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The U.S.'s $13B aircraft carrier has a toilet problem
- credit_guy 7y agoLink to GAO report: https://www.gao.gov/assets/710/705463.pdf https://www.gao.gov/assets/710/705463.pdf
- unixfg 7y agoWait, what kinda of acid and how much? $400,000 seems like a lot.
- synaesthesisx 7y agoExactly. The real question is - why do the chemicals cost $400,000? This seems to be a recurring theme with U.S. expenditure - particularly within the defense sector. When you get nearly blank checks from the government it’s not uncommon for items to be “marked up” so to speak and the difference pocketed by the vendors. Granted, this kind of stuff is pervasive across all sectors/layers. “[A] McKinsey “business analyst”—someone with an undergraduate degree and no experience—lent to the government priced out at $56,707/week, or $2,948,764/year.”
- jngreenlee 7y agoWhy did you have to bring politics into this (Buttlegug)?
- crocodiletears 7y agoYou can throw shade at a consultancy without necessarily referring to one of their alumni. McKinsey was a major player in the field long before Buttigieg was an ultrasound.
- ornornor 7y ago> $56,707/week, or $2,948,764/year. I picked the wrong job.
- chii 7y agothey are paid a pittance of a salary compared to their charged. McKensey is pocketing the difference.
- lotsofpulp 7y agoIt also goes back into wining and dining the very clients they are charging, and otherwise bribing whoever they need to get the work.
- zdragnar 7y agoThe amount of red tape involved in working with the government- especially anything related to defense- is astounding. I previously worked with a start up whose contacts in the military genuinely wanted to buy our services, but the process to do so was so long that the company ended up pivoting to focus exclusively on the commercial market. It was a less ideal fit, but it actually paid. Take: One part slow bureaucracy One part nepotism One part jealousy of internal teams One part good intentions (regulations to prevent said nepotism) And you get a cluster of inexcusable outcomes. The company seriously considered hiring a consulting firm whose sole business was helping other businesses land government contracts. The fact that the system is so inefficient that that kind of arbitrage opportunity exists is depressing. The only companies that can possibly win government contracts here are those that are huge, with tons of staff dedicated to winning government contracts. The end result is they can charge the moon and the sky, not because they do what they do better than anyone else, but because they are just as bloated and inefficient as the government itself and can survive the process of winning the contract in the first place.
- prox 7y agoI wonder if thats one of the reasons, in this case the acid, is so expensive. You have to add all of the logistical and bureaucracy costs.
- metabagel 7y agoOne solution is to be acquired by a defense contractor. A company which I worked for went that route.
- christophilus 7y agoI worked for a government contractor for a little over two weeks once. (I gave my 2 weeks notice almost right away.) It’s hard to express how wasteful and broken this process is. When I realized that I wouldn’t actually be doing anything useful for the first two months of my job, I just quit. No way could I do that kind of “work” day in and day out.
- vsareto 7y ago
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Rebelgecko 7y agoMy guess is that the cost of the raw chemicals is a small part of the $400,000. If there's 500 toilets on board that's $800 per toilet. What is probably much more expensive is safely transporting the chemicals in massive amounts, storing them, inspecting all the pipes after the treatment, and safely disposing of the chemicals. The GAO report doesn't say what they're using. I wouldn't even be that surprised if the acid flush was actually done with a base like Drano/lye
- AlfeG 7y agoFigure can include not only acid costs, but work amount and ship idle costs
- LatteLazy 7y agoIf you have to make 120m each in campaign donations to 3 senators to get the contract, plus another 40m in actual cost of research, supply and profit margin and then the navy only wants to buy 1000 units because its new and they get in trouble for buying necessary supplies instead of cool shit like torpedoes, then you sort of have to charge 400k a unit...
- Ididntdothis 7y ago" 120m each in campaign donations to 3 senators to get the contract" The contributions they are making are usually much lower. When you read the numbers it's actually surprising how little money you have to spend to get government money in return. Very good ROI.
- LatteLazy 7y agoYeah, I'd heard that too. It's all so shameful...
- downrightmike 7y agoOdds are that a good part of that expense is just storage for the massive amounts of the product. x100 of course. But when you need it, you'd better be able to get it and that's what's more than likely being paid for.
- spease 7y ago"The more they overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain."
- guidedlight 7y agoWhat problem is solved by using aircraft-style toilets on Navy ships?
- jonsen 7y agoStealth.
- erpellan 7y agoAircraft toilets always sound pretty damn loud to me. And their main reason to exist on planes is the lack of available water. Pretty sure that is not an aircraft carrier’s constraint.
- jonititan 7y agoActually ships are very water constrained. Especially Nuclear as they can't risk sea water contamination to the reactor cooling.
- Reason077 7y agoModern aircraft carriers have reverse-osmosis desalination systems on board. These can supply hundreds (thousands?) of tons of potable water per day.
- davidf18 7y agoThank you for this information, for I was wondering why they wouldn't have desalinization technology on-board, and you've answered the question -- they do. Thus, I don't understand the lack of fresh water.
- dctoedt 7y agoYes, fresh water is a valuable commodity at sea; on U.S. Navy ships, water-flushed toilets are flushed with sea water, not fresh — or at least that's the way it used to be, and I can't imagine it'd be different today. (Source: Three years' sea duty as an engineering officer in the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise, CVN-65.) EDIT: See https://www.navy.mil/submit/display.asp?story_id=103122 https://www.navy.mil/submit/display.asp?story_id=103122 for a 2017 press release describing how the Reactor Department produces fresh water aboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln (a Nimitz-class carrier, i.e., an old design). TL;DR: It's done with giant evaporators, that is, distilling units. Fun fact: At sea, one of the big uses of fresh water aboard a carrier is the repeated washing down of the aircraft to reduce corrosion from the salt air.
