16 ms·

Spain builds submarine 70 tons too heavy due to wrong decimal (2013)

281 points by EndXA 7y ago

zzzeek 7y ago
runs great in extremely dense water
- pauljurczak 7y ago
  Dead Sea Squadron will be equipped with Spanish S-80 submarines.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
mwilliaams 7y ago
How does this not get caught before now? The review/QA process for a program this expensive and sensitive should be very strong.
- pvaldes 7y ago
  Unburying this old fail just right now is really interesting. In the same week when the minister of defense Margarita Robles is about to close several big contracts including S80 submarines, F110 frigates and MGCS chariots with several companies. I would not discard that the decimal event happened either only in the mind of the journalist or as a scapegoat history after a major change of specifications in the middle of the project. Honestly, smells a lot like FUD
userbinator 7y ago
Apparently somebody in the calculations made a mistake in the very beginning and nobody paid attention to review the calculations. This is common in projects of such scale, where everyone is so specialised that no one has a general idea of the whole project and could thus have raised a "something feels wrong" feeling.
- MaxBarraclough 7y ago
  Isn't that what systems engineering is for?
  - Mtinie 7y ago
    Only if you hire them.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- lnsru 7y ago
  Exactly! There is no real owner/leader of such project. The clerks just process their checklists. If a clerk finds some calculations, it’s all good, because it was done the right way according the checklist. Clerk has with high probability no knowledge to exam results of the calculations. I just experienced same situation with documentation of the project. There was none at very beginning, clerks were mad, there must be one according checklist. Documentation was written later, absolutely useless document, but it was here and it was good enough for the checklist.
  - derjames 7y ago
    Yes totally agree, the clerks/integrators/chief engineers/etc. handle a lot of data and it is easy to get lost. That is why all the checklists must also contain bounds. Upper and lower limits of the calculated/measured physical quantities in question.
- skylanh 7y ago
  I'd also like to point out this is also a situation where several workplace factors can cause issues: - my job=>my problems - tight deadlines, crunch, and not enough time to investigate issues outside of your domain - rigid purview domains--"you aren't authorized to look at that", "why are you wasting time / company resources looking at that?" - culture of elitism--"of course it's correct; I did it." Just some food for thought.
- astrodust 7y ago
codewithcheese 7y ago
As of January 2018, the intended delivery date of the first submarine is September 2022. [0] Can anyone comment what the current status and solution is? [0] https://abcblogs.abc.es/tierra-mar-aire/industria-de-defensa/defensa-submarino-s80.html https://abcblogs.abc.es/tierra-mar-aire/industria-de-defensa...
- JoshuaJB 7y ago
  From what I understand, they just lengthened the submarine to increase its displacement enough to counter the extra weight. It also looks like the hull of the first submarine is now complete, [1] so there's some possibility they'll meet their new timeline. [1] https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/europe/s-80.htm https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/europe/s-80.ht...
Carrett 7y ago
2013 fake new ?
ChrisMarshallNY 7y ago
Boy, if that isn't an argument for peer review, I don't know what is...
- astrodust 7y ago
  Would you be able to spot the mistake in a system that complex?
  - mtnGoat 7y ago
    shouldnt something be tracking the BOM and thus calculating the weight of everything being added in. It seems like catching this could even be automated.
    - astrodust 7y ago
      What it something was omitted from the spreadsheet by accident? That's how these mistakes happen.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 7y ago
    No, but then, it’s not my job. People who get paid for stuff like this, catch these kinds of errors all the time.
    - btrettel 7y ago
      What are the jobs you have in mind? Software testers? Academic peer review rarely catches these sorts of errors and those peer reviewers aren't paid.
      - ChrisMarshallNY 7y ago
        The company I worked for had a fairly strict policy for that kind of thing. Design Review was an integral part of their engineering culture. Involved lots of heavy-duty folks, going over your design with a fine-toothed comb. A junior engineer would present the design from their team, and everyone would take turns picking up brickbats and having at it. Not for the faint of heart.
agrippanux 7y ago
Why does Spain need subs? Seems like a waste of resources.
- bassman9000 7y ago
  Country largely surrounded by ocean/sea, with increasingly aggressive southern neighbors, and NATO responsibilities.
  - rat9988 7y ago
    How are spain's southern neighbors agressive?
    - vnorilo 7y ago
      You only need to go back ~1200 years: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umayyad_conquest_of_Hispania https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umayyad_conquest_of_Hispania
      - mkl 7y ago
