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Insider's Look at High-Tech High-Speed Navy Vessel
Xidus writes "Computerworld is running an article on the technology behind the US Navy's newest HSV (High Speed Vessel), focusing on interfaces designed to reduce the number of personnel needed on the bridge. Lots of pretty pictures. No word on OSes, although Mozilla is mentioned, and UNIX-ish desktops are visible, along with some nifty virtual-reality tactical displays. Would you like to play a game?"
You can see the ship from the outside here and here
Although expensive, there is a lot here that is superior to what is available on civilan shelves. The vessel is just 300' long, but can carry 350 troops, Abrams MBTs and Sea Knights at 35+ knots. And with just 3 people on the bridge. That's a very different shelf.
Besides, they can remotely control the ship through a Mozilla interface. How cool is that?
"Those who cast the votes decide nothing; those who count the votes decide everything." (attrib. Joseph Stalin)
Where?
this looks liks windows to me. This even has the windows default titlebar fade action going on.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
The article shows the "COMBATSS" system that has been used to remote control a whole ship 3000 miles off the coast of California... Via a Mozilla browser interface. Nice union of military (proprietary) and commodity software.
The Navy is renting this vessel for 11.4 million dollars a year (including operating costs).
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
I can tell you from personal experience that they are pretty damned unpleasant in even 3m swells... At least half of the passengers (including myself) quite sick.
This boat is an Incat fast ferry, built in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia. Incat have made about 40% of the large fast catermaran ferries around the world.
They used to run an Incat ferry across Bass Strait from Tasmania to mainland Australia. It would get from Devonport (Tasmania) to Melbourne in about 6 hours - the traditional ferries took 14 hours. Quite a difference, and it's really neat being on a boat that size when it starts moving. However, Bass Strait has some pretty impressively bad weather (try looking for Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race to get an idea)... The Incat ferries were just not suited to it (for the general public, anyway).
They can still move quickly if you don't mind lots of extremely sick people on board (soldiers are supposed to be tough, right?). Incat have won (and currently hold) the trans-Atlantic Blue Riband (Hales Trophy) (and have actually won it three times - usually while delivering their ferries!) - with an average speed of 38.8 knots (about 72km/h)
I used to work in military research here in the UK, and worked on a project not *too* dissimilar to the COMBATSS/InfoScene bit mentioned in this article (I probably shouldn't divulge exactly how similar or not, for obvious reasons :) ). At least, from the brief mention in the article, it seems to be a similar kind of system, in principle at least.
Our stuff was written as a kind of proof of concept, with a fairly basic GUI (x/motif iirc), and most of the work being done on the data processing to ensure it was an accurate representation of reality.
we once had a meeting with a team from the US who were working on a similar system to our own, the plan being to see if we could benefit from each other's work. they gave us a demonstration of their product, which initially seemed much closer to completion than our own. it had a beautiful 3D interface (much like the screen shot in the article) and they demonstrated how a user could easily pan round in real time and see what was happening with a simple drag-and-click of the mouse.
then we asked them about how they actually processed the data, as this was the most important part of the system (obviously, no matter how good the interface it's a bit pointless if the stuff you're looking at is just plain wrong), which is where things fell apart a little. the actual backend of their system had hardly been started - the stuff we were seeing was all manufactured data created for demos, which kind of negated the entire point of the exercise from our point of view. they had a much larger team working with a much bigger budget than we did, but had effectively just come up with a nice GUI - and it didn't actually do anything that our basic motif GUI didn't, it just had more colours and more 3D stuff. we weren't really interested after that...
the point being that even in the military, even if something looks great on screen is no indication of whether it's actually any use or not. our system was actually deployed and used (on a testing basis) by the UK armed forces - what became of it since then i couldn't say as i got another job soon after, but it was clear that the US system was many months behind our own in terms of usefulness.
and on a slight tangent...
the whole thing reminds me of the well publicised FIST system that was featured on UK TV a few years back - basically trying to bring the infantry soldier into the 21st century using in-helmet HUDs and super smart targeting/comms systems etc... it was developed at the same place I worked but had so many problems i think it was shelved - after huge spending. but then, it did use windows as the underlying OS (don't ask me why), which for a mission-critical system always seemed a bit... stupid.
I often wonder for some of these things whether they were instigated by military ppl out of necessity or genuine improvement, or by politicians who just want things to look good
From the pictures it looks like that ship is running Windows 2000.
