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To build ships that break ice, U.S. must relearn to cut steel
- guestbest 3y ago[flagged]
- dang 3y agoIf there's a workaround, it's ok. Users usually post workarounds in the thread. This is in the FAQ at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html and there's more explanation here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=paywalls%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989
- westurner 3y ago"This new idea could reduce steel’s carbon emissions by 90%" https://www.freethink.com/energy/decarbonizing-steel https://www.freethink.com/energy/decarbonizing-steel Why is steel necessary for ships? From "Plant-based epoxy enables recyclable carbon fiber" (2022) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30138954 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30138954 : > And once it’s completed you have an insanely strong material that makes steel look weak and brittle. It’s reported to be as much as ten times stronger than steel, yet is lighter than fiberglass Make it out of hemp aerogel and you could carry the boat.
- thorncorona 3y agoYou need mass to break ice.
- marginalia_nu 3y agoWell there's always reinforced ice: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Habakkuk https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Habakkuk ;-)
- fsckboy 3y ago> You need mass to break ice. this is one of the narrow cases where pounds comes off the bench to say, "actually, you need weight" (icebreakers slide/ride up on top of the ice and the weight of the ship breaks breaks it ice downward)
- loeg 3y agoOn Earth's surface, it's not like gravity is optional.
- westurner 3y agoTo get real technical about it, gravity is inconstant at constant altitudes when varying latitude and longitude. 9.8m/s^2 at sea level, and it decreases with altitude all the way out to Lagrangian points where the gravitational attraction of the sun (and other local masses) is equal to that of earth; but solar pressure presumably displaces objects at zero-gravity rest. Gravity is 'optional' with quantum locking. Gravity is a weak force. Gravity is maybe the least lossy form of potential energy storage?
- loeg 3y agoA key feature of ice-breakers is that they operate at sea level, and in fact rely on gravity.
- westurner 3y agoThey are also surrounded by fluid that as ballast affects the density/volume/buoyancy/displacement(?) of the hull (and the inertia of the craft), which could be steel-plated [3d printed and/or pressure molded] biocomposite that lasts for spec years in seawater.
- ChainOfFools 3y agoThat's because pounds use force as a base unit, mass is kind of incorporated into it the notion of a pound, whereas the metric system generally handles the units for force and mass separately. The imperial system actually does have a rather obscure unit called a slug which is equivalent to the kilogram (in terms of being purely a mass quantity) in the metric system, but since the pound already incorporates that term ( bundled together with the gravitational acceleration factor) it seldom sees action.
- delfinom 3y agoThe problem with carbon fiber and epoxy composites. Once it cracks, you cannot repair it, easily. It relies on a continuous composite structure. You can't patch it because that patchwork joint will just be a weak spot. So you are talking about writing off tens of millions of dollars of a boat just because someone lost control and hit something too hard. Steel is infinitely repairable, cut out the damaged section and weld in new steel. Damage will and does occur to boats.
- andylynch 3y agoThe other big drawback is that damaged composites attend to violently fall to pieces, where metal would bend.
- bluGill 3y agoSteel - it doesn't lose strength when you bend it a little. Most other materials suffer fatigue and fail when you bend them repeatedly. This makes steel ideal for many things.
- MattGaiser 3y agoA boat you could carry couldn’t break ice.
- pvg 3y agodepends how hard you throw it
- bluGill 3y agoIf you are a human you cannot break significant ice by throwing. Sure you can break 1cm of ice, but so any any other boat. We need ice breakers because there are cases where the ice is probably strong enough to support a the heaviest truck, but it doesn't quite have enough margin of safety on that probably to actually drive a truck so if you want to get through you need to send a boat through water.
- pvg 3y agoyou cannot break significant ice by throwing. Don't skip boat throwing day!
- westurner 3y ago+1. How do mass density of the craft and thrust limit the energy necessary to solve problem?
- bell-cot 3y agoCarbon fiber materials have excellent tensile strengths, especially under steady-ish loads. The front of an icebreaker's hull mostly faces compressive loads, with lots of shocks from hitting ice. Try searching for "OceanGate Titan" if you want to read more about the performance of carbon fiber composites under large compressive loads in a marine environment.
- westurner 3y agoReading further from that thread about hemp on an article about carbon fiber: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30147414 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30147414 > Have you here contested claims that hemp - biocomposite with resin - has greater Tensile Strength and Compressive Strength than steel and aluminum (and carbon fiber with sustainable binder)?
- jjoonathan 3y ago"Stronger than steel" is a common materials science catchphrase, but it usually carries more than enough asterisks, daggers, and double-daggers to skewer practical applications.