        That doesn't really support "increasingly aggressive", and those were arguably quite different neighbours.
        bassman9000 7y ago
        https://www.elmundo.es/baleares/2020/02/19/5e4c0ca121efa041428b4613.html https://www.elmundo.es/baleares/2020/02/19/5e4c0ca121efa0414... https://thediplomatinspain.com/en/2020/01/moroccan-expansionism-into-saharan-waters/ https://thediplomatinspain.com/en/2020/01/moroccan-expansion...
        mkl 7y ago
        Those are recent, not 1200 years ago. Therefore they do support "increasingly aggressive", which I never disputed. See my other comment.
ggcdn 7y ago
I’m terrified of making one of these ‘big picture’ mistakes. I’ve long been weary of the fact that there is a surprising amount of engineering going on without scrutiny or peer review. And over reliance on computer modelling and increasing complexity makes it less and less easy to grasp the big picture. Just yesterday I made a trivial error crunching some numbers for when a construction site could turn off their dewatering. Quite the opposite of this submarine, my structure would be 1000s of kips too buoyant and could potentially float up out of its excavation due to hydrostatic forces. A mistake like going unnoticed could easily be a career-ender.
- JohnJamesRambo 7y ago
  Wary :)
  - nemosaltat 7y ago
    ¿Por qué no los dos?
- userbinator 7y ago
  And over reliance on computer modelling and increasing complexity makes it less and less easy to grasp the big picture. More importantly, this also diminishes order-of-magnitude/approximation thinking, which is a very important source of "common sense". I've graded physics/electronics exam questions, and it's astonishing/amusing just how far-off some of the wrong answers are. Some memorable examples: - Asked to calculate the current-limiting resistor for an LED in a low-voltage circuit, some students gave answers in the megaohms, others in the miliohms (correct answer was in the low kiloohms.) - A question about the engine power of a dragster resulted in wrong answers of over a GW (roughly a million horsepower!) and under 1kW. (Correct answer was around 1MW.)
  - tigershark 7y ago
    Wait, is the engine power measured in something else than KW nowadays? I think that the HP -> KW switch happened something like 20 years ago, at least in my country.
gumby 7y ago
Was this kind of error common in the slide rule era? I never heard that it was.
- metaphor 7y ago
  Yes. What the slide rule era didn't have was the internet. EDIT: Here's a 1992 GAO acquisition study[1] on the AN/BSY-1 combat system whose development started in 1980 and was an absolute clusterfuck for the Navy in the decade that followed, as history would have it. I originally learned of this disaster from a former sailor (and now good friend) who participated in sea trials for one of the submarines that this system was installed in. By his account, the submarine had had its hull recut just to get the system installed and routed properly, and it never really worked as intended. The study vaguely alludes to this: > As a result, the shipbuilder was eventually faced with rip-outs, recutting of hulls, and rerouting of cables. Electric Boat was the prime and responsible for system integration. They've had their fair share of glorious fuckups to the tune of $82.4MM in late 80s dollars, so it's funny to read the hero part on how they've "helped other countries with their submarine programs". In the right professional circles, stories like these quite literally abound. Now what's the probability of learning about them without the internet? [1] https://www.gao.gov/assets/nsiad-92-50.pdf https://www.gao.gov/assets/nsiad-92-50.pdf
  - gumby 7y ago
    Thanks! Probably we only hear of the successes.
- dredmorbius 7y ago
  A Google Scholar search for slide rule calculation errors is ... disappointingly sparse. Cliff Stoll's rememberance is interesting, though doesn't discuss errors: http://gen.lib.rus.ec/scimag/?q=stoll+When+Slide+Rules+Ruled http://gen.lib.rus.ec/scimag/?q=stoll+When+Slide+Rules+Ruled
jacknews 7y ago
lol, does the Navantia logo look like a wavy equals sign, ie 'approximately equal'? I think it does. It's honest anyway.
keiferski 7y ago
The Isaac Peral, the first in a new class of diesel-electric submarines, was nearly completed when engineers discovered the problem. A U.S. Navy contractor in Connecticut, Electric Boat, has signed a deal to help the Spanish Defence Ministry find ways to slim down the 2,200-ton submarine. In case you were wondering (I was) - the entire sub is 2,200 tons.
- DoofusOfDeath 7y ago
  Slightly off topic, but my dad worked on submarine engineering at that E.B. facility, and in related subcontractor / government roles, in the 1970s - 1990s. He had lots of stories about major oversights making it WAY farther into the production process than you'd expect.
jcheng 7y ago
For scale, the submarine is 2,200 tons total, so it’s a little over 3% overweight.
- okusername 7y ago
  Which is more than enough to put it out of balance, depending on where it is.
  - masklinn 7y ago
    Apparently the fear is much buoyancy issues than balance, the extra 70t means even with empty ballasts the sub might not be positively buoyant. That's why this could be solved by lengthening the hull, increasing displacement and thus compensating for the extra weight.
btrettel 7y ago
