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Are there any startups working on disrupting US Shipbuilding?
by JacobDotVI 3y ago
Are there any startups working on disrupting US Shipbuilding?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- echelon 3y agoThere should be. This is going to be a huge need. Autonomous ships will probably also be a big thing.
- Waterluvian 3y agoLike trains, autonomous ships fundamentally doesn’t seem to make any sense. What’s the upside? Having a crew of 19 instead of 22?
- ghaff 3y agoContainer ships already have tiny crews relative to the amount of goods they transport. The systems are already highly automated and you need some level of crew anyway for unexpected events, maintenance, etc. The idea that "automation" is this magical thing when the labor component is already pretty small is just silly.
- cesarb 3y ago> Like trains, autonomous ships fundamentally doesn’t seem to make any sense. Autonomous trains already exist, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_driverless_train_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_driverless_train_syste... for a long list of places where it's been implemented. The related article at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_train_operation#Advantages_of_GoA3+ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_train_operation#Adva... has a list with six advantages of autonomous trains. Many of these advantages would probably also apply to autonomous ships (and other kinds of vehicles).
- ghaff 3y agoIn spite of the intro, those seem to pretty much be all people-mover/metro systems. They're not long distance transport in potentially unpredictable conditions.
- GauntletWizard 3y agoAnd none of them are without support crew; The crew just doesn't need to ride on the train itself, but rather waits in stations or in depots along the tracks.
- ghaff 3y agoRight. You don't always need to have a driver potentially doing nothing 99% of the time. But you probably have remote and station staff a lot of the time.
- seanmcdirmid 3y agoI’m not sure why container ships couldn’t be piloted remote if drones are. It’s just that it is cheap to hire a bunch of sailors from the Philippines so automation isn’t really necessary.
- ghaff 3y agoYou probably want at least some on-site supervision. And most of your sailors are probably cheap anyway.
- pfisch 3y agocheap suicide drone ships full of explosives...
- Muromec 3y agoThat’s already a thing since the previous year
- Waterluvian 3y agoOkay if we’re talking boats, not ships, a ton of things change.
- 48864w6ui 3y agoHow about cheap drone ships (with suitable propulsion) just shouldering DDGs?
- kcb 3y agoSounds like a Torpedo.
- renewiltord 3y agoFully autonomous ships are pointless. But automation improvements across the US fleet while retaining reliability are a significant factor behind America's dominance of the seas.
- oneplane 3y agoAlready a thing (mostly remote controlled drone ships). But you'll always need mitigating controls for unexpected or low frequency events, and it's not always feasible to fly in a crew at which point the crew needs to be on board. This effectively is the same as the crew that's already there right now, so it doesn't actually impact all that much. The biggest benefit of remote, drone or automated piloting is the way you could make better use of a person's time, and maybe save a tiny amount of wages, but it's mostly the resulting functionality/features/business processes that is the benefit, not the headcount cost.
- CHB0403085482 3y agoThe problem is a skilled labor force for shipbuilding ie. too few of them.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- toomuchtodo 3y agoAlso union skilled workers who aren’t going to tolerate “hire fast, fire fast, fail fast.”
- astrange 3y agoWorkers are unionized in a lot of overseas industries that are more productive than the US. Don't know about Korea but they are in Japan and certainly in Europe. Part of it is have better union structures than we do; sectoral bargaining means any employers and unions spend less time fighting each other. A big problem for US shipbuilding is the Jones Act, which is so protectionist it's easier for the industry to flee the country entirely than deal with it. It's really harmful to our overseas areas like Hawaii and PR too.
- toomuchtodo 3y agoMy point was that you will not solve this with a startup, because of how a startup must operate due to its inherent nature (ruthlessly capital efficient, constrained runway). You must operate this as a long term, sustainable operation (perhaps a public private partnership), like you would build a nuclear reactor over years or a decade. To not do this is to ignore the muscle memory needed to retain the core component: teams of skilled labor with options. It’s a flywheel you bring up to speed with capital, a pipeline/book of work far into the future, and domain experienced management. Boeing is learning this the hard way currently, for example, and is in talks to buy the subcontractor (Spirit AeroSystems) it spun out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39571819 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39571819
- sanxiyn 3y ago
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 3y agoI'll just pop on over to the deep water port in my garage...
- throwawaysleep 3y agoBesides the unions preventing any real innovation in construction, I imagine finding customers would also be a challenge.