- neonate 3y agohttps://archive.ph/lSeY4 https://archive.ph/lSeY4
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- wigster 3y ago[flagged]
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- bruce511 3y agoI had a similar reaction - I thought that the ice was reducing (which it is). Wait a bit no ice, no problem. The article speaks to that. The polar cap melting means thinner ice, which can in turn make sea lanes. Simplistically, no ice is fine, thick ice is fine, but when there's "thin" ice you need ice breakers. Russia doesn't have much in the way of non-polar coast (well, not the European end) so they've been breaking ice since forever. The US by comparison has very little polar coast and so less need for icebreakers. Frankly, not sure it needs them at all except for bragging rights. Canadians maybe, but not sure about the US.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dingosity 3y agoDo we really need to OWN icebreakers? Maybe we could start a website where countries and companies who own icebreakers can operate them for the benefit of other countries and companies who want to use them. They just walk to the shore in the Canadian north, click the "Call Icebreaker" button on the app and wait for an icebreaker someone else owns to arrive.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- omginternets 3y agoGenerally speaking, states try to avoid having critical dependencies on other states, because they become points of leverage for adversarial foreign policy. For the purposes of keeping America running, yes, we really do need to own icebreakers in the same way that we need to own powerplants, steel mills, chip foundries and and refineries.
- georgeg23 3y agoBut then market pressures for efficiency will lead to mergers and acquisitions...
- Alupis 3y agoVersus being quite literally held hostage by a non-cooperating foreign power for political gain? Things like energy independence sound cute and quaint until you find yourself being taken advantage of at best, or ground to a halt during armed conflict at worst.
- tristanb 3y agoJust wait a few years, there won't be any ice.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- notamy 3y agoMeta: What is it about this post that attracted so many flippant comments? Non-meta: Why does the US have so few of these ships? Were more just not produced? I didn’t see an answer in the article but it’s possible I missed it.
- FourHand451 3y agoNon-meta Answer from user @bruce511: "Russia doesn't have much in the way of non-polar coast (well, not today European end) so they've been breaking ice since forever. The US by comparison has very little polar coast and so less need for icebreakers."
- hef19898 3y agoIcebreakers? No need, as simple as that.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- phkahler 3y ago>> Why does the US have so few of these ships? Were more just not produced? I didn’t see an answer in the article but it’s possible I missed it. Article mentions that as the polar ice melts there is MORE activity up there which increases the need for these ships. And the US is about to have just one left, which for some reason in down for maintenance in... the winter?
- ahi 3y agoNot a huge need, really just Alaska and the Great Lakes. For geostrategic purposes, our friends to the north have something like 20 including a couple heavies.
- notamy 3y agoInteresting. I would have thought that the Great Lakes would be important to keep cleared and necessitate more than 1-2.
- mschuster91 3y agoSurprise, this is what happens when you shift everything in heavy industry or production in general off to India and China without keeping at least some production domestic or at least have everything documented and regularly (i.e. once every ten years) check if the documentation is accurate and workers can understand it to build a product that meets specifications.
- appleiigs 3y agoThe U.S. doesn't have a centrally planned economy. Each business is free to do as it wishes... and if they wished to survive competitively, they moved their production offshore (helps avoid UAW strikes). Easy to know U.S. lost expertise, but tough question how do you get it back? Tariffs? A larger military-industrial complex? Even larger government?
- mschuster91 3y ago> The U.S. doesn't have a centrally planned economy. You don't need a centrally planned economy. Subsidies are enough incentive to at least keep a bit of production around. > Easy to know U.S. lost expertise, but tough question how do you get it back? Invest money into subsidies / R&D like in the icebreaker case, or raise tariffs against Chinese and Indian price dumping.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- User23 3y ago> The U.S. doesn't have a centrally planned economy. Each business is free to do as it wishes... Currently US federal government spending is around 36% of GDP, which means 36% of the US economy is in fact centrally planned, albeit with some devolution in some cases.
- hwillis 3y agoI don't really disagree with you, but that's very misleading to say. 64% of the federal budget goes to social security, medicare/medicaid, disability etc. That is, it goes to individuals. It's not meaningful to call that economic planning. It's not in the slightest like paying for defense contractors or research or infrastructure. 11% goes to interest payments, ie people who bought bonds etc. For individuals that's certainly not central planning, since they are the ones who decided to buy. A large amount goes towards paying of quant. easing etc, but it seems a little goofy to count that like we spend it every year still.
- cm2187 3y ago> designers, engineers and welders grapple with something the U.S. hasn’t done in decades: reliably shape hardened steel that is more than an inch thick into a curved, reinforced ship’s hull I don't understand. Aren't modern military ships armoured anymore?
- andylynch 3y agoNo, they aren’t armoured nearly as much as WWII era ships; it shorten range, slows them down, and doesn’t really work against guided weapons
- hef19898 3y agoOr torpedoes.
- tomatotomato37 3y agoYeah, the dreadnaught arms race of the first part of the 20th century was kinda an anomaly in ship design, especially considering how little big-gun naval battles happened despite two world wars. Turns out up-armoring ships hard enough that they end up legitimately surviving a close range nuclear shockwave (look up Operation Crossroads) is actually a massive waste of resources.