Any good tricks for catching these sorts of errors? I'm a theoretical fluid dynamicist. When doing math I'll typically check the dimensions, order of magnitude, bounds, functional dependencies (anything missing or something there that shouldn't be?), overall trends of an equation, and limiting cases. For solutions to equations it's useful to also plug the apparent solution back into the equation. Another check ideally comes after waiting a while so that my mind is fresh. Sometimes what I did seems dumb by then. Coding up the math is useful too. I've found that I can never add too many assertions. I might have caught the error described in the article as I often use assertions to check bounds. Peer review isn't as reliable as I'd like. When it comes to math, most people seem to "rubber stamp" it. I can recall reviewing a paper that had math problems that were fairly obvious to me. For some reason I got the reports from the other reviewers, and I was the only one to notice...
- cm2187 7y ago
  Intuitively, only store numbers in their natural dimension. The same thing regularly happens in finance where interest rates (1.5% ie 0.015) is often stored as percent (1.5) in databases. And of course you never know what conventions people take, particularly in these days of super low interest rates. Then you have spreads which can either be stored in basis points (10bps), percent (0.1%) or natural (0.001). And currency of amounts, etc. All table columns should also have unit in names, whether in charts, tables, database or variable names.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    > All table columns should also have unit in names, whether in charts, tables, database or variable names. Oh yes. That would mitigate a lot of stupidity. Imagine if math in programming and Excel had to have both a) always visible/known units, b) unit propagation and c) unit checks. So if A is seconds and B is kilograms, the compiler/spreadsheet wouldn't let you write C = A + B.
    - selimthegrim 7y ago
      Blockpad (http://www.blockpad.net http://www.blockpad.net) is the answer to your prayers.
epicgiga 7y ago
I get the whole "home grown industry" and sovereign production of defense and all that, but just like when Australia tried to build its own submarines, really you're better off just buying them off the shelf from your allies who've already been ploughing billions into design and development of the things for decades.
- simion314 7y ago
  From what I read about american airplanes they have this days software that call home and send tracking data, plus imagine some diplomatic incident(like a tweet of some extradition case) and you now have to worry if your submarines will be remotely bricked ... so yeah if you buy important crap from others make sure you can control the software too.
- gherkinnn 7y ago
  Indias Arjun main battle tank was a difficult birth as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arjun_(tank) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arjun_(tank)
- Glawen 7y ago
  Spain has an active defense shipbuilding industry (e. Eg scorpene submarine), why would they buy them from someone else ? And these kind of program secure a lot of jobs, when you buy from outside you secure those jobs abroad. By the way, how is the f35 going ?
  - gdy 7y ago
    I guess, they are still at the 'ploughing billions' stage.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
TomK32 7y ago
Yet another achievement for pacifism :-) Seriously, in the olden days someone might have been put in jail for being a saboteur.
- stblack 7y ago
  Sabotage should never be discounted. Great point!
timonoko 7y ago
In slide-rule world this did not happen. Slide rule gave you 3 numbers, but you were not always sure of the tailing zeros, so you checked the sanity of the scale all the time.
- masklinn 7y ago
  > In slide-rule world this did not happen. Of course it did, you just didn't hear about it because either it wasn't publicised at all, or there wasn't enough tracking to find out where the error had originally been introduced, or nobody shifted through literal tons of papers to find out, or if they did there was no internet and it'd only appeared as a note on page 7 in the "journal of overweight submarines", circulation 500 copies. This sort of errors is pretty much why double-entry bookkeeping was invented.
varjag 7y ago
A Spanish shipyard also botched up bulkhead design on Helge Ingstad frigate. It sunk after collision in 2018 and was a total loss. The collision itself was all on inept Norwegian crew, but the water sealing have not held. There are 4 others of her class still in service. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HNoMS_Helge_Ingstad_(F313)#Collision_with_oil_tanker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HNoMS_Helge_Ingstad_(F313)#Col...
- fauria 7y ago
  This is not true. Norwegian investigations concluded that there were no technical defects involved in this incident, discharging Navantia. Quoting your source: The watertight condition of the ship was guaranteed by the 13 watertight bulkheads. Seven compartments were damaged as a result of the collision but initially the ship remained afloat. No one intervened to break the chain of errors. See also: https://www.aibn.no/About-us/News-archive/Status-of-the-investigation-into-the-collision-between-the-frigate-KNM-Helge-Ingstad-and-the-oil-tanker-Sola-TS-27-February-2019 https://www.aibn.no/About-us/News-archive/Status-of-the-inve...
