22 thoughts on “Ships”

  1. I have seen this mentioned in many articles over the last 30 years. They never seem to admit the solution to the basic cost of American labor is to displace it, … in the current case, with Robots. This was hinted at in the article, but never stated outright. One of the 2 comments to this article stated it much more clearly.

    All the reorganizing and block-building in the world is not going to change the need that American Labor work for as much, or as little, as elsewhere. The possible first use of Optimus Robots on a large scale may well be in Shipyards.

    1. And we can build robot factories anywhere, like in an old mine where they will be protected from us, I mean protected from our enemies fellow human.

  3. I think that can’t should be read as some combination of don’t, won’t and see no way to make a profit with can’t somewhere at the tail end. To be sure, building a shipyard or even enlarging an existing shipyard to build the largest ships would need a huge investment. All to compete against substantially subsidized foreign yards. It’s hard to imagine how you’d go about raising that kind of money and even harder to imagine any government program producing anything but disaster.

    A couple of points. The decline in shipbuilding and ocean shipping dating from the Civil War more or less inversely mirrors the development of domestic, overland transportation, first the railroads, then the hiway system. The clipper ships were just transporting cargo from one part of the country to another after all. They became uneconomic the minute that spike was driven at Promontory Point. Steam ships, especially the early ones, needed frequent refueling. At the same time, America was considerably in advance technologically in ship building and propulsion in terms of naval ships. We did pretty much miss the boat in terms of large, low speed diesel engines though.

    Still, the rest of the world, outside of China, Japan and Korea are largely in the same position with almost all of that capacity concentrated in that one small area and with China’s intentions increasingly unpredictable. Korea and Japan are a lot closer to China than to any of their allies.

    1. That sounds very plausible. I do think Americans embraced overland transport over seaborne. Also the US wasn’t as interested in expansion over seas until the Spanish American War. But we did build massive fleets after that War and sailed them all over the world. What broke that concept? Did we decide to step back after WWII? Maybe aviation caused a second draw away from seaborne to airborne.

      1. America had a really good setup for the World Wars. Their shipyards were pretty much immune to attack except from long-range submarines.
        But after the war they had a couple of problems:
        a) a huge glut of ships which weren’t going to be sold to the others and weren’t going to be sunk
        b) the unions decided that using new methods in wartime was patriotic (and actually got the job done), but now peace had broken out they could go back to the old, labor-intensive ways.

    2. “…almost all of that capacity concentrated in that one small area and with China’s intentions increasingly unpredictable.”

      FTFY

  4. I don’t know the investment would *necessarily* be huge. Ships can be built outdoors with very little in the way of facilities and infrastructure, just the way SpaceX is building rockets 4x the size of Saturn V without the huge permanent infrastructure NASA and its contractors built. (I worked at PNSY way back when).

    1. “Ships can be built outdoors with very little in the way of facilities and infrastructure”
      Ships come in sizes of ten to hundred thousand tons. Unit construction means building thousand ton plus pieces with over all tolerances of fractions of a millimeter. They have to be moved around and assembled in a large hole in the ground. You can maybe build a bass boat in your back yard, doesn’t work with a supper tanker a third of a mile long.

      Star ship might have a dry weight of 85 tons and they don’t try to move them fueled. Three orders of magnitude difference.

      1. Nonsense. You’re just defending the status quo ante using boobishly simple arguments. Btw, SLS is transported largely fueled (SRMs) from the VAB to the pad on gravel roads using the crawler transporter. Ships can and are built above ground and transported to water via rail. Lots of videos on YouTube, some of them quite entertaining.

        And also, btw, my back yard is 5.3 acres. with the longest dimension around 2,000 feet, so I could certainly build a Neopanamax vessel here. The real feat would be transporting it 150 miles to the Atlantic Ocean! I don’t think the Dan River (6mi. from my backyard is big enough.

        1. IF NASA ever manages to build the transporter that has already cost more than the whole Starship development to date. I’m not holding my breath.

          The issue is building ships efficiently which takes cranes capable of lifting thousands of tons at a time and either dry docks or slipways, and I don’t think anyone would launch a ship measured in fractions of a kilometer on a slipway, that will hold those ships.

          1. You’re mistaken about the transporter. Two crawler-transporters exist, built in the 1960s. You’re thinking of MLP-2, which is the contraption that rides on the crawler and holds SLS upright for the ride and launch. That’s where the absurd cost overruns are taking place.

          2. The largest ship I could positively identify (via AIS) with a slipway launch was 145.5 meters. I saw some larger ones on YouTube but they were Chinese, using pneumatic rollers. I could not read the name, so couldn’t identify. So 145 meters is about 1/3 of a Neopanamax. The coolest video I saw was a time lapse of a cruise ship build in a graving dock no deeper than its water line. Btw, those giant cranes can be rented from Liebherr, which is what SpaceX does. They’re delivered in pieces and assembled on site.

          3. I managed to track down some of the Chinese slipway launches. The largest I could positively identify was 345.8 meters in 2012. So that’s a quarter kilometer, 12 years ago.

        1. A while back you wrote about using the big guns to shoot down missiles, pretty efficient if it works. Also a while back, the navy released a statement on Red Sea operations and the five inch guns were used quite a lot but they never said on which type of targets.

          1. The Army has tested using a radar-guided 155mm Howitzer to shoot down missiles. The theory is, an iron-saboted zirconium slug would have the range and hitting power to take out an incoming ICBM warhead. Those five-inch guns are autoloaders, so can shoot rapidly. They’re augmented by Vulcan autocannons for close-in defense. The US has close to 2,000 155mm Howitzers. That’s enough to defend the continental US against a nuclear attack by Russia and China combined. Or it would have been if we hadn’t given away the guns and ammo.

  6. It is hard to find a market solution when the competition games the market.

    Who else will buy boats other than the government? Privateers are an option. Cartels, ghost fleets, rogue Chinese fishing armadas could all be targets. ROROs with CIWS and modular weapon systems that build off existing platforms or plug them in with whatever Lucky Palmer is making.

    Dense Pack strategy applied to ships.

    1. The US owns 12 Algol-class fast freighters that could be made into interesting standoff weapons platforms. Antiaircraft and anti-ship missiles, with five-inch guns and autocannon for close-in defense, then a butt-load of cruise missiles to use on the home base of the bad guys.

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