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US Navy's High-Tech Ship Loses Power In Panama Canal (usni.org)
bsharma writes: USS Zumwalt suffered engine failure and collided with lock walls while transiting the Panama Canal. The ship lost propulsion in its port shaft during the transit and the crew saw water intrusion in two of the four bearings that connect to Zumwalt's port and starboard Advanced Induction Motors (AIMs) to the drive shafts, a defense official told USNI News on Tuesday. The AIMs are the massive electrical motors that are driven by the ship's gas turbines and, in turn, electrically power the ship's systems and drive the shafts. USNI News reports: "Zumwalt entered the Panama Canal following a successful port visit to Columbia last week -- a visit which the service intended to skip if it thought the engineering problems would continue, several defense officials told USNI News. The ship's engineering plant -- the Integrated Power System (IPS) -- is arguably the most complex and unique in the service. Installing and testing the system -- that provides ship additional power margins to power high energy weapons and sensors -- was a primary reason the ship delivered months late to the service. Before the casualty, the ship was set to arrive in San Diego by the end of the year and start weapon system activation period before joining the fleet as an operational warship sometime in 2018. (Zumwalt is the first of three in the $22-billion class.)
Which is it? Do the AIM's create electricity (generator), or do they drive shafts? (motor) How do you do both at the same time?
obligatory destroyer meme: dive dive dive
If that isn't the ship that has to file a budget request each time before firing a shell...
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bickerdyke
I was in the Nuclear Propulsion Program in the Navy. By necessity, quality control and training were at near-religious levels. But the systems themselves were designed above all for reliability. One aspect of that was simplicity.
The Zumwalt isn't a nuke, just an over-priced gas turbo-electric. The tech surrounding this project is an engineer's wet dream.However, they have built the flimsiest of paper tigers. It's supposed to be a combatant warship, not a science fair demonstration project, and not a contractor piggy-bank for taxpayer dollars.
The idea of propulsion plant automation as a labor-saving measure is laudable, but the concept is scalar, not linear. There is a tradeoff to be made here, and prudence seems to have gone overboard the garbage. More points of failure with fewer resources to respond to failures does not make for a reliable combat system. Automation gone wild might be OK commercial ships where the price of failure is less, but this is supposed to be a fighting ship, not a bulk freighter.
We have seen the same folly in the littoral combatants and the ridiculously moribund Ford-class carrier.
Who the hell is driving this reliability-be-damned design regime? Certainly not the war fighters.
News for nerds? Looks like everyting US is ok now. Mind you, a big slice of /. readers isn't from US.. This website used to be readable but it's getting worse month after month.
"Zumwalt is the first of three in the $22-billion class."
It's refreshing to see the honesty - "$22-billion class" ship is much more descriptive than "Zumwalt class" ship.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
"The more they overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain." -Scotty
Windows XP BSOD? RSOD?...
Not Columbia
One of the ideas tried out in the Zumwalt-class is a high level of automation. As a result, the crew is ~140. Other US Destroyer classes (Spruance, Arleigh Burke) have crews of roughly 340.
The first article mentions seawater intrusion: I suspect that if there were more crew, this would have been detected before it caused the propulsion system to become an 'engineering casualty'.
Pro Tip: you man combat ships based on combat requirements, meaning sufficient hands for damage control and major emergency repairs. The Zumwalt-class manning apparently does not take that into account. . .
Hello. Zumwalt-class tech support. Chet speaking.
Have you tried turning it off and on?
errors do happen it will be interesting to see what they are though...
I suspect that if there were more crew, this would have been detected before it caused the propulsion system to become an 'engineering casualty'.
They knew the problem existed and were monitoring it. This is a completely new propulsion system on a ship that's undergoing sea trials; finding problems is no surprise.
Classically, there was a great tank battle in Iraq War 1.0 where the US went up against the T-62 equipped with autoloaders. While range was a problem for the opposition, they couldn't get in more than one shot because the damned autoloader was so slow to reload.
Did it visit columbia? As in DC?
TFA says Colombia, the American country. Because btw, America is a continent.
The aviation industry has been milking the government out of hundreds of billions for decades by delivering sub par aircraft, with delayed delivery, over budget & with massive maintenance/parts requirements. I suppose it was only a matter of time before the naval industry decided they wanted in on that action and began the same campaign of pork mining. Isn't this how the Soviet Union fell? Dumping obscene amounts of money into faulty programs (mostly military) until their economy could stand no more and collapsed in on itself.
The ship's engineering plant -- the Integrated Power System (IPS) -- is arguably the most complex and unique in the service.
This statement should have read: "The ship's engineering plant -- the Integrated Power System (IPS) -- is arguably the most complex, unique and prone to failure and hacking in the service.Eemphasis mine.
The big problem for the Iraqis was that they couldn't fire at a moving target while moving. US tanks kept maneuvering and easily blew the T-62s away.
crew is now 141, adding one more oiler.
crew now 141, adding one oiler
jr
It visited where? This city in the middle of South Carolina, 100 miles from the ocean? That IS impressive!
Oh! Some country in South America, you say? Then you must mean ColOmbia.