  - varjag 7y ago
    Yes it was guaranteed by the bulkheads, and the guarantee has failed. The ship should not have sunk with this amount of damage. The vessel grounded and continued to take on water, through the propeller shaft and stuffing boxes.[9] The whole point of stuffing boxes was to contain water in damage like this. The link you posted is in no way absolves the shipbuilder. Merely states that The vessel's Spanish designer Navantia received a notification of a critical safety issue in relation to the frigate's watertight compartments …and the investigation is ongoing.
    - alsobrsp 7y ago
      > The whole point of stuffing boxes was to contain water in damage like this. That is not the point of stuffing boxes. They keep water out when the shaft is not turning and lubricate the the shaft with sea water when it is. A grounding can bend the shaft easily letting lots of water in.
brmgb 7y ago
The real joke is that Navantia which is building this submarine actually stole the intellectual property from their French counterpart during a previous joint venture [0] and then managed to fail building a submarine with it. Having worked in the field, the idea that someone can just misplace a decimal point is laughable. It highlights a complete lack of quality control and engineering know-how from Naventia. The issue here is not the calculation. Mistakes happen. The issue is procedural. You can't hope to build submarines if you have no process in place to systematically catch this kind of error. That's true at every level from conception to manufacturing. That they ended up having to go see the Americans because the French wouldn't help them say a lot about European defense integration however. [0] https://globalarbitrationreview.com/article/1029783/submarine-dispute-runs-aground https://globalarbitrationreview.com/article/1029783/submarin...
- Glawen 7y ago
  Wow, saucy, i did know about scorpene, but i did not know that the french accuse the spanish of stealing french technology
  - Retric 7y ago
    I read that as an accusation between companies not countries.
    - liotier 7y ago
      When building such strategic naval assets, company independence from the host country is fictive - national interest drives them.
      - jacobush 7y ago
        True. The Swedish military recently (a couple of years ago) raided the offices of Kockums at dawn to acquire prototypes and plans for its submarines.
    - Glawen 7y ago
jacquesm 7y ago
On they plus side, they won't have nearly as much trouble as they otherwise would have had to make it go down. On a boat like this 70 tons isn't all that much, but it is outside the margin of error in terms of what you would correct with the ballast tanks. This will be expensive and tricky to fix without impacting other systems.
Havoc 7y ago
Tie some balloons to it?
coleifer 7y ago
It's like that essay about top-down vs bottom-up. It was written about Challenger but same principles apply. https://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/51-l/docs/rogers-commission/Appendix-F.txt https://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/51-l/docs/roge...
- vintagedave 7y ago
  I get an ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED accessing that URL. Do you have another link?
giant 7y ago
The Defence Ministry said technical problems are normal for projects of this scale.
acqq 7y ago
The later development is even more of ... issues: https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/navy-ships/a22473758/spains-newest-submarine-is-too-big-for-port/ https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/navy-ships/a224737... "Spain’s Newest Submarine is Too Big For Port" (July 2018) "In 2013, ten years after the first boat was ordered, authorities detected a critical flaw in the design: The submarines were 75 to 100 tons heavier than anticipated. The submarines could dive but there was some question as to whether they could reliably surface again." "The shipbuilder, Navantia, immediately suspended construction of the subs and called in U.S. submarine builder Electric Boat to solve the buoyancy issue. EB recommended the shipyards lengthen the S-80s by thirty feet, stretching it from 232 feet to 265 feet..." "Now, fifteen years after the submarines were ordered there is a new problem: The first submarine, Isaac Peral, is too large to fit in its port at Cartagena. Authorities say the port will have to be enlarged and dredged to fit the updated design. It’s odd that Spanish authorities are suddenly discovering the problem considering the submarines were actually built in Cartagena and everyone involved has had five years to ponder the ramifications of enlarging the sub’s design."
bunchOfCucks 7y ago
What is with this site and old news?
carapace 7y ago
No one expects the Spanish Exponentiation!
pvaldes 7y ago
The scheduled date for floating is October 2020 and it looks pretty fine. If there was a problem it seems perfectly fixed. https://www.navantia.es/en/news/press-releases/navantia-closes-the-resistant-hull-of-s81-isaac-peral-submarine/ https://www.navantia.es/en/news/press-releases/navantia-clos...
muyuu 7y ago
Ooops! there are bugs and bugs.
ChrisArchitect 7y ago
2013 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5842281 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5842281

