Posted on 04/19/2005 3:48:36 PM PDT by Lysandru
This is turning into the Soviet Navy. They had some awesome ships (kirov) but could only afford 3 or 4.
Disgraceful that we're so poor now.
ok.
it is ugly as sin, but the design principles are sound.
I have a personal preference for the eventual development of fully external IPS pods, as it reduces the number of holes in the hull...
but ok, a good design overall.
I assume there will be an integration of stealth materials in the profile above the waterline, plus full prairie-masker underneath.
Stealth costs money.
(but none of that explains the 125% price hike for structural steel in 2004.)
possible correction(?): there is a lot of electronics on these ships, developed through the usual Pentagon pork process, which is new to the Navy and remarkably expensive, but which is NOT new to the civilian market and which costs far more and works less well than the civilian equivalent available through Radio Shack.
does that about cover it?
damn.
who has racked up the prices for their metal exports? we used to (circa 1995) get a hell of a lot of our metals from the former East Bloc (esp. Russia and Ukraine).
someone doing a little creative gouging?
A 14,000 ton "destroyer?"
I'm with you. The whole DD(X)/CG(X) is nutty. The AGS is not even developed yet. It's a classic "one ship does everything" (aka One size fits all) deal. Even the LCS which is considered littoral in nature weighs almost 3000 tons. (I served on an ocean going DE/FF that weight in at 2500 tons.) At least the LCS project makes sense and the cost is only around $210 million/ship.
http://www.naval-technology.com/projects/littoral/
The reason the DD(X) even came about was because the DD-21 become to big and expensive. Here's a good read on the subect, warning it's a big .pdf file, but worth the time if you want to understand this important topic.
http://www.fas.org/man/crs/RL32109.pdf
Like it or not, destroyers have traditionally been viewed as somewhat expendable. These are not expendable prices.
oh, wait, lemme guess...
demand from China for all industrial materials has racked up the prices.
>>125% in one year?
>>
>>good GOD!
>>
>>justified by what, energy costs for refinement and logistics???
Supply and demand. Econ 101.
Big chunks of China and India are becoming "middle class". This drives a lot of steel demand.
Thought you'd find this interesting.
hehhehheh yeah, i figured out that obvious bit in post 27
*shuffling feet sheepishly*
now I'm wondering why our domestic facilities are not ramping up production/capacity, if the prices are rising so fast.
demand from China for all industrial materials has racked up the prices.
Well, if so we should smile to see the amrket at work and insure we're well invested in key metals/mining corporations as they benefit from improved prices.
Back to the quality versus quantity debate.
Bush was attempting to protect the steel industry by slapping a large tariff on steel. It has backfired.
US Armed Force has no enemy to match in traditional warfare, but has the worst enemy that can never be defeated which is called the budget and the complaining congressmen.
I hold that tariffs are generally counterproductive.
(I except situations where tariffs are reprisals against other nations who place import tariffs on our goods, designed to artificially bolster *their* industries.)
ever heard of the technology/cost "death spiral"?
how right you are..
IIRC, it comes from airforce acquisitions tendencies.
the cost of planes keeps going up as they become more technologically sophisticated and multi-mission capable. this forces either an expansion of budget or a reduction of units purchased. as the budget cannot be infinitely expanded, this always means reduction in number of units purchased (which also drives up the per-unit cost by failing to spread the RD costs over more units), which leads to a much smaller inventory of units which are tasked to a larger number of jobs.
eventually, this trend leads to a point at which the airforce has wants to buy a plane which can do everything, but has only enough money to buy one of them.
it is called a death spiral.
though this logical extreme has never been reached in reality, practical limits have been reached several times in recent history (see nazi germany and, in some applications, the USSR)
Bookmarking.
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