- leeter 3y agoYes and no, the ship and crew might have survived. But the steel wasn't thick enough to block all the radiation. Moreover traditional ship design up until that point didn't handle Nuclear Biological, and Chemical threats well. They weren't really designed to be completely sealed. It's important to recognize that the assumption that the next war would be atomic killed a lot of technology paths because the people with the money assumed it was a waste of time to continue in those directions. By the time the military started to re-explore those paths the tech had languished. It's why the Iowas went back to sea with the Mk8 fire control computer, a completely analog computer. Because nobody had really bothered to build a better one for large caliber shells since WWII. But it's important to note that before the Iowas were given their final retirements into museum ships the Navy made sure to basically document everything they could about firing large caliber guns. Because when they initially pulled them out of mothballs in the 1980s they were woefully inaccurate, but by the time they were decommissioned for the final time they could hit a proverbial fly on a flag pole (allegedly). The other part of it was that the Soviet Union didn't really have a surface fleet to really speak of. They invested heavily in submarines, so consequently the US Navy focused heavily on ASW. So... nobody really knows how 16" of modern armor would fair against modern weapons, it's literally never been tried. Whereas you can find pictures from way back when they were testing guns, of how various shells fared against various thicknesses and types of armor. Long story short: We've forgotten most of what we knew about surface warfare, and we're starting to forget what we knew about shipbuilding and design. The US has outsourced all it's naval architecture and shipbuilding so long that the necessary skills are either all retired or lost.
- horeszko 3y agoMakes me wonder how much manufacturing knowledge has been lost in the west, and how long it might take to rediscover it all. Does anyone know of any good sources on this?
- deaddodo 3y agoStrictly speaking, none. The knowledge is all there, the problem is lack of experience/training.
- kevin_thibedeau 3y agoTraining is a cost center. Just put out a job req demanding 20 years experience in forging curved steel. Problem solves itself. Now just let me collect my plum consulting fee for this bit of genius business management advice.
- notsurenymore 3y ago> Now just let me collect my plum consulting fee for this bit of genius business management advice. Come on, you’ve got to at least offer them something other than what they’ve already been doing for years.
- 1970-01-01 3y agoIt's the skills that are lost. The knowledge is safe in print.
- moonchrome 3y agoThere's a lot of practical/contextual knowledge that isn't documented, and what's documented isn't guaranteed to be correct or can be misleading (terminology changes, standards change, some things are implied because they are obvious at the time, etc.)
- bluGill 3y ago
- HankB99 3y agoTwo articles now I try to access the content at archive.ph and cannot make it past the Captcha. I've disabled uBlock Origin and that seems to make no difference. Is anyone else seeing this and if so, have a solution? (Firefox 117.0.1 (64-bit) on Debian Linux.)
- notamy 3y ago1.1.1.1 does not work with archive.ph and the related family of archive sites, due to choices on the archive.* end of things. See ex. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36970702 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36970702
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- rkagerer 3y agoAre you with Starlink by any chance? Had similar trouble from one of their IP's, but a different ISP's (same device) is working fine.
- Tangurena2 3y agoArchive.ph has trouble from time-to-time. Give it a couple hours and someone will "reboot the hamster".
- throe37848 3y agoDoes USA even have civilian dry docks to build ships? I thought everything was outsourced to Korea. I know it can build military vessels, but at horribly slow pace. Australia will get their nuclear submarines some time in 2040. I can not imagine building civilian nuclear ice breakers in US.
- Ekaros 3y agoAnd building ships isn't even that hard... Like a really nice passenger ships takes what 2 or 3 years?
- JacobThreeThree 3y ago>Does USA even have civilian dry docks to build ships? The article was about getting new ice breakers for the Coast Guard, a branch of the US military.
- Baeocystin 3y agoYes. The NASSCO shipyard in San Diego. I worked there as a ship welder for a while after the first .com crash, and two of the three ships I worked on were civilian.
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- willmadden 3y agoWe should buy the icebreakers and retrofit them minimally and inexpensively, not rebuild a niche industry just because we are running out of 50+ year old icebreakers in the Coast Guard.
- cpursley 3y agoEverybody likes to dump on Russia here but their nuclear icebreakers are something to behold: https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2022/may/worlds-most-capable-icebreakers-russias-new-arktika-class https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2022/may/worlds-m... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKaVhXn49xY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKaVhXn49xY
- xvedejas 3y agoPeople don't dump on Russia for their nuclear icebreakers ;) Maybe in an alternate, more peaceful world, Russia would be happily selling icebreakers to the US for profit?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- 0xDEF 3y agoIt is actually a surprising that Russia is not the manufacturing capital of the world. They have super-cheap energy, Soviet-era high-quality STEM education, and 50 million cheap workers from Caucasus, Siberia, Far East Russia, and the Central Asian countries.
- EliRivers 3y agoSoviet-era high-quality STEM education The last batch of such manufacturing apprentices went through in the mid-eighties. They're just about all gone from the workplace.
- moffkalast 3y agoFun fact, the USCGC Healy is the ship that the Half Life 2 Borealis model is based on.
- impish9208 3y agoDupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37548091 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37548091