281 points by EndXA 7y ago

zzzeek 7y ago

runs great in extremely dense water

pauljurczak 7y ago
Dead Sea Squadron will be equipped with Spanish S-80 submarines.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

mwilliaams 7y ago

How does this not get caught before now? The review/QA process for a program this expensive and sensitive should be very strong.

pvaldes 7y ago
Unburying this old fail just right now is really interesting. In the same week when the minister of defense Margarita Robles is about to close several big contracts including S80 submarines, F110 frigates and MGCS chariots with several companies. I would not discard that the decimal event happened either only in the mind of the journalist or as a scapegoat history after a major change of specifications in the middle of the project. Honestly, smells a lot like FUD

userbinator 7y ago

Apparently somebody in the calculations made a mistake in the very beginning and nobody paid attention to review the calculations. This is common in projects of such scale, where everyone is so specialised that no one has a general idea of the whole project and could thus have raised a "something feels wrong" feeling.

MaxBarraclough 7y ago
Isn't that what systems engineering is for?
- Mtinie 7y ago
  Only if you hire them.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
lnsru 7y ago
Exactly! There is no real owner/leader of such project. The clerks just process their checklists. If a clerk finds some calculations, it’s all good, because it was done the right way according the checklist. Clerk has with high probability no knowledge to exam results of the calculations. I just experienced same situation with documentation of the project. There was none at very beginning, clerks were mad, there must be one according checklist. Documentation was written later, absolutely useless document, but it was here and it was good enough for the checklist.
- derjames 7y ago
  Yes totally agree, the clerks/integrators/chief engineers/etc. handle a lot of data and it is easy to get lost. That is why all the checklists must also contain bounds. Upper and lower limits of the calculated/measured physical quantities in question.
skylanh 7y ago
I'd also like to point out this is also a situation where several workplace factors can cause issues: - my job=>my problems - tight deadlines, crunch, and not enough time to investigate issues outside of your domain - rigid purview domains--"you aren't authorized to look at that", "why are you wasting time / company resources looking at that?" - culture of elitism--"of course it's correct; I did it." Just some food for thought.
astrodust 7y ago

codewithcheese 7y ago

As of January 2018, the intended delivery date of the first submarine is September 2022. [0] Can anyone comment what the current status and solution is? [0] https://abcblogs.abc.es/tierra-mar-aire/industria-de-defensa/defensa-submarino-s80.html https://abcblogs.abc.es/tierra-mar-aire/industria-de-defensa...

JoshuaJB 7y ago
From what I understand, they just lengthened the submarine to increase its displacement enough to counter the extra weight. It also looks like the hull of the first submarine is now complete, [1] so there's some possibility they'll meet their new timeline. [1] https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/europe/s-80.htm https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/europe/s-80.ht...

Carrett 7y ago

2013 fake new ?

ChrisMarshallNY 7y ago

Boy, if that isn't an argument for peer review, I don't know what is...

astrodust 7y ago
Would you be able to spot the mistake in a system that complex?
- mtnGoat 7y ago
  shouldnt something be tracking the BOM and thus calculating the weight of everything being added in. It seems like catching this could even be automated.
  - astrodust 7y ago
    What it something was omitted from the spreadsheet by accident? That's how these mistakes happen.
- ChrisMarshallNY 7y ago
  No, but then, it’s not my job. People who get paid for stuff like this, catch these kinds of errors all the time.
  - btrettel 7y ago
    What are the jobs you have in mind? Software testers? Academic peer review rarely catches these sorts of errors and those peer reviewers aren't paid.
    - ChrisMarshallNY 7y ago
      The company I worked for had a fairly strict policy for that kind of thing. Design Review was an integral part of their engineering culture. Involved lots of heavy-duty folks, going over your design with a fine-toothed comb. A junior engineer would present the design from their team, and everyone would take turns picking up brickbats and having at it. Not for the faint of heart.

agrippanux 7y ago

Why does Spain need subs? Seems like a waste of resources.