3 distressingly unreliable war ships that cost more than the entire NASA yearly budget... Yep, seems like taxpayer money well-spent to me!
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
"It belongs in a museum!"
Ezekiel 23:20
I believe scraping the locks is considered a sign of bad luck for the ship. You really don't want a warship that has intermittent power.
Brings to mind an old story I heard from some airline pilots as FMS Flight Management Systems (very non user friendly) were integrated into airliners. Previously if something went wrong on an aircraft in flight one or both of the pilots would say something to the effect of "Oh $^it we've got to.....", but now its "Why'd it just do that?"
Sounds like it applies to the Zumwalt as well. Hopefully they're not running Windows on it.
It's floating in the sky somewhere...don't know where exactly.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
https://www.google.co.uk/maps/...
The one right below Panama, or are you being pedantic about the o/u
Wanna buy a shirt?
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That and the fact that even when they managed to ding a US tank, it just dinged it while the US Tank guns, that could be shot while on the move and from nearly three times the range, even through sand berms, sent the Sov design tank turrets spinning into the air.
Hell we even tried to destroy in place a stuck in the sand M1 and were unable to do so. The first two shots just grooved the front armor, a third from the side, went into the ammo compartment, the blow out panels worked as designed and odds are the hit would have been survivable by the crew (though they would have had burn injuries). Before they could try to shoot again a couple more recovery vehicles showed up and they were able to pull it free and it was towed back and sent to a lab to be examined, but if needed a new turret could have been swapped in and the vehicle sent back into combat within a couple days.
I'm too lazy to compose a creative sig.
In the press statement it says Pedro Miguel and Gatun. Which was it, those are two different lock sets separated by miles. Don't they even know which locks it was in ?
gahhh , colombia!!!!!
Yes. And that's damage control after the ship got shot at, not damage control after some simple mechanical breakdown.
Wow! First, they don't order the ammo for that ship's cannons, because they are cheap bastards and now they also didn't order enough gas?
Still a better aircraft than the F-35.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
It is incredibly disturbing to me that a deployed destroyer's propulsion system can't even survive "minor contact" with the lock walls. It's particularly worrisome that the failure mode was for the propulsion drives to completely lock up, rendering the ship immobile.
I can see losing one drive shaft due to a collision, but both?!
How is the ship going to continue to function after getting hit by an enemy missile?
How is this possibly a robust and combat ready design when one of the two critical functions (propulsion system and the combat system) can't even take a minor hit?
To be fair, the T-62 was obsolescent in 1990 and that was essentially the reason the Iraqis had them.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Installing and testing the system -- that provides ship additional power margins to power high energy weapons and sensors
They installed phasers on it and didn't tell anyone!
Or calling level 2 support?
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
To be fair the T-72 was obsolete in 1990. And even the T-94 lacked an armor comparable to the Chobham Composite armor the West uses. Don't know if they finally managed to steal the tech for their current tanks, which supposedly have a greater range than the Abrams, but range means nothing if your shots simply bounce off the target.
I'm too lazy to compose a creative sig.
One edit: I mixed up my Russian tanks, the T-90 was what I meant not T-94, the T-95 ended up being cancelled. Not sure if or what a more recent model is called.
I'm too lazy to compose a creative sig.
T-62 is perfectly capable of firing (and hitting) on the move. This isn't a WW2 design, even its predesessors have received two plane stabilisation in the fifties.
T-62 is just very old and very, very light compared to the M1. Two thirds of the M1 weight tops. Funny fact - T-62 was considered overweight at its introduction, hence its successor - T-64, a much better machine in every way - weighted a couple of tons fewer.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
It will only take another 22 billion dollars to fix the problem.
But we have Trump now!
Trump! Trump! Trump! Trump! Trump!
They were going to go with external motors, but did not. All in all, they really need to go that route. Less chance of issues during a battle.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
zumwalt is being shook down just like all naval ships are.
Bearing failures would have produced alarms all over.
And 140 is plenty. In fact, I would argue that we need a lot more automation and better design (nuke reactor, outside-mounted motors, etc), so as to have fewer ppl.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
There needs to be some hashtag analogous to "RichPersonProblems" for military groups. Easy to look up that the $22.5B price tag is for THREE warships. That's like enough money to sort out all the lead water services in Flint and surrounding towns; then all the rest of them in the United States, probably 250,000 of them, delivering neurotoxins directly into the populace (if ISIS were doing it, the money would be there already)....and enough left over for a couple of hundred highway interchanges that would each save a couple of lives per year.
The waste level, if you calculate actual risks and returns, is jaw-dropping.
American's are soooo suspicious about every welfare dollar spent; if you apply for it, a guy comes to your house and snoops in your bathroom and underwear drawer, looking for proof that your boyfriend actually does live with you. But along comes a City Slicker with a laughable story about a superior killing machine, and Americans roll over and spread open their wallets.
Testing? Read "The Pentagon Wars" by Col. Jim Burton (or see the movie; the situation was so awful, they could only make a real-life story about Pentagon weapons system purchasing, into a *comedy* with Kelsey Grammar and Carey Elwes.) They HATE testing. Or any other requirement to prove their snake oil works in the real world.
