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German Navy Experiences 'LCS Syndrome' In Spades As New Frigate Fails Sea Trials (arstechnica.com)
schwit1 shares a report from Ars Technica, highlighting the problems the Germany Navy is facing right now. It has no working submarines due to a chronic repair parts shortage, and its newest ships face problems so severe that the first of the class failed its sea trials and was returned to the shipbuilders in December. From the report: The Baden-Wurttemberg class frigates were ordered to replace the 1980s-era Bremen class ships, all but two of which have been retired already. At 149 meters (488 feet) long with a displacement of 7,200 metric tons (about 7,900 U.S. tons), the Baden-Wurttembergs are about the size of destroyers and are intended to reduce the size of the crew required to operate them. Like the Zumwalt, the frigates are intended to have improved land attack capabilities -- a mission capability largely missing from the Deutsche Marine's other post-unification ships. The new frigate was supposed to be a master of all trades -- carrying Marines to deploy to fight ashore, providing gunfire support, hunting enemy ships and submarines, and capable of being deployed on far-flung missions for up to two years away from a home port. As with the U.S. Navy's LCS ships, the German Navy planned to alternate crews -- sending a fresh crew to meet the ship on deployment to relieve the standing crew.
Instead, the Baden-Wurttemberg now bears the undesirable distinction of being the first ship the German Navy has ever refused to accept after delivery. In fact, the future of the whole class of German frigates is now in doubt because of the huge number of problems experienced with the first ship during sea trials. So the Baden-Wurttemberg won't be shooting its guns at anything for the foreseeable future (and neither will the Zumwalt for the moment, since the U.S. Navy cancelled orders for their $800,000-per-shot projectiles). System integration issues are a major chunk of the Baden-Wurrenberg's problems. About 90 percent of the ship's systems are so new that they've never been deployed on a warship in fact -- they've never been tested together as part of what the U.S. Navy would call "a system of systems." And all of that new hardware and software have not played well together -- particularly with the ship's command and control computer system, the Atlas Naval Combat System (ANCS). schwit1 adds: "Perhaps most inexcusable, the ship doesn't even float right. It has a permanent list to starboard."
Instead, the Baden-Wurttemberg now bears the undesirable distinction of being the first ship the German Navy has ever refused to accept after delivery. In fact, the future of the whole class of German frigates is now in doubt because of the huge number of problems experienced with the first ship during sea trials. So the Baden-Wurttemberg won't be shooting its guns at anything for the foreseeable future (and neither will the Zumwalt for the moment, since the U.S. Navy cancelled orders for their $800,000-per-shot projectiles). System integration issues are a major chunk of the Baden-Wurrenberg's problems. About 90 percent of the ship's systems are so new that they've never been deployed on a warship in fact -- they've never been tested together as part of what the U.S. Navy would call "a system of systems." And all of that new hardware and software have not played well together -- particularly with the ship's command and control computer system, the Atlas Naval Combat System (ANCS). schwit1 adds: "Perhaps most inexcusable, the ship doesn't even float right. It has a permanent list to starboard."
what they need is AI to fix all the issues, or maybe some sort of apps. if all else fails try hostfiles.
Ist nicht so gut.
Perhaps most inexcusable, the ship doesn't even float right. It has a permanent list to starboard.
Seems to me it's floating right.
Whodasunk?
Can't afford it. We've got a massive parade to put on.
You are welcome on my lawn.
It's the integration and fielding that's difficult.
I've always thought that the really hard part of any complex system deployment was the integration work. It's often overlooked and under planned in the original project plan and when it is planned, the inevitable sliding to the right of the schedule causes integration to get squeezed into impossible schedules. I've worked integration efforts where the original unlikely to succeed 6 month schedule got compressed into two weeks.
I'm guessing the schedule slipped to far right, management wanted their bonus so it got fielded before it was going to work, so failure came as no surprise to the system integrators. Of course it failed acceptance, it failed our tests too.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
To build a "Little Crappy Ship". But in this case, I guess it is a "Kleines beschissenes Schiff"?
The new frigate was supposed to be a master of all trades...
Gotcha, nobody who has ever seen combat spec'd the thing. Politicians are the used car salesmen of military hardware.
