Navy To Auction Stealth Ship

First time accepted submitter Sparticus789 writes "Looks like the Navy is doing some housecleaning and selling off failed experiments, 'Yup, the Lockheed Martin-built Sea Shadow is being auctioned off from its home in the Suisun Bay ghost fleet in California.' Bidding is right now at $100,000 and it even comes with the dock. Don't get your hopes up of an evil hideout, the fine print says 'The ex-sea shadow shall be disposed of by completely dismantling and scrapping within the U.S.A."

Failed experiment?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's only a failed experiment if nothing's learned. More often than not, experiments don't produce the expected result. It's how we learn.

Re:Failed experiment?

[boaworm]

It was developed in competition with other stealth ships. This one didn't win.

Nevertheless, it has a lot of cutting-edge technology that the US government has very little interest in giving to someone else. So the sensible option in this case is to keep producing the winning concept ships, and dismantle the losing prototype, making sure noone else can piggyback on all the money spent on it.

Re:Failed experiment?

[braeldiil]

It wasn't developed in competition with anything. It wasn't a warship, or really a working ship at all. It was a test platform for a bunch of different technologies. And, since the technologies being tested have since been incorporated into actual navy ships, I'd say it was a successful test ship. Calling it a failure is nearly as stupid as calling the Norton Sound a failure. After all, they didn't build any more of her, either.

Re:Failed experiment?

[Chris Mattern]

And if it's a "failed experiment" why the requirement to dismantle?

Because we've learned all there is to be learned from it.

If all it is is a curious looking ship, who cares what happens to it after it leaves the Navy's hands?

Because we don't want anybody learning what there is to be learned from it.

Re:Failed experiment?

[DerekLyons]

And if it's a "failed experiment" why the requirement to dismantle? If all it is is a curious looking ship, who cares what happens to it after it leaves the Navy's hands?

Because the government doesn't sell military equipment unless it's either a) been demilitarized (essentially, rendered useless), or b) going to be scrapped. Otherwise, as it does for museum ships, it retains custody.
 

This sounds more like something you'd do with a successful prototype that nevertheless was not militarily useful due to factors relating to the fact that it is a prototype and not a full blown warship....

She was an abysmal failure. For a reasonable amount of armament, she ended up much larger more expensive than a ship with a conventional displacement hull.... and she wasn't actually all that stealthy. (In particular, her wake could be trivially detected using the same radar used to detect submarine periscopes.) On top of that, because of displacement limitations, she was highly vulnerable in combat, had low survivability, limited endurance, maintenance issues, and had habitability issues as compared to an equivalent conventional design.
 
tl;dr version: The Navy already had a stealth ship (the fast attack submarine) that filled the various mission needs that the Navy needed stealth for. Sea Shadow had no particular advantages over the submarine and several key disadvantages. Other than her one party trick (stealth), she was inferior to conventional surface ships but had a considerably higher price tag.

Re:Failed experiment?

[braeldiil]

Actually, she was quite the success. While we're not building ships exactly like her, radar stealth has been a significant concern of the Navy, and current ships are designed to minimize their radar cross section. Reduced crew manning has also been a really big push, as had improved roll stability. About the only major design feature not in use is the catamaran hull. and really, figuring out something is a bad idea is still a successful experiment.

The ultimate excuse

[turkeyfish]

This is a military contractor's dream. The ultimate weapon that has to be built so that it must be quickly destroyed. Because of its advanced capabilities it can't be allowed to fall into anyone's hands, not even that of our own military, thus requiring the immediate need for a new no-bid contract to build its technological successor.

Re:Failed experiment?

[flyingsquid]

I suspect the main reason this design didn't catch on is that there's no clear military role for a ship like the Sea Shadow that another vessel couldn't already do better. The unconventional design of the hull limits the ship in a lot of ways, the most obvious is that you can't put guns on it. You can't put a radar on it either, or rather, you could, but it would undo all your efforts to make the ship invisible as soon as you turned it on. So the ship can't be used in a defensive role against ships and aircraft like a destroyer.

Basically the only places where a stealth ship makes sense are missions where the need for stealth outweighs other considerations. Stealth is useful in an attack role, or for electronic eavesdropping, or perhaps for infiltrating a small group of special operations forces close to shore. However, the ship still has long way to go in terms of stealth. The main issue is that you can see the thing- a 100 foot long ship is going to be visible to patrol aircraft and other ships from a long way off, and it will also be visible to satellites. At night it would probably be fairly easy to pick up using thermal imaging, unless you found a way to heat or cool the skin of the boat to the same temperature as the surrounding ocean.

But there's a simple way to make you invisible to radar and to avoid visual detection at the same time: put the boat underwater. And I suspect that is the real reason nothing like the Sea Shadow was ever built. We've been able to achieve total invisibility to radar and visual detection for close to a century using subs, it's hard to imagine what advantage the Sea Shadow would have over something like a Seawolf attack sub.