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Any very large project is expected to have a number of embarrassing failures. You just don't hear about most of them. Not surprisingly, on a military ship,

Any very large project is expected to have a number of embarrassing failures. You just don't hear about most of them. Not surprisingly, on a __military__ ship, sewage is not considered mission critical and required to have multiple redundancy. You can, after all, take a poop in a bucket and throw it over the side. Redundancy engineering is reserved for truly mission-critical things, like being able to find and shoot the enemy, and surviving a certain amount of damage. You don't waste valuable redundancy resources on things like this.

throwanem 7y ago
It's a shame they also haven't wasted redundancy resources on the electromagnetic catapult system used to launch aircraft, and which as of 2018 had a failure rate consistent with a 70% chance of completing a full day of flight operations without downtime. (1) It's easy to imagine that the toilet failures here under discussion represent an isolated concern and a teething problem for the kind of new, nonessential system that you expect to see in a new class of capital warship which, after all, still gets the fundamentals right. The trouble is that, once you start really looking, that's just not borne out by the evidence. A lot of the ideas in play with these ships, as with the LCS or the F-35, are fundamentally good. But the US military procurement process has become so deeply corrupt that we as a country are no longer capable of implementing these good ideas well. The multiple-decade, trillion-dollar boondoggle has become table stakes, and that doesn't deserve to be excused by anyone. (Also, a Ford-class carrier has a crew of something like four thousand. They're gonna need a lot of buckets...) (1) https://breakingdefense.com/2018/06/navys-troubled-ford-carrier-makes-modest-progress/ https://breakingdefense.com/2018/06/navys-troubled-ford-carr...
- hwillis 7y ago
  > It's a shame they also haven't wasted redundancy resources on the electromagnetic catapult system used to launch aircraft, and which as of 2018 had a failure rate consistent with a 70% chance of completing a full day of flight operations without downtime. (1) Note that this system is a privately-contracted one and was supposed to work as delivered.

Any very large project is expected to have a number of embarrassing failures. You just don't hear about most of them. Not surprisingly, on a __military__ ship,

throwanem 7y ago

It's a shame they also haven't wasted redundancy resources on the electromagnetic catapult system used to launch aircraft, and which as of 2018 had a failure rate consistent with a 70% chance of completing a full day of flight operations without downtime. (1) It's easy to imagine that the toilet failures here under discussion represent an isolated concern and a teething problem for the kind of new, nonessential system that you expect to see in a new class of capital warship which, after all, still gets the fundamentals right. The trouble is that, once you start really looking, that's just not borne out by the evidence. A lot of the ideas in play with these ships, as with the LCS or the F-35, are fundamentally good. But the US military procurement process has become so deeply corrupt that we as a country are no longer capable of implementing these good ideas well. The multiple-decade, trillion-dollar boondoggle has become table stakes, and that doesn't deserve to be excused by anyone. (Also, a Ford-class carrier has a crew of something like four thousand. They're gonna need a lot of buckets...) (1) https://breakingdefense.com/2018/06/navys-troubled-ford-carrier-makes-modest-progress/ https://breakingdefense.com/2018/06/navys-troubled-ford-carr...

hwillis 7y ago
> It's a shame they also haven't wasted redundancy resources on the electromagnetic catapult system used to launch aircraft, and which as of 2018 had a failure rate consistent with a 70% chance of completing a full day of flight operations without downtime. (1) Note that this system is a privately-contracted one and was supposed to work as delivered.