Sounds like the F35 to me... Jack of all trades, master of none and a nightmare of last second engineering changes because more doesn't work than does the first time out.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
In case anyone wonders what LCS stands for, it's "Littoral Combat Ship". Not that everyone knows what that means either, but it boils down to a jack-of-all-trades ship that's intended for close-to-shore operations, and not the deep seas.
And yeah, they're the F-135s of the ocean. Overpriced, delayed, problems doing some expected things, and loved by those who love Swiss army knives, entertainment systems and all-you-can-eat buffets.
It has a permanent list to starboard
Yeah, most guys can sympathize.
They German Navy testers forgot to turn on the "generate fake data" mode during the acceptance testing. Soon it will be corrected and all the data will match the expected data so very perfectly. Just watch.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Going into World War 1, just about every power had at least some major equipment that was horrendously inadequate or impractical in some way. And/or just plain outdated. If we're as close to World War 3 starting as many people think we are, that's the situation now, between the new equipment like these faulty ships, the F-35, etc.
At least they get something in the water. Canada issued contracts for new ships years ago and the shipyards still haven't started welding metal yet. It's another case of trying to keep the yards in business over building the proper ships for the Navy. We should have had the basic ship (hull, structures, engines, etc) built in a country that specializes in ship building such as South Korea and then brought them back to kit them out with all of the specialized equipment (RADAR, SONAR, weapons, communications, etc). We could have had ships in service by now.
Audi, BMW: "chronic repair parts shortage" ... "newest cars [ships] face problems so severe that the first [of the class] failed"...
The difference is that the US command structure accepted them while Germany was smart enough to say "no".
Table-ized A.I.
LCS, Low-priced contractor shipbuilding.
A ferry that can pick up illegal migrants, carry EU troops, look for subs, be inexpensive, be maneuverable, can sail to distant parts of the globe and project EU military power.
Help with mine countermeasures, do maritime intercept for pirates globally, support special operations with special forces.
Be a spy ship and gather lots of collect it all intelligence. Be an amphibious-type assault ship.
How to make all that for a shareholder profit and give NATO nation political leaders what they think they want an EU navy to do?
Thats the low price part.
Paint the boat a nice new radar reflecting color, accept payment and have a band playing music on the dock. Offer to sell the gov many more.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Personally misread it as LSC and wondered if they were trying for Musashi.
Why they didn't just buy the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer which is designed to be configurable for different missions so they could have just ordered it with whatever features they wanted?
One of the oldest rules is "don't build if you can buy" because you let someone else make the mistakes, iron out the bugs, and you can then just get a working solution OTS instead of trying to reinvent the wheel. Was it a case of NIH? Or one of those "bringing home the bacon" deals where spending money in the right districts mattered more than the finished product? Because looking at what they expected this turkey to do could have just as easily be gotten by simply buying the Arleigh Burke-class destroyer with the right package and it would "just work" since they have been in service since the 90s.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Or the space shuttle.
On a "power point" style presentation, it sounds really good to pay a premium to get one great craft that can do 3-4 things well, instead of the weird mix of old fashioned kit that does one and a half things well. This will save money, right?
But it is really easy to set the details of the requirements wrong and achieve something that is bad at everything for a high price.
Well this new ship matches other German military acquisitions. Submarines which do not work, marine helicopter which cannot fly over sea (not allowed as they rust and might crash), impercise guns, non working transport planes, drones which are not legal to fly over Germany. In short the only thing that works are tanks, which we sell to the Turkish to murder civilians in Syria.
Get a calendar. Germany has been a democracy for some time now and is embedded in NATO and EU. While other countries run in the direction of totalitarism e.g., discrediting media, talking about an illiberal democracy, calling foreigners and refugees to be dangerous, etc. All classic steps the fascists in Germany addressed in the past.
That's pretty much what Clemenceau tried after WW1, cripple Germany to the point where it can never become a threat again.
We know how well that idea went.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You do know that Germany is one of the few countries in the world that actually has a working democracy? You might want to take a look at this for a little reality check.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Baden-Wurttemberg doesn't even have an ocean nearby!
Obviously, the machines themselves don't want to be part of the criminal NATO strategy of the "civilized West" against the rest of the world anymore.
It's whatever happens when political types get involved in making technical decisions.
Yet the space shuttle operation over the program's entire lifetime cost less than the F-35 and actually worked for the most part.
Those who do not learn from commit history are doomed to regress it.
Customer sets up a contract, with semi-sane requirements and sane deadline.