- mmhsieh 7y agoI never had to pay that much to drop acid.
- Rebelgecko 7y agoIt's interesting that there's so much focus on the toilet problem, and not the other $139 billion in unexpected maintenance costs
- frozenport 7y agoPerhaps the toilet is a microcosm of the other $139 billion in unexpected costs?
- ookware 7y agoI know right. A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking real money.
- lithos 7y agoyour mind would be rapidly changed when you learned the concept of shit lasagna. Layers or waste and toilet paper.
- avar 7y agoPrevious (flagged) discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22681785 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22681785
- Reason077 7y ago“system must regularly be cleaned with ... acid solution that costs $400,000 per use.” I realise the government/military procurement process can result in higher costs than the private sector would pay, but that is beyond ridiculous.
- trelliscoded 7y agoGuess how much shipping is to the middle of the ocean. Go on, guess.
- hejdirk 7y agoSurely you can stock on the thing.
- zdkl 7y agoAnd store it where? Dry volume is at a premium, just look at the compactness of living quarters to get an idea how little room there is to spare.
- thawaway1837 7y agoWhy in the world would you stock it and use up valuable space, and fuel on carrying it around the world? Also, it surely cannot be a good idea to keep massive amounts of acid around for non essential purposes.
- gambiting 7y ago
- lmilcin 7y agoThat would be mighty unpleasant in case real war broke.
- antman 7y agoAnother toilet problem was in a WWII submarine which had worse consequences. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_submarine_U-1206#Fate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_submarine_U-1206#Fate
- Lagogarda 7y agoHuman poop cannot polute oceans, fishes tend to poop and pee as well
- m0xte 7y agoPerhaps it’s classified poop and pee
- avree 7y agoFish and humans have vastly different diets, and human feces contain different bacteria and viruses than fish feces. You can absolutely pollute an ocean with sewage. Please try to educate yourself.
- hwillis 7y agoIt's also not just about the ocean- hepatitis A spreads quite regularly when shellfish feed on contaminated sewage. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGJLKhsLx18&ab_channel=SteveMould https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGJLKhsLx18&ab_channel=Steve...
- everyone 7y agoSo the 'Bush' is so filled with excrement it cant function? Appropriately named :)
- stevespang 7y agoBet you $100 it's mostly women flushing feminine hygiene products down the loo . . . . it's the military, they can video anywhere/anytime they want. Install video cams in the toliets to capture the user and what is being flushed and I guarantee they will catch the offenders and punish them severely.
- dukoid 7y agoStill sounds harmless compared to the toilet problem of U-1206: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pfr0nsh0Ghc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pfr0nsh0Ghc
- grandinj 7y agoGiven the size and complexity of such a device, and the limited number of them that are constructed (which means they are always a one-off), it would be a miracle on the order of Moses parting the Red Sea for one of them to be built __without__ such mistakes happening. In you are a developer, think of the number of times you have seen a successful SAP deployment i.e. on time, on budget, meets specs. Then multiply that by about 10k to reach the complexity of an aircraft carrier.
- hwillis 7y agoEngineering has a much stronger and more specific focus on avoiding "unexpected" problems like this. At its most general you use things like dimensional analysis to identify and avoid issues that you can't specifically foresee. This is, bare minimum, an embarrassing failure of design. No system, especially on a military ship, should have no redundancy. A single point of failure should not bring down every toilet on the ship. It's a damn aircraft carrier- splurge on separate sewage in the aft and fore.
- dreamcompiler 7y agoEngineering in the traditional sense plays very little role in modern defense systems. The overriding concern is profit: How can we extract the most money from the DoD? Good engineering that avoids recurring costs is discouraged in favor of gee-whiz technology that's easy to sell but expensive to build and maintain. The icing on the cake is that bids no longer matter; the largest contractors always underbid to get the contract then send bills that are 2x, 4x or 10x the bid, knowing they have the DoD over a barrel. The solution for this nonsense is competition. Real, honest, open, transparent competition. Combined with laws that dictate refusal to pay in excess of the bid, instant scrapping of programs that exceed cost estimates, and a 10-year timeout window between when people in DoD leadership can transition out and get jobs with DoD contractors.
- ceejayoz 7y ago> instant scrapping of programs that exceed cost estimates So you're gonna build 75% of an aircraft carrier, and... then what?
- sillywalk 7y agoI'd have to say my favorite problem with the ship is that it has to stop flight operations if the new arresting gear needs repairing, and if one catapult needs repairs, it cannot be independently shut-down, all four need to be turned off, which takes ~90 minutes.
- m3kw9 7y agoThe crew should be required to use a laxative at all times instead. Wouldn’t cost 400k
- simonblack 7y agoUS Carriers will repeat History in following the usage of the British Dreadnoughts. In WW1, the Dreadnoughts were too valuable to be risked. So they were really only used once, in the non-conclusive Battle of Jutland which only lasted a couple of hours. Millions of Pounds (the equivalent of Billions of Dollars, in today's money) were wasted on ships that were locked safely away because they were too valuable to be actually used in combat. That money could have been far more usefully employed elsewhere. The same can be said of today's billions of Dollars wasted on useless slow, very expensive targets (= carriers).