Unlike the story submitter who would obviously love it to be running Linux.
Perhaps you are thinking of a "Small Waterplane Area Twin Hull" kind of multihull, not a wawe-piercing catamaran?
SWATH vessels are slow though, so they are in (scientific and heavy-industrial) uses where speed doesn't matter but stability is paramount. Not too good for Navy use.
(a SWATH catamaran rolls less because in each hull the bulk of the hull is deep under, avoiding the impact of the surface wawes, and the hull is narrow at waterline. Sort of like two hourglasses side by side...)
In a bid to clear to my mind of the cobwebs, I took ~1 year off, and worked as a deck hand aboard a 656 foot shipping vessel (as a merchant marine).
At the time, I was mid-way through completion of a computer science degree, which I am currently finishing. I was completely shocked by the lack of pervasive computing on board the ship - a complex environment, where any and all silicon help could prove to be highly advantageous.
Two newly acquired computers, running NaviSailor were onboard, and provided (what most of my fellow mates/luddites took as) advanced information in a no-hassel manner.
There is a great deal of money to be made in the shipping business. It is a complex and intricate profession, and most of the people onboard shipping vessels exhibit a great degree of perfectionism. Afterall, wrecking a multi-million dollar ship with hundreds of thousands of dollars of onboard cargo would be quite disasterous to one's career.
The long and the short is that these people need attention. Here is a niche market ripe for the taking. Custom software geared towards making watches, navigation, and docking less error prone has yet to be made. All you who complain of a lack of work -- that fattest worms are found only by lifting the heavier stones.
-pararox-
As I understand it, these ships are basically a Faraday Cage to start with. Because of the possibility of NBC warfare, the ships are basically competely sealed. Note that the steering picture only shows computer screens, not windows. There are no portholes, and donly the minimum number of external walkways for mooring etc. All doors are RFI tight. So all you need to do is make all the (many) cable ports EMP proof (not easy, but feasible) asnd the ship is EMP tolerant. You need spares for all the bits outside the shell (CCTV cameras, Antenna amplifiers), but inside the shell, lofe (and war) continues as usual.
EMP is not now a new threat. You can bet the Navy have thought of it.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
Absolute and total bollocks.
Take the number of modern-navy ships sunk by battle damage post-Vietnam. Now take the number damaged post-Vietnam. The latter is considerably greater than the former. I'll work backwards a bit here, but I might get a few transposed.
USS Cole: Kamikaze floating bomb. Sealifted home, repaired.
USS Princeton: Mine impact, with sympathetic detonation of a second nearby mine. Severe structural damage, fires, cracked superstructure, flooded magazine. Ship was capable of conducting air action within two hours, stayed on station as local AAW command vessel for an additional 30 hours until relieved.
USS Samuel B. Roberts: Mine impact. Sealifted home and repaired.
USS Stark: Two Exocet strikes, with one missile detonation. Sailed home under her own power, and repaired.
Damage control is the difference between the Stark, which took two Exocets and sailed home, and the HMS Sheffield, which took a single dud Exocet, burned from stem to stern, and sunk under tow. It is taken *exteremely* seriously by the US Navy, and while we don't plate ships with inches of steel armor any more, rest assured that a lot of money is spent on redundant systems, DC training, shock-hardening, and "armor of form" to allow ships to continue fighting after they get hit, and to make it home for repairs. Even if we're not talking about combat, there are all sorts of Bad Things that can happen to ships. Take a look at the Belknap(collided with the Kennedy, fuel spill, fire, basically burned down to the waterline), the Forrestal, or the Enterprise for examples.
It's accidents like those that drove home how unbelieveably important damage control is. Yes, if a Mach 2+ SS-N-19 delivers its 750 kilogram warhead successfully, the ship's a definite mission-kill at the least. But there are a whole host of less-destructive situations that can result in disaster with bad DC, so DC is considered somewhat...important. No, damage control isn't what it was in WW2: It's a helluva lot better.
but it loses its high-security status if you install any recent patches.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
In any case, the problem with aluminium is that it is softer and melts more easily, which is also part of what happened to Columbia. There's more on aluminium in ships here.
If you have powdered alumimium (or indeed most metals, including iron) and preferably a strong oxidiser mixed with it, then you can get aluminium to burn. In a thermite reaction, powdered aluminium reacts directly with powdered iron oxide in an extremely exothermic reaction which is self-sustaining. But these aren't the conditions you'd get on a ship under attack.
