in fact no action should have been taken on their part.
The cause? In a status update, the person cleaning the dataset said that she was "ready to begin". I interpreted that as "the processing process is ready to begin", not "the cleaning process is ready to begin".
When stakes are high, clear communication helps us all - even when whatever's happening is an SOP that you run every day.
Aviation uses niner instead of nine to avoid confusion with five which is also one syllable and contains the long-I vowel sound. The rest of the English numbers have distinct vowels and/or different numbers of syllables. If all you picked up over a weak radio transmission was the vowel sounds, you could still tell what number was spoken.
I get it, but it’s still wild to me that we build massive ships then just kinda dump them in the water.
You’d think they’d build it in a drydock and then open some locks, let it flood, and tow it out. But nope… they deploy ships like my kids do at bathtime.
I wonder the same thing, no other industry moves such a big load in close quarter that fast. I suspect it's some kind of supersitious tradition more than any engineering reason.
For big ships, you need a even bigger drydock. This way, you can do it in a smaller area. From the video, the canal doesn't look that big, and the process seems a lot faster than having to unfill/fill/unfill a huge drydock. Regardless, the ship will withstand much harder forces while crossing the oceans, so might as well make a spectacle out of it and drop that shit into the waters, see some splashing together with cheering.
Aren't those also tests of sea worthiness? A ship will have to withstand much harsher conditions. It is better for it to fail early than in the middle of an ocean in bad weather.
I'm pretty sure they are tested again, in a real way, and that it starts with a static stability test before doing anything dynamic. Here is a video that explains a bit the endeavor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8F93a7A2ug8
The amount of people saying this is ok in this thread is disturbing to me. Hitting the tugboat isn’t ok and you know how much everything costs in the Navy, repairing the damage will cost a fortune.
I don't know if the article changed its clickbaity headline, but I definitely see other news sources using the headline "US warship collides with tugboat in disastrous launch".
The way this is being reported seems quite misleading to me.
"US warship collides with tugboat" seems to imply that the warship was at fault, when in reality my understanding is that it was completely unmanned and certainly not under power.
If someone tied their pickup to a dead tree in an attempt to uproot it, causing it to fall onto the truck and crush it, you wouldn't expect that headline to be "Tree collides with truck".
This is the fault of the shipyard, or of the tugboat crew.
>a Pentagon release ahead of the christening noted that Saturday’s “side-launch” would be the last at the Wisconsin shipyard, with follow-on ships being launched using a shiplift system.
Too bad. I always found side ship launches awe inspiring. Hurling gigantic and incredibly expensive masses of steel in the water to make a big show.
Can't tell if it was the Navy's fault or that of the shipyard. I'm sure there is plenty of blame to go around. Looks like future launches will be done a different way, so maybe it wad a known risk already.
It's crazy no one checked if the area was clear before launching the ship. You would think they had a protocol for clearing boats/objects prior to launch. Or is it so rare that there is no protocol?
Other videos of ship side-launches I've watched on Youtube don't involve a tug pulling at the same time the hydraulics are released. What was the deal with this one?
I hate this hand wringing that is ever so fashionable in white collar circles. Getting humped by an LCS is not outside the bounds of the "occasional mishap" a tugboat is meant to shrug off without expensive downtime. Should it have happened? No. But this isn't newsworthy. This is "get lectured about better communication in next week's safety meeting" worthy.
If you want to hand wring then go be concerned about the warship having damage that may require expensive drydocking from the ordeal. That's a more realistic concern.