bassman9000 7y ago
Country largely surrounded by ocean/sea, with increasingly aggressive southern neighbors, and NATO responsibilities.
- rat9988 7y ago
  How are spain's southern neighbors agressive?
  - vnorilo 7y ago
    You only need to go back ~1200 years: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umayyad_conquest_of_Hispania https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umayyad_conquest_of_Hispania
    - mkl 7y ago
      That doesn't really support "increasingly aggressive", and those were arguably quite different neighbours.
      - bassman9000 7y ago
        https://www.elmundo.es/baleares/2020/02/19/5e4c0ca121efa041428b4613.html https://www.elmundo.es/baleares/2020/02/19/5e4c0ca121efa0414... https://thediplomatinspain.com/en/2020/01/moroccan-expansionism-into-saharan-waters/ https://thediplomatinspain.com/en/2020/01/moroccan-expansion...
        mkl 7y ago
        Those are recent, not 1200 years ago. Therefore they do support "increasingly aggressive", which I never disputed. See my other comment.

ggcdn 7y ago

I’m terrified of making one of these ‘big picture’ mistakes. I’ve long been weary of the fact that there is a surprising amount of engineering going on without scrutiny or peer review. And over reliance on computer modelling and increasing complexity makes it less and less easy to grasp the big picture. Just yesterday I made a trivial error crunching some numbers for when a construction site could turn off their dewatering. Quite the opposite of this submarine, my structure would be 1000s of kips too buoyant and could potentially float up out of its excavation due to hydrostatic forces. A mistake like going unnoticed could easily be a career-ender.

JohnJamesRambo 7y ago
Wary :)
- nemosaltat 7y ago
  ¿Por qué no los dos?
userbinator 7y ago
And over reliance on computer modelling and increasing complexity makes it less and less easy to grasp the big picture. More importantly, this also diminishes order-of-magnitude/approximation thinking, which is a very important source of "common sense". I've graded physics/electronics exam questions, and it's astonishing/amusing just how far-off some of the wrong answers are. Some memorable examples: - Asked to calculate the current-limiting resistor for an LED in a low-voltage circuit, some students gave answers in the megaohms, others in the miliohms (correct answer was in the low kiloohms.) - A question about the engine power of a dragster resulted in wrong answers of over a GW (roughly a million horsepower!) and under 1kW. (Correct answer was around 1MW.)
- tigershark 7y ago
  Wait, is the engine power measured in something else than KW nowadays? I think that the HP -> KW switch happened something like 20 years ago, at least in my country.

gumby 7y ago

Was this kind of error common in the slide rule era? I never heard that it was.

metaphor 7y ago
Yes. What the slide rule era didn't have was the internet. EDIT: Here's a 1992 GAO acquisition study[1] on the AN/BSY-1 combat system whose development started in 1980 and was an absolute clusterfuck for the Navy in the decade that followed, as history would have it. I originally learned of this disaster from a former sailor (and now good friend) who participated in sea trials for one of the submarines that this system was installed in. By his account, the submarine had had its hull recut just to get the system installed and routed properly, and it never really worked as intended. The study vaguely alludes to this: > As a result, the shipbuilder was eventually faced with rip-outs, recutting of hulls, and rerouting of cables. Electric Boat was the prime and responsible for system integration. They've had their fair share of glorious fuckups to the tune of $82.4MM in late 80s dollars, so it's funny to read the hero part on how they've "helped other countries with their submarine programs". In the right professional circles, stories like these quite literally abound. Now what's the probability of learning about them without the internet? [1] https://www.gao.gov/assets/nsiad-92-50.pdf https://www.gao.gov/assets/nsiad-92-50.pdf
- gumby 7y ago
  Thanks! Probably we only hear of the successes.
dredmorbius 7y ago
A Google Scholar search for slide rule calculation errors is ... disappointingly sparse. Cliff Stoll's rememberance is interesting, though doesn't discuss errors: http://gen.lib.rus.ec/scimag/?q=stoll+When+Slide+Rules+Ruled http://gen.lib.rus.ec/scimag/?q=stoll+When+Slide+Rules+Ruled

jacknews 7y ago

lol, does the Navantia logo look like a wavy equals sign, ie 'approximately equal'? I think it does. It's honest anyway.

keiferski 7y ago

The Isaac Peral, the first in a new class of diesel-electric submarines, was nearly completed when engineers discovered the problem. A U.S. Navy contractor in Connecticut, Electric Boat, has signed a deal to help the Spanish Defence Ministry find ways to slim down the 2,200-ton submarine. In case you were wondering (I was) - the entire sub is 2,200 tons.