Contract is approved, but requirements change, deviating increasingly far from sane.
There are punitive charges for not meeting the deadline. The developer is simply unable to meet all the requirements of the contract in full, on time.
Solution: As deadline comes, wrap up and release the half-made, definitely not ready for market product that "technically" meets all the requirements "on paper" - everything works, but nearly nothing works correctly. Then finish development while calling it "maintenance". Deadline is met, requirements will be met *eventually*, no punitive charges, essentially the best outcome possible in given situation.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
has glass-bottomed boats, so they can see the old German Navy.
Scapa Flow FTW!
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
Yeah, it seems that the way we did it in WWII worked out better.
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
They may have cost less than a totally unrelated piece of hardware, but they cost far more than simpler rockets that could do the same thing. The 'reusable' promise wasn't really delivered: the cost of refitting the space shuttle after each mission was more than the cost of building an entirely new rocket. The complexity from being able to collect a satellite and bring it back from orbit was hugely expensive, for a mission profile that was never used. The space shuttle is a big part of the reason that the Russians were able to massively undercut NASA for launch costs: they built cheap rockets that did one thing well, NASA built an expensive shuttle that did a load of things badly.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The purpose of the Military is to spend money. The F35 is the best weapon system EVER.
"Prediction: within 10 years, Windows will be a Linux distribution." Me, 7-6-2016
A Note to the Editors: it would be appropriate to italicize the name of a particular vessel - Baden-Wurttemberg, Zumwalt - as the Ars article did. I know that Slashdot submitters are all about copying and pasting from articles, with nary a bit of added value (like explaining the acronym "LCS"), but y'all could at least avoid making things worse by preserving formatting.
What happened after WW2 was that the winners, at least the Western ones, didn't want to cripple Germany but instead came and helped rebuild. That had a powerful effect on how they were regarded in Germany after the war. Everything from England and even more the US was awesome, by default. And nothing they did could possibly be bad. There was a very strong and lasting Pro-US sentiment in Germany, first because of the aid and later because of the threat from the East.
That changed later, in the 60s and more so in the 70s, but by then Germany already had a strong and resilient democracy that could easily withstand any attempt to destabilize it.
And this is, in my opinion, also the only way you can bring democracy to a country that has no democratic culture (like Germany before WW2. Yes, they had a democracy between WW1 and WW2, but there was no culture behind it, no support in the population that would hit the road or even fight for their democracy. Quite the opposite). Crush an oppressive regime to the point where its people are completely disenchanted, get rid of the assholes and then cooperate with the population to take control and rebuild.
It worked in Germany, a country that was considered "irredeemable" by some in the 1940s, the perpetual warmonger that cannot be taught how to play nice with the rest of the world. If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
If there's something to be learned from this, then to beware nationalism and baseless hatred towards a group of people.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You have a strange term for "trying to get rid of the Nazis the Allies overlooked"
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
The first purpose-built American aircraft carriers, the Lexington and Saratoga, had the same lean-to-the-side issue. They were laid down during WW I as battle cruisers, which were the size of battleships with less armor and higher speed. They were designed as scouts.
When the hulls were converted to carriers in the 1920s they were designed to be part of the scouting force that screened the main fleet. So they carried
8 x 8" guns (the same battery as a heavy cruiser) near the superstructure on the right (starboard) side of the ship plus, if I remember correctly, the superstructure was partly armored. Adding 2,000 tons to one side made them tilt so the fuel tanks on the left side of the ship were basically ballast, only usable in an emergency.
Ok, that's the Germans out. And the French, the British, the Swedes, the Dutch, obviously America, Spain on multiple counts, everywhere in Africa, China, Japan, most of their neighbours, Turkey, Russia and around 150 countries I can't be arsed to include.
Anybody I missed? Btw, who _do_ you trust?
LCS = Littoral Combat Ship. The US Navy's response to the F-35.
The complexity from being able to collect a satellite and bring it back from orbit was hugely expensive, for a mission profile that was never used.
Never used? Here is one example.
I'm sure there are more and who knows what happened on the secret military missions.
Star Trek, there maybe hope.
The space shuttle was supposed to be cheaper and more capable and safer than the Saturn 5, but wasn't.
At the end of WW1 they wanted to prevent new wars and punish the losers. At the end of WW2 they wanted to fight the Communists (Russia) so they needed allies.
