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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.)
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.
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. . .
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.
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.
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/...