DoofusOfDeath 7y ago
Slightly off topic, but my dad worked on submarine engineering at that E.B. facility, and in related subcontractor / government roles, in the 1970s - 1990s. He had lots of stories about major oversights making it WAY farther into the production process than you'd expect.

jcheng 7y ago

For scale, the submarine is 2,200 tons total, so it’s a little over 3% overweight.

okusername 7y ago
Which is more than enough to put it out of balance, depending on where it is.
- masklinn 7y ago
  Apparently the fear is much buoyancy issues than balance, the extra 70t means even with empty ballasts the sub might not be positively buoyant. That's why this could be solved by lengthening the hull, increasing displacement and thus compensating for the extra weight.

btrettel 7y ago

Any good tricks for catching these sorts of errors? I'm a theoretical fluid dynamicist. When doing math I'll typically check the dimensions, order of magnitude, bounds, functional dependencies (anything missing or something there that shouldn't be?), overall trends of an equation, and limiting cases. For solutions to equations it's useful to also plug the apparent solution back into the equation. Another check ideally comes after waiting a while so that my mind is fresh. Sometimes what I did seems dumb by then. Coding up the math is useful too. I've found that I can never add too many assertions. I might have caught the error described in the article as I often use assertions to check bounds. Peer review isn't as reliable as I'd like. When it comes to math, most people seem to "rubber stamp" it. I can recall reviewing a paper that had math problems that were fairly obvious to me. For some reason I got the reports from the other reviewers, and I was the only one to notice...

cm2187 7y ago
Intuitively, only store numbers in their natural dimension. The same thing regularly happens in finance where interest rates (1.5% ie 0.015) is often stored as percent (1.5) in databases. And of course you never know what conventions people take, particularly in these days of super low interest rates. Then you have spreads which can either be stored in basis points (10bps), percent (0.1%) or natural (0.001). And currency of amounts, etc. All table columns should also have unit in names, whether in charts, tables, database or variable names.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  > All table columns should also have unit in names, whether in charts, tables, database or variable names. Oh yes. That would mitigate a lot of stupidity. Imagine if math in programming and Excel had to have both a) always visible/known units, b) unit propagation and c) unit checks. So if A is seconds and B is kilograms, the compiler/spreadsheet wouldn't let you write C = A + B.
  - selimthegrim 7y ago
    Blockpad (http://www.blockpad.net http://www.blockpad.net) is the answer to your prayers.

epicgiga 7y ago

I get the whole "home grown industry" and sovereign production of defense and all that, but just like when Australia tried to build its own submarines, really you're better off just buying them off the shelf from your allies who've already been ploughing billions into design and development of the things for decades.

simion314 7y ago
From what I read about american airplanes they have this days software that call home and send tracking data, plus imagine some diplomatic incident(like a tweet of some extradition case) and you now have to worry if your submarines will be remotely bricked ... so yeah if you buy important crap from others make sure you can control the software too.
gherkinnn 7y ago
Indias Arjun main battle tank was a difficult birth as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arjun_(tank) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arjun_(tank)
Glawen 7y ago
Spain has an active defense shipbuilding industry (e. Eg scorpene submarine), why would they buy them from someone else ? And these kind of program secure a lot of jobs, when you buy from outside you secure those jobs abroad. By the way, how is the f35 going ?
- gdy 7y ago
  I guess, they are still at the 'ploughing billions' stage.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

TomK32 7y ago

Yet another achievement for pacifism :-) Seriously, in the olden days someone might have been put in jail for being a saboteur.

stblack 7y ago
Sabotage should never be discounted. Great point!

timonoko 7y ago

In slide-rule world this did not happen. Slide rule gave you 3 numbers, but you were not always sure of the tailing zeros, so you checked the sanity of the scale all the time.

masklinn 7y ago
> In slide-rule world this did not happen. Of course it did, you just didn't hear about it because either it wasn't publicised at all, or there wasn't enough tracking to find out where the error had originally been introduced, or nobody shifted through literal tons of papers to find out, or if they did there was no internet and it'd only appeared as a note on page 7 in the "journal of overweight submarines", circulation 500 copies. This sort of errors is pretty much why double-entry bookkeeping was invented.

varjag 7y ago

A Spanish shipyard also botched up bulkhead design on Helge Ingstad frigate. It sunk after collision in 2018 and was a total loss. The collision itself was all on inept Norwegian crew, but the water sealing have not held. There are 4 others of her class still in service. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HNoMS_Helge_Ingstad_(F313)#Collision_with_oil_tanker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HNoMS_Helge_Ingstad_(F313)#Col...