The shuttle did do one thing well: it was iconic and served as an inspiration for youth to take an interest in science and technology and space exploration. I know I was one of them. For right or wrong reasons it was also a source of national pride.
Sure it was expensive and inefficient, but its value isn't as quantifiable as military hardware or even rockets.
I am not suggesting that replacing the space shuttle with nothing would have been better. However, simpler rockets would have been ballpark ~70% cheaper and probably significantly more reliable. Imagine twice as many scientific probes into our solar system, twice as many science satellites, and a bigger and better ISS earlier ...all for less money.
Scandals of officials turning out to have a Nazi past kept turning up until the 80s. The German Left was very right to protest in the 70s. Even if the RAF was a step too far. But then again, most of the Left was quite quick to deplore their violence (which didn't endear them to the radicals already shifting towards RAF-like standpoints).
What marked Germany as a mature democracy is that the radical Left did by and large forswear deadly violence and from the anarchist leaning activists and the Greens was able to create a third stream of Left politics (besides GDR style Marxist-Leninism and the Social Democrats).
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
Ok, that's the Germans out. And the French, the British, the Swedes, the Dutch, obviously America, Spain on multiple counts, everywhere in Africa, China, Japan, most of their neighbours, Turkey, Russia and around 150 countries I can't be arsed to include.
Anybody I missed? Btw, who _do_ you trust?
Koreans, Italians, Mongols, *every* *single* *country* in the middle east, those damn homonins migrating from southern Africa, Incas, Aztecs, those damn Clovis folk migrating over the Bering Straights...did we forget anyone?
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
Most of the more enthusiastic Nazis had either fled to South America or been given cushy government jobs in the US. The biggest problem were the Nazis the US insisted be installed on prominent posts in the West German security and intelligence agencies. Most of them retired by the 1970, though.
Well, we saw after Iraq II that, when the Baath party was banned, a vast pool of govt operational knowledge was cut off from helping to stabilize the country after the regime fell. (They found other outlets for their skills and energy).
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
Mother of necessity. A new threat allowed us to put our war dogs back in the kennel (to the point that, 5 years later, Korea strained the US military). History is strange. You grab your breaks when you can find them.
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
I guess someone flunked his geopolitics 101 class...
Mmm. Pax Americana is very expensive for the US. Of course, the risk assessment has to be...how expensive will the loss of Pax Americana be?
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
Ha! and every wwii vet I ever talked to was part of the conspiracy.
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
The one and only example.
Demonstrating that capability gave the Soviets a major attack of heartburn to the point that diplomatic channels ran red hot for a while and reportedly led to the including of explosive on-orbit self-destruct systems being fitted to USSR military payloads.
The demonstration proved that the cost of recovering a commercial satellite was higher than simply launching the flight spare - so whilst it _could_ recover a satellite it simply wasn't economic for commercial operations (or most military ones) and touching anything belonging to someone else would probably result in a self-destruct mechanism being triggered resulting in the loss of shuttle+crew.
I'd be more inclined to believe the rumours that classified missions were investigating the practicality of sex in zero gravity than in them going within a few hundred miles of rendezvousing with uncooperative orbiting soviet hardware (The more likely reality is that they were probably NRO missions)
It was - until the USAF got involved. It was their unreasonable demands for payload capacity and cross-glide capabilities (single orbit missions) which caused the massive orbiter growth necessitating a sidemounted configuration.
Having caused the horse to turn into a camel, the USAF looked at it and said "thanks but no thanks"
It's not just the Germans.
The latest generation of UK frigates are noisier than an explosion in a spanner factory - not a good look for something supposed to be capable of antisubmarine warfare.
Any submarines would hear them coming from 100 miles away and make themselves scarce.
And that's quite apart from being as spectacularly unreliable as the german boats - the difference being that the Royal Navy accepted their ones instead of being sensible and sending them back.
Then again this is the same Royal Navy that's bought a pair of Nimitz-size aircraft carriers with non-nuclear fuel source, whilst not having enough ships in the rest of the navy to form a single support group OR any aircraft to fly off them.... (HMS Sitting Duck and HMS White Elephant)
Haha, really? They bought non-nuclear supercarriers? That's dumb enough on its own but to do it without being able to form a support group, that's just lunacy.
Examine even your most deeply held beliefs. Nobody is always right.