This is what happens when Captain Kirk calls for more power and Scotty isn't there to deliver.... ...The captain's name really is James Kirk
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
There was no need to steal anything. Matter of fact, composite armour was introduced with the T-64. It was actually the first tank to have that, along with quite a lot of other firsts that make the tank quite problematic. Bouncing shots is something that can happen with a HE-FRAG shell, but that is something that stopped with WW2. Modern shots are either APFSDS (the new shells for the 125mm gun introduced in the 1990ies would probably be able to penetrate the M1A2 frontal hull at ranges lower than 2 km), HEAT (that one probably won't, even the modern triple charge ones), or ATGM (something of a Russian specialty and could go either way).
And M1 is not that good anyway - it can be disabled with a machine gun, as Saddam's army found out.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
If they'd put the frigg'n hull on the right side up they wouldn't have a leak to begin with.
It's too bad that the Navy can't harness the electrical potential of ADM Elmo Zumwalt spinning in his grave about having such a TURKEY of an overpriced, under-weaponed "war"-ship named for him.
There are officers who are war fighters, and there are perfumed princes (nod to Col Hackworth)
The war fighters want rugged, simple systems that can endure combat conditions. The perfumed sort want to spend lots of money on the latest gizmos offered-up by the same crop of defense contractors who ALWAYS over-promise, under-perform, over-charge, and schedule-slip..... and for whom they plan to work after their "military careers" in air conditioned offices in the beltway are over.
I have written software for the Zumwalt DDX-1000 propulsion,the DDG Arleigh Burke class, and several aircraft carriers. The level of DDX-1000 Linux based software complexity is astounding compared to the Windows-based code of its predecessors. Linux was supposed to save money. LOL
Without propulsion, its just floating money!
Actually Chobham armor did/does need to be stolen as it is (as of last time I looked) classified in the exact composition and manufacture processes.
The example I gave of the stuck tank had two shots with Sabot penetrators bounce off the front glacis with just grooves in the armor. The third shot was a side shot right into the ammo compartment, and the blowout panels worked as designed, unless the loader had just happened to have the ammo door open at that moment the crew would have survived, while the Iraqi crews would die from such a hit (actually they died in just about any hit).
As to the use of machine guns. First any tank is vulnerable to infantry that can hit it from the sides in reduced mobility and visibility conditions found in urban warfare. Thus doctrine is for Tanks to be supported by Infantry and vise versa. Either alone is at risk from the other. In pure Tank on Tank you don't want infantry around as their softer vehicles are just more targets. But in a more complex battlefield they support and defend each other.
Second the way that worked was by hitting externally stored fuel in the turret bustle rack. That burning fuel then dripped into the engine compartments destroying the engines. Carrying fuel in that manner was not doctrinal and that practice was stopped. And that practice was actually copied from the externally mounted fuel tanks the Russians have long used on their tanks.
You say the M1 is not that good, but it's combat record says otherwise. Of modern Tank designs, only the Merkva has a more established combat record. And it uses the same (or very similar) composite armor.
I'm too lazy to compose a creative sig.
Chobham is just a marketing name for a certain composite armour, nothing more. A lot of countries use composite armour nowadays, even India and China, it is really nothing special anymore. Nobody has used rolled homogeneous armour for "fucking years, absolutely years".
KE penetrators don't bounce as such, they either shatter or go in. The only reason for them to bounce would be hitting in a very unlucky angle, which is quite unlikely. Very old KE penetrators that were very short and made of steel might bounce, but long rod penetrators made of tungsteen or depleted uranium were introduced 50 years ago and these, like I said, don't bounce.
And no, M1 is not a very good tank. It still can be disabled with a machine gun because its turret is so heavy it needs its own engine which can be easily disabled. The whole tank is way overweight and emits so much heat it probably can be detected from low earth orbit. Its combat record only says that it was always used against a vastly inferior enemy without an air force, without modern tanks and without modern shells. A couple of RPG hits can kill an M1 just as well as any other tank. The whole M1 concept was basically a heavy tank destroyer, which is certainly not what a main battle tank should be. It took years to upgrade the tank to some capabilities beyond destroying tanks, all of these upgrades (like anti-infantry shells or reactive armour) came with the experience of how much the tank sucked in the Iraq war for every task that didn't involve destruction of enemy tanks but it is still akin to polishing a turd - doable, but pointless.
A main battle tank is supposed to be capable of all tasks armoured troops are supposed to execute, not just taking out tanks. This is why all other modern tanks are better than M1.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Reminds me of the Canadian submarines we purchased from the UK. They have never worked right and astonishing quantities of money have been poured into them.
One sub was in transit from the UK to Canada, this is the initial delivery run you understand. There was a fire and the sub wound up becalmed in the middle of the ocean. A ship of war and it could have been taken over by a dingy full of 12-year old pretend 'pirates'!
Later they found that a different sub had a large depression in the pressure hull. It had apparently hit something, and hit it hard. Now that sub has permanent diving restrictions on it (it cannot safely achieve it's maximum rated depth).
My dad, former military, tried to defend all of this, but I wasn't having any of it. This particular sub program has been nothing but a money pit with nothing to show for it.