fauria 7y ago
This is not true. Norwegian investigations concluded that there were no technical defects involved in this incident, discharging Navantia. Quoting your source: The watertight condition of the ship was guaranteed by the 13 watertight bulkheads. Seven compartments were damaged as a result of the collision but initially the ship remained afloat. No one intervened to break the chain of errors. See also: https://www.aibn.no/About-us/News-archive/Status-of-the-investigation-into-the-collision-between-the-frigate-KNM-Helge-Ingstad-and-the-oil-tanker-Sola-TS-27-February-2019 https://www.aibn.no/About-us/News-archive/Status-of-the-inve...
- varjag 7y ago
  Yes it was guaranteed by the bulkheads, and the guarantee has failed. The ship should not have sunk with this amount of damage. The vessel grounded and continued to take on water, through the propeller shaft and stuffing boxes.[9] The whole point of stuffing boxes was to contain water in damage like this. The link you posted is in no way absolves the shipbuilder. Merely states that The vessel's Spanish designer Navantia received a notification of a critical safety issue in relation to the frigate's watertight compartments …and the investigation is ongoing.
  - alsobrsp 7y ago
    > The whole point of stuffing boxes was to contain water in damage like this. That is not the point of stuffing boxes. They keep water out when the shaft is not turning and lubricate the the shaft with sea water when it is. A grounding can bend the shaft easily letting lots of water in.

brmgb 7y ago

The real joke is that Navantia which is building this submarine actually stole the intellectual property from their French counterpart during a previous joint venture [0] and then managed to fail building a submarine with it. Having worked in the field, the idea that someone can just misplace a decimal point is laughable. It highlights a complete lack of quality control and engineering know-how from Naventia. The issue here is not the calculation. Mistakes happen. The issue is procedural. You can't hope to build submarines if you have no process in place to systematically catch this kind of error. That's true at every level from conception to manufacturing. That they ended up having to go see the Americans because the French wouldn't help them say a lot about European defense integration however. [0] https://globalarbitrationreview.com/article/1029783/submarine-dispute-runs-aground https://globalarbitrationreview.com/article/1029783/submarin...

Glawen 7y ago
Wow, saucy, i did know about scorpene, but i did not know that the french accuse the spanish of stealing french technology
- Retric 7y ago
  I read that as an accusation between companies not countries.
  - liotier 7y ago
    When building such strategic naval assets, company independence from the host country is fictive - national interest drives them.
    - jacobush 7y ago
      True. The Swedish military recently (a couple of years ago) raided the offices of Kockums at dawn to acquire prototypes and plans for its submarines.
  - Glawen 7y ago

jacquesm 7y ago

On they plus side, they won't have nearly as much trouble as they otherwise would have had to make it go down. On a boat like this 70 tons isn't all that much, but it is outside the margin of error in terms of what you would correct with the ballast tanks. This will be expensive and tricky to fix without impacting other systems.

Havoc 7y ago

Tie some balloons to it?

coleifer 7y ago

It's like that essay about top-down vs bottom-up. It was written about Challenger but same principles apply. https://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/51-l/docs/rogers-commission/Appendix-F.txt https://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/51-l/docs/roge...

vintagedave 7y ago
I get an ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED accessing that URL. Do you have another link?

giant 7y ago

The Defence Ministry said technical problems are normal for projects of this scale.

acqq 7y ago

The later development is even more of ... issues: https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/navy-ships/a22473758/spains-newest-submarine-is-too-big-for-port/ https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/navy-ships/a224737... "Spain’s Newest Submarine is Too Big For Port" (July 2018) "In 2013, ten years after the first boat was ordered, authorities detected a critical flaw in the design: The submarines were 75 to 100 tons heavier than anticipated. The submarines could dive but there was some question as to whether they could reliably surface again." "The shipbuilder, Navantia, immediately suspended construction of the subs and called in U.S. submarine builder Electric Boat to solve the buoyancy issue. EB recommended the shipyards lengthen the S-80s by thirty feet, stretching it from 232 feet to 265 feet..." "Now, fifteen years after the submarines were ordered there is a new problem: The first submarine, Isaac Peral, is too large to fit in its port at Cartagena. Authorities say the port will have to be enlarged and dredged to fit the updated design. It’s odd that Spanish authorities are suddenly discovering the problem considering the submarines were actually built in Cartagena and everyone involved has had five years to ponder the ramifications of enlarging the sub’s design."

bunchOfCucks 7y ago

What is with this site and old news?

carapace 7y ago

No one expects the Spanish Exponentiation!

pvaldes 7y ago

The scheduled date for floating is October 2020 and it looks pretty fine. If there was a problem it seems perfectly fixed. https://www.navantia.es/en/news/press-releases/navantia-closes-the-resistant-hull-of-s81-isaac-peral-submarine/ https://www.navantia.es/en/news/press-releases/navantia-clos...

muyuu 7y ago

Ooops! there are bugs and bugs.

ChrisArchitect 7y ago

2013 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5842281 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5842281