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The Navy’s next-generation aircraft carrier, USS Gerald R. Ford, is a monument to the Navy’s and defense industry’s ability to justify spending billions on unproven technologies that often deliver worse performance at a higher cost.
[...] The Navy had expected to have the ship delivered in 2014 at a cost of $10.5 billion.
Instead, because the Navy tried to develop more than a dozen new and risky technologies at the same time it was building the ship, the schedule has slipped by more than three years. And, the cost has increased to $12.9 billion -- nearly 25 percent over budget.
For all this time and money, a 2015 Defense Department operational testing report concluded that “poor or unknown reliability” of the newly designed catapults, arresting gear, weapons elevators and radar could affect the Ford’s ability to generate sorties, make the ship more vulnerable to attack, or create limitations during routine operations.
The problems with the ship’s systems, including the catapult, are well-known.
But President Donald Trump still caught virtually every Pentagon watcher off guard when he told Time magazine in May that he had directed the Navy to abandon the new “digital” aircraft catapult on future Ford-class carriers. Instead he wants the Navy to revert to the proven steam catapults, which have been in use for decades. The president is correct when he says there are significant problems with the Ford’s “digital” catapult, but abandoning it in future ships will pose significant problems.
The Ford’s “digital” catapult is, in fact, the Electromagnetic Launch System, or EMALS. In the long run, it is intended to be lighter, more reliable, and less expensive than the steam system. Unfortunately, EMALS is immature technology. So far, the program has not lived up to the promises made.
Steam-powered catapults, though said to be maintenance-intensive, are proven technology. They have been in service with continuous upgrades and satisfactory reliability for more than half a century.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday June 10 2017, @06:34AM (6 children)
Do those EMALS need to mature only when mounted on a ship?
I mean, what difference does it make if one makes a mockup earthen platform to model the ship's takeoff strip and mature those catapults however long they want there?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 10 2017, @06:46AM
So as long as you manage to get your leech(es) onboard their ship, it's gonna suck for quite a while.
I mean look at the stuff they build nowadays. It's not like the old days where it actually seemed like they were trying (not always succeeding) to build stuff that was combat effective. e.g. A10 Thunderbolt. The new gen stuff just seem to be built with the priority of extracting money.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 10 2017, @12:31PM
The catapult failures were apparent on the land-based test bed. Ditto the arresting gear (made by the same company).
But like most Navy boondoggles (the LCS ships, the Zumwalt, rail guns, etc.) it was still Full Flux Ahead! (no steam, just magnetic flux, get it?).
The Navy is all fluxed up.
(Score: 2) by sgleysti on Saturday June 10 2017, @06:08PM (3 children)
I came here to ask the same thing. Give them a well-funded R&D team and a decade to make the thing reliable on a land-based platform and only then integrate it into your newest ship. The same should apply for any other subsystem. How is this not standard practice?
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday June 10 2017, @09:33PM
Based in the prev answers, seems like is no longer a matter of getting a product done well, but rather "how can we grab more money from the suckers?".
USA is on the way down.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Sunday June 11 2017, @06:40AM (1 child)
Because the US Navy will order about a dozen Ford-class, and they will mostly be the same ship.
So you put the fancy new electromagnetic catapults, billed as much better for drone launching, because the next opportunity for a redesign will be, literally, 40 years later.
Regardless of what the Orangissimo says, changing to steam is a full ship redesign, which would cost a decade. And when the last one built is 40 years old, 60 years from now, the steam cat will be a major problem to launch the drone swarms which will have supplanted the ridiculous F35C.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday June 11 2017, @01:01PM
The worst possible scenario is changing from electric to steam. Until after WWII they always used hydraulic pressure so just hook up the power lines to a motor/pump combo in the switchgear room, its not that big of a deal. Before cats, during WWII they used rocket assisted takeoff too.
A more conspiratorial view is they need megawatts of electrical power on deck for something thats still secret. Charging some EMP weapon. Or lasers to mount on the heads of sharks. Or very fast charging of a large semi-autonomous drone swarm. Or charging literally electrically powered non-drone aircraft.
Or the fighter mafia just got kneecapped and the future belongs to tilt rotors and helis. This isn't necessarily a problem. From the point of view of an infantryman who's theoretically being supported by the navy, would you rather have our navy competing in a DSW with our air force, or would you rather have our navy supporting you with 10x as many helicopters for insertion/extraction, medivac, and supplies? Whoops our carriers can't compete with the airforce anymore, oh well, we'll just be even more combat capable with a zillion helis.