- sandworm101 3y agoNo. Shipbuilding isn't an area for startups and unions are a very very small hurdle compared to getting the necessary materials. Just think of the steel. Anyone can order a few tons of rebar, but ask for 10,000 tons of plate steel suitable for ships and you will be laughed at. That isn't sitting in a warehouse or a back lot waiting for customers. An order out of the blue might take years to fill. The people that make steel work with regular customers and will always put those regular paying customers above a random startup who might not ever pay. If anything, they will want insane down payments. Then think ship engines, the ones with blocks bigger than most houses. Order one of those out of the blue and, again not joking, it might be 10+ years. Those engines are targeting at future ships still on drawing boards, each is accounted for long before any metal is assembled. Any startup's order would be at the back of a very slow line. A startup wanting to get into ship construction would have more success launching a new social media system, getting lucky, IPO, then use that money to purchase an existing shipbuilder. But at that point the "startup" is really just another a hedge fund investing in ship construction.
- wizerdrobe 3y agoWhat makes this so much more impossible than SpaceX building rockets? Is the payoff worse for ship builders?
- sandworm101 3y agoTotally different scales. A falcon 9 rocket weights in at 550 tons, and most of that is fuel and the rest can be broken down into small parts. The average cargo ship might be 50,000 tonnes, literally orders of magnitude larger, and none of the major parts are road-mobile. The logistics are just totally different. Space X also competes in a rocket industry that is maybe 60 years old. Shipping is a 1000+ year-old industry making it, again, a couple orders of magnitude more mature. One might even argue that commercial cargo ships have existed for two, three or even four thousand years. Pharaoh paid someone to ship those blocks down river for the pyramids.
- roenxi 3y ago
- renewiltord 3y agoUSVs and autonomous torpedos are the future for this stuff. Conventional ships are more industrial.
- nickelpro 3y agoThere's no such thing as a blue water autonomous torpedo, there will always need to be a human-occupied platform to project power and manage military naval operations from. This is without getting into the obvious problems of "lol how do you plan to control your USV? Pacific ocean spanning tether?" As long as there are blue water navies, there will be military shipyards servicing them.
- mncharity 3y agoLooks like Boeing is finally delivering an "Orca" prototype XtraLargeUUV (85 t, 26 m) - more sub than torpedo. Seems to be pier deployment with 6k nm diesel/electric range.[1] [1] https://www.navalnews.com/event-news/sna-2024/2024/01/us-navy-expects-more-orca-extra-large-uuv-deliveries-this-year/ https://www.navalnews.com/event-news/sna-2024/2024/01/us-nav...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- renewiltord 3y agoVery cool. Thanks for sharing that.
- nostrademons 3y agoI wonder if instead of disrupting U.S. shipbuilding, it would be more cost effective to figure out containerization of weaponry. Figure out how to land a drone in a shipping container and you might be able to turn any standard civilian container ship into an aircraft carrier with 1000 drones, 10x the air wing of a modern fleet carrier. You also trivialize logistics for this - the armaments, fuel, spare drones, sensors, etc. also go in containers, and resupply could be done at any container port and carried by any other container ship. There's a long history of this in both world wars, eg. auxiliary cruisers and escort carriers, and they were fairly effective. See eg. the Battle of Samar, where 18 escort carriers and their destroyer escorts took on most of the Japanese battle fleet and won.
- nickelpro 3y agoSimilar ideas have been tried in the past, they always end the same way. The converted civilian ship has zero survivability and is sunk by the first passing warship to the embarrassment of all the planners involved. Today such vessels are so susceptible to anti-ship missiles and submarines that they're laughed out of any serious military planning meeting where the participants aren't already desperate for tonnage.
- nostrademons 3y agoRight, but I wonder if developments in the rest of weaponry have changed the calculus around that. It's pretty likely that a fleet carrier or other purpose-built warship also has zero survivability in the face of a barrage of anti-ship cruise missiles too. That's what recent wargames have shown, and also has been born out by Russian experience in Ukraine. The strategy for survivability is "don't let hostiles get within your air defense bubble, and shoot as many missiles down with your CIWS as you can if they do." An escort drone carrier could follow that strategy as well, and much more cheaply. The point is to make them expendable and cheap. Yes, if they get hit they're gone - that was always the case in WW2 as well - but there are now so many more options for blowing everything else out of the water that might get close.
- 3y ago