Realistically, the missile and or explosion would just rip more easily through the softer metal, and any resulting fire would weaken the structure. In a vessel of that size and with the thinner dual hulls, that would be fatal enough even with a steel hull. A ship like this really has to rely on stealth or countermeasures to survive.
Commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) is both a bane and a boon for the Navy (I'm involved in Navy sub design and have a peripheral exposure to this).
The biggest advantage is that it allows relatively modern tech to be installed on ships. Back when I started in the late 80's, the fire-control stations on a typical sub had a staggering 64K of RAM. But it takes so long to certify new H/W and S/W that there was typically a 10 year lag betweeen inception and implementation. Now with COTS it's a much shorter turnaround time. The downside is that this stuff is not shock qualified, has an unproven history for long-term shipboard environmental service, and is potentially bug-ridden (don't worry, they don't let COTS equipment launch nukes).
He took a duck to the face at 250 knots.
It's all data-dependent. While compression can get huge gains on plain text traffic such as smtp email, or ftp of uncompressed files, it will get close to nothing on encrypted or already compressed data (ssh, vpn's (ipsec, etc), ssh, http (with modern browsers). On data like that, there is no repetitive data and losless algorithms can not reduce the number of bits, except something on the headers, and packets like the tcp-ack, resulting in only a small speed increase due to compression.
;-) every software speedup is good, even if it's only 4% an not even close to 400%.
But still I wish the ietf would select a standard for between-router compression, and then my cable provider support it
On that subject: Note that for speeding on www, using a proxy-cache, such as squid can often achieve a 10%-40% bandwidth saving at a cost of less than 500MB disk space per user, and doesn't need special hardware on both ends of the link (just on the user/office end). From a user standpoint the proxy-cache gives a much larger speed increase, due to the pages loading faster because the latency of getting an object from the cache in the proxy is so much faster than from the other web site (no, the 'cache' in your web browser doesn't even perform close to what squid can do, especially if you have multiple people/pc's behind the proxy). At home behind a fast cable modem, I even notice a web browsing speed increase with the proxy-cache.
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
Oh well. The military knows what they are doing, right?
Actually, in many cases they do.
Speaking as an ex-tanker, tank gunnery qualification involves numerous "degraded mode" exercises. Some engagements you have everything- computer, thermal sight, rangefinder, healthy gunner, etc. For others you only have parts of that, or perhaps just the backup optical telescope with an aiming reticule (M105D for my tank).
Very very smart. Then again, I knew a fair number of gunners who *only* used the M105D in every daylight exercise, no matter what they were allowed to use. (It's obviously useless at night) They generally got good scores- you can guesstimate the target distance pretty well and with a bit of windage correction you can get shots off a lot faster than with all the bells and whistles.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
The current new wave in naval thinking is that missiles and aircraft have rendered major warships with guns and defensive systems obsolete.
The Soviets were the first ones to realize that a $500,000 50' cutter (say a Namchuka class missile corvette) with a big anti-ship missile could disable or sink a $20 billion aircraft carrier. Of course a heavy machine gun could sink the ship, but Soviet sailors were just conscripts anyway.
As unsexy as it is, they have a point. A modern aircraft carrier battle groups is vulnerable to attack and has to stay as far as 500 miles offshore to avoid shore-based missile batteries. A single SCUD missile with a big nuke could disable an entire US CVG.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
If the rules are changing and speed/tactical operations are the New Way, I wonder whether high manoeuvrability "tanks" will be back on the agenda as well, then?
Okay, so I watch the History Channel and I love Mail Call with R. Lee Ermey. The fact is that there ARE high speed "tanks" of a sort. The army and marines both have light attack vehicles which are fasted and armored, but not nearly as well fortified as a M1A1. The Marine's main assault vehicle is in fact amphibious, useful for beach landings and fording rivers. The Marine's vehicle is also wheeled and mounts a 30 mm gun, much smaller than the devastating gun mounted on the M1A1.
I wish I had links for you, but those types of tanks have been in existence for years. The navy may be behind a bit because with the size and cost of the craft, the development cycle of new naval tech is often a little longer.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
I think most worrisome is a computer glitch (not to mention a bullet) hitting the right server at the right place to cause the ship to be dead in the water because engine/navigation controls don't work.
You mean like the USS Yorktown in 1998?
