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Swedish Carbon-Fiber Stealth Ship Runs NT
tiled_rainbows writes "The Guardian has an article today about the Swedish navy's new stealth warship, which they claim is the largest carbon-fiber vessel ever built. Slashdotters will be interested to learn that the ship runs Windows NT. The article says 'While the point-and-click system is popular with conscripts, the ship was fitted with a wooden ship's wheel at the insistence of senior officers. If Windows goes down, they will still be able to steer.' Which raises the question: where can I get a USB-compatible wooden ship's wheel for my computer?"
Back in May 1997, the US fitted the USS YORKTOWN (http://www.yorktown.navy.mil/ ) with NT and it had disastrous results (http://www.gcn.com/archives/gcn/1998/july13/cov2. htm ) . The ship went DIW (dead in the water) for a few hours. This is the worst case scenario for any ship's captain (and their career)...
Guess it took this long to work out the bugs... Not bad - only 7 years!
"Omnis tuus capsa sunt inesse nos"
I'd worry less about it running NT and more about it's structural integrity. They'll soon learn what many automotive enthusiates have learned. Although Carbon Fiber has it's advantages(light weight, looks cool, non-metal, etc), it also has several disadvantages. Carbon fiber tends to be very tempermental to temperature changes, and will crack easily with severe cold/heat. Also, although carbon fiber is fairly flexable, it's still brittle. It's doesn't crack when impacted, it shatters.
The article states that they had to create new techniques for cutting the material during construction, but if this gets hit with a mine/torpedo/exocet, will it shatter? If not, how would they fix the leaks w/o being able to weld a new piece of steel over the hole(s) to keep it afloat until it makes it back to the shipyard?
Visualize Whirled Peas
The good: A lightweight, stealth ship. I'd love to have one. I have no need for one, but it would be cool. (I'd rather have a lightweight, stealth car, esp. if it came with a retractable 57mm cannon!) Do we have any idea how well CF will really hold up in this case, though? Both in long term maneuvers and under attack by enemy aircraft? What about barnacles? OK, the good we don't know for sure.
The bad: Let's see, didn't the US Navy already experience a problem with an NT4-based ship being dead in the water? And a dead ship can't maneuver. If there are other ships around, that's not a good time to be invisible. (Captain of aircraft carrier: "What was that crunchy sound?")
The ugly (editing): "And if it is detected, the Visby should be quick enough to escape as it is only half as light as a conventional corvette." Presumably they meant half as heavy!
People have been building boats from fibreglass for a long time. There is no difference between working with CF and working with fibreglass - it's just that CF is stronger and more expensive (and thus more difficult to cut).
Also, if you use the technique the Sweedes used (sandwich expandable foam between two CF layers), the hull is alot more buoyant than a steel hull - which means you can change the shape (within reason) to a more stealthy version.
Modification would be a bitch though! If you want to weld a new bracket to a steel hull it takes 5min from the inside or a few hours to do externally. If you try the same thing on a CF hull, it takes a few hours (12?) for the CF resin to go off. Forget trying to modify the exterior hull without a drydock. Also, in the event of wartime damage repairs you can weld a new plate over the hull and have it watertight and you are good to go. No chance with CF - it needs a completely dry environment (assuming you even have enough raw CF & resin in the first place - you can't just reuse old sections)
According to what little info is avialable from Janes The ship is one of two which were initially ordered in 1995. Military procurement being what it is, no matter where you go, the ships were probably designed with NT in mind, circa '95. However, I doubt NT will last longer than the first refit or post-sea trials.
The US and UK navies are both experimenting with a number of computer-control options ranging from MS solutions, to various *nixen. Of course there is the now aporcyphal story of the NT crash that put the USS Yorktown dead in the water. Short answer, it may have been built on the NT platform, but lots of replacement systems exist now and I doubt NT will survive long enough for the ship to enter the active list.
"Being Irish, he possessed an abiding sense of tragedy which sustained him through brief episodes of joy." -W. B.
I know it's a joke, so yes, except Sweden doesn't have "nukes".
Actually (I'm Swedish) we don't have much of an army, airforce, or navy, at all anymore..
Not that I personally agree to spending the kind of money you do in the US, but the military situation is pretty pathetic in Sweden (although it's been a few hundred years since we were a military power by any standard).
We can't defend our borders at all, and we probably can't wage an effective (defensive/guerilla) war on Swedish soil either (no militia to speak of, laws against owning weapons other than for hunting, etc.).
The cuts in the military budget has been brutal, to the point I was kind of amazed that they've been able to develop this stealth vessel at all (with what money - the entire navy budget?!?).
Without much debate, politicians have been working overtime to convert (reduce) our own military to a few special units (like this stealth corvette thing) - perhaps to be used in some large EU military force.. (Not that I know enough about it to say whether 'tis a 'Good Thing', but I've always considered self-reliance to be important, so.. I guess I think it sucks bigtime.)
668.5
the HMS bork bork bork is a joke... actually all naval vessles made in the last 60 years are a joke compared to the real battleships of WW-II.
That's because they don't need to go in for close combat. Firing massive shells is a relic of the days when naval wars were fought with cannons. These days a carrier would strike your battleship from over 100 miles out and sink her without a single useful shot fired by the battleship. Not to mention that armor is relatively ineffective against many modern weapons that are designed to pierce armor. Thus naval warfare focuses on a different set of abilities:
1. Ability to launch a strike from great distances.
2. Speed to quickly enter and exit a theater of operations (U.S.S Enterprise [CVN-65] did 32 knots, non-stop, around the world!)
3. Stealth to sneak up on a ship without getting blasted from a hundred miles away. (Subs still rule this area.)
4. Screening ships and weapons to shoot down incoming planes.
5. Survivability via ability to float despite massive internal damage.
6. G.I. proofing so that no one accidentally blows up the ship from the inside. (Don't laugh, this happened several times in WWII.)
The truth however, is that any major conflict would probably see a total loss of all seagoing vessels. They'd simply start lobbing nukes at one another until they are all destroyed or capsized.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I remember getting an interesting tech support call back in 1998. A naval officer was attempting to get Windows NT Server running and was wondering if we could help. (We were business support and her husband worked for our business.) Apparently all of her regular outlets for support were shut down for the weekend (or maybe it was a holiday, I don't remember) and she needed to get the computers running on time for the deadline. We didn't support NT Server, so I really couldn't help her.
:-) Too bad the Blueridge didn't fail. It might have given the Admirals the idea that NT computers were a bad idea for naval warfare. Instead they had to go and refit an entire ship (the Yorktown) that later had to be towed back to port.
When I passed the story on to coworkers, they didn't entirely believe me. After all, why would the Military use NT computers for mission critical applications? Then about a month later, the story of the USS Blueridge hit the presses. I was vindicated!
With any luck, they've learned enough that the USS Ronald Regan won't be suffering systems failures anytime soon.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade