Spain's New S-80 Class Submarines Sink, But Won't Float 326
New submitter home-electro.com writes "In the era of total CAD and CAM, is it even possible to come up with a fundamentally flawed design ? Turns out, yes. This a fascinating engineering SNAFU. Spain's newly built submarine is 100 tons too heavy, which means it is unable to float. 'Unfortunately for the Spainards, Quartz reports that they have already sunk the equivalent of $680 million into the Isaac Peral, and a total of $3 billion into the entire quartet of S-80 class submarines. If Spain hopes to salvage its submarines, it must either find some weight that can be trimmed from the current design or lengthen the ship to accommodate the excess weight, The Local notes. Though the latter option is more feasible, it is expected to cost Spain an extra $9.7 million per meter.'"
Government efficiency (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Government efficiency (Score:5, Insightful)
I think this is a great example of government "efficiency", underlining the fact for all those people who love to carry on about how vital "government spending" is.
Yeah, because private enterprise never screws up.
Re:Government efficiency (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Government efficiency (Score:3, Insightful)
No, this is a specific example of military-industrial complex "efficiency" --- a particular order that combines the very worst of private monopolistic greed with unaccountable, secretive, wasteful spending. Governments tend to be rather efficient (much more than private markets) at supplying *public goods* like roads, healthcare, education, transportation, infrastructure, utilities, etc. --- things with clear public benefits easily evaluated by the public. Joe Citizen can tell when his roads have potholes, his tapwater tastes like ass, his kids have a lousy school, and he can't get decent medical care; and this will show at the next election. Few people who support increased government spending for public good are also big fans of handing blank checks to the military-industrial complex to build the next generation murder-machine boondoggle; generally, the most enthusiastic supporters of unchecked military spending are the same folks who rail against any publicly beneficial forms of government spending (since they are ideologically committed to proving government is a failure, by making it so whenever they get in power).
comment at the source (Score:5, Insightful)
These are very biased news and in fact they are wrong. For starters, only the first submarine has a floatability problem. The other submarines in the series are larger, therefore they have no problem. Now, why has the fist submarine (the original design) a floatability problem? Because the Navy asked for more equipment (electronic equipment, weapons, etc) and more comfortable cabins for the sailors than originally planned. It is not a design problem but a modifications problem and this is very very very frequent in large projects, especially if military. The changes have been taken into account in the design for the second and subsequent submarines (S81, S82, etc). The first submarine (S80) will be fixed by making it a bit longer and adding some floating aids. Source: I work in this project. Next time you want to say stupid things about very serious projects, please warn us you are drunk.
J D Exposito
Re:Government efficiency (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Government efficiency (Score:5, Insightful)
Wall Street called; they need another trillion $ of bailout money. Unmarked 20s straight from the taxpayers' pockets please.
Superfund is another example that comes to mind.
sPh
Re:Government efficiency (Score:3, Insightful)
The concept of a "corporation" is a government-created entity. They even get their charter directly from government. But even if a corporation were some natural entity, the goverment granting them limited liability leads to stuff like superfund sites. When the government has sole authority to issue currency and grant charters to banks, it's hard to blame "private industry" for playing the game the way the government has set them up to play it.
Re:at least they're trying... (Score:5, Insightful)
That's because when Canada does design a ship it costs 100 times that of any other nation.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/story/2013/05/02/pol-milewski-shipbuilding-design-mystery.html [www.cbc.ca]
The design of a ship is costing canada $250 million, when similar vessels designed in Norway were designed for $20 million and built for $80 million
So go ahead and buy the UK and USA scraps it is cheaper.
Re:Government efficiency (Score:4, Insightful)
because the people who got pissed were labeled as right wing conspiracy nutjobs, or dirty lazy hippies. Everyone else either believed those labels, got paid out, or turned a blind eye to the possibility that their political spectrum could actually have a flaw.
Re:Government efficiency (Score:3, Insightful)
"Too big to fail" is a government determination: not a private one.
Banks are a very poor example: they are only one-step away from government: merely a private extension of the Federal Reserve: a better reflection of poor legislative and financial policy than private lechery.
Don't confuse the free market with entites that live off public taxes and are first in line for public monetary distribution.
Re:Where were the checks and balances? (Score:5, Insightful)
How does someone in 2013 miscalculate the displacement of seawater?
Probably to 15 decimal places on a workstation with more transistors than the entire world possessed in 1980, along with an entire PPT deck full of pretty renders, and a basic sanity check skipped early in the process...
Re:comment at the source (Score:5, Insightful)
Given the context, it's a fair guess that the person who wrote that is Spanish. Was it really necessary to be nasty about their English?
Re:at least they're trying... (Score:4, Insightful)
Taxes are the extortion I pay not to be jailed or killed by people legally empowered to use guns against the innocent.
Re:at least they're trying... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:at least they're trying... (Score:5, Insightful)