The only reason we have the rights we have is that people just like us died to gain those rights. -- Cheerio Boy
Carriers have computer-controlled and radar assisted guns that can lock on and destroy several incoming missiles at once, firing at rates of several thousand rounds/min. If you want to see an example, check out the movie "The Sum of All Fears." You'd have to throw more than one missile at a carrier for it to get through. Also if you're interested in what it takes to destroy an American CVG, I suggest reading the book "Nimitz Class." It details just how hard and yet how easy it can be.
That would be true if modern carriers didn't run around in "carrier groups", which provide a rather staggering array of defenses for the carrier itself. It is still extremely important to be able to deliver airpower by sea. Being 500 miles offshore is irrelevant given the range of modern combat aircraft (and the fact that we go for air superiority fast and early, which allows aerial refueling).
:)
A SCUD would be irrelevant for this purpose -- a carrier group would never come into range (and I've read that SCUDs would suck as nuke platforms anyway, although I can't remember the reasoning behind it). It might be possible to use a ballistic missile to deliver a nuke into a CVG, although the group could probably take one of those out fairly easily, not to mention putting significant distance between themselves and the target point with the kind of warning you get with a large ballistic missile (they move surprisingly fast), and an air-launched nuke would probably only work with the combination of surprise and high quality stealth. In a known or suspected hostile environment, early warning systems such as AWACS would prevent anything from getting anywhere near launch range.
You're right about the Soviets, but remember they had to worry about being attacked by western technology which is far superior to anything they had in any quantity.
Don't write off carriers just yet.
Slashdot quality declines as the number of hot grits posts decreases. - Provolt's Law, Apr-09-2005
In WW II, several U.S submarines are believed to have torpedoed themselves. One known to have had this happen was the Tang (there were some survivors).
The torepedoes were defective.
Modern torpedoes have interlocks to prevent circular runs; if the torpedo turns through too large an angle (say 300 degrees), the torpedo either shuts down or at least dis-arms itself.
Al Bonnyman
Community Broadband Networks
IIRC, the exocet that struck the HMS Sheffield did detonate, but that was not the main problem. The problem was that the Type 42 Destroyer class used almost solid aluminium superstructures. In extremely high temperatures, aluminium can burn (just like magnesium, but even higher temps). When the ship was struck, it ignited the aluminium which then steadily burned. This is why you no longer see ships produced with all-aluminium superstructures any more.
Please, do not mod popular misunderstanding as "informative."
The Sheffield's superstructure was not aluminum, it was solid steel, like her hull, and like the superstructure and hull of all Type 42s.
And, no, the missile did not detonate.
What made the fire so catastrophic was not the mythical aluminum superstructure, but rather than the missile severed the fire mains, making shipboard firefight all but impossible.
INCAT's specs for the swift: pdf file
.DOC file
INCAT's specs for the Evolution 10B:
The debate above is sort of moot, since the PDF specs for HSV2 from INCAT list a max speed of 38 knots fully loaded at 627 tonnes deadweight. However, the external profiles and dimensions are nearly identical, and the Evolution 10B lists a max speed of 36 knots at 750 tonnes. The 10B lists 40 kts at 375 tonnes and the HSV2 specs 42 knts at 300 tonnes.
(Aside: it kinda makes the Nimitz-class carriers more impressive when you realize their gross weight fully loaded is over 97,000 tonnes, and as somebody else in the thread noted, they can steam indefinitely at 32 knots.)
The engines are the same, specifically 4 x Catapiller 3618 rated at 7080 kW (although the 10B offers a different engine as an option). The water jets are also identical, though the transmission may be a different manufacturer.
So, the bottom line is if you want to know the real top speed of the HSV 2, call up Bay Ferries in Maine, talk to one of their captains, and ask her/him how fast they can make the Cat go.
Of course, as you mention, it is always possible that the military has modified the ship and/or its engines upwards from the specs.
Having glanced a little closer at this ship, my thought is how well this ship would hold up in combat. How much redundancy and survivability is grafted onto what seems to be essentially a civilian design? I guess it's a good thing that it's intended for behind-the-front-lines transport type duties.
Oh, and about that 47 knot number. No weight is listed for the 'lightship' configuration so I guess that would be empty. I would guess that the top speed isn't classified - they just toned down the number to 35+ for the press release so as not to sound too conspicuous.
Christopher
Mozilla