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Little Honking Ships......

so we wander?
Interesting about quality and work ethic?
I just read several articles in the Jan 20th edition of the CFB Esquimalt newspaper "Lookout" that had praise for the work done on the Winnipeg's  refit.
They even gave a plaque.
If this was a sincere gesture for real quality, it would be a refreshing thought. 
 
There has been little complaints about the work done by Vic Ships. Since they do not "own" the graving dock they have to get ships in an out in a timely manner. They cannot afford to have ship's come back due to shoddy work. They must be doing decent work because there is a constant stream of vessels (BC Ferries, Cruise ships, fishing vessels etc) in and out of the dock. I understand that CRCN had a rep from Vic Ships go to ISL to try to improve the culture there. I have no idea if it was successful or not.
They work they did on WIN after the allission (in conjunction with FMF Cape Breton) was done over in the dry dock in Esquimalt. WIN sails this week, so we shall see how the repairs really turned out.
 
I'd like to get back to the "little honking ships" idea. I came across this link while reading Janes today: http://www.huntingtoningalls.com/flight2/

It looks like a practical solution to the little honking ship conundrum. It's bases on the proven and modern LPD17 but at 30% cheaper. The manufacturer claims it can fulfill several of the roles we've identified such as Humanitarian, Hospital, Task Force Command and Control, Amphibious Warfare, etc.

While I'm not qualified to say this is what we need, it certainly looks interesting to this old Sea King magician.
 
Just my opinion: Little honking ships should not be on the bucket list right now. 

With destroyers approaching 55 years service or more before replacement, and frigates probably more than 32 years old before replacement, the priority needs to be a much scaled down CSC that is very inexpensive and uncomplicated to build very quickly.

LeadMark is long dead, and anyone can read the tea leaves and see that the government will NEVER purchase 15 or 16 high technology, high cost ships )>> Let's all be realists and pragmaticly understand that the politics in shipbuilding has basically ensured that major capital warship construction programs consisting of vessels of warfighting design are forever done in Canada. The APS and maybe one or 2 second hand but still fairly modern US built frigates is all that is could materialize after FELEX is completed, but even that is a stretch of the imagination. At that point the DDG's will be long gone and then FFG's just rusting away anyway.

We can, however, build in-shore or mid shore patrol vessels (possibly light weight Corvettes) quickly and inexpensively. They are cheap, harmless [in the sense that they would have virtually no heavy armament), not generally globally deployable and so politically very safe, and thus also dispensing with the need for expensive tankers etc.

I think that is the future of the Navy unless they start cutting steel and placing machinery and equipment orders for several CSC within the next 10 months, and certainly well before the next election.     

And if that Algerian LPD approaches Hibernia or any part of the Rock, we can always take them to Sanctimony Court (:)) , because we are just that much more civilized than the rest of the world....
   
 
The Flight 11 has eliminated the hanger space and a/c maintenance facilities.  Makes it suitable for staging a/c but certainly not for embarking any for any type of extended cruise.  Salt water is hell on airframes and you certainly can't leave 'em tied down on the deck during any kind of rough weather and winter ops. 
 
Not quite sure if Whiskey 601 was being facetious or not but I'm pretty sure that replacing the frigates and destroyers with low capability corvettes actually doesn't do anything useful for the navy. It puts us into the third world level of maritime capability. There is a fair argument to be made that we need a class of ship larger, faster and more capable than the KIN class but smaller than a frigate or CSC.

No doubt that there is plenty of political dithering on moving forward on ship replacement and I suspect there always will be. Ultimately, retaining our role as a middle level naval power will be seen as important. The importance of ensuring west coast maritime trade and security is only going to grow with the expansion of energy product exports to the Far East.

 
Sailorwest said:
Not quite sure if Whiskey 601 was being facetious or not but I'm pretty sure that replacing the frigates and destroyers with low capability corvettes actually doesn't do anything useful for the navy. It puts us into the third world level of maritime capability. There is a fair argument to be made that we need a class of ship larger, faster and more capable than the KIN class but smaller than a frigate or CSC.

No doubt that there is plenty of political dithering on moving forward on ship replacement and I suspect there always will be. Ultimately, retaining our role as a middle level naval power will be seen as important. The importance of ensuring west coast maritime trade and security is only going to grow with the expansion of energy product exports to the Far East.


I think whiskey601 is telling a fiscal truth. The old Canada First Defence Strategy promised to reduce defence spending, measured as a percentage of GDP, over a thirty year period. There is a new CFDS in the mill, I hear, and I really doubt that it will promise more money.

We are almost clear of Afghanistan and the Conservatives have other priorities ~and so do the Liberal and NDP, by the way, so don't look to the opposition benches for anything except deeper and deeper cuts. It has been this way for 60 years.

Put simply, I believe that we, Canada, cannot afford are unwilling to pay for a full blown, general purpose, combat capable military with new, first rate destroyers and frigates, three mechanized brigades and an Air Force with F-35s. I have no idea which we are not going to get: my gut says that the government may decide to get new ships and new combat aircraft and allow the army to wither on the vine, collapsing it into something affordable.

 
Hey, if we can't afford mukluks we can't afford rowboats let alone "honking" ships of any size.

>:D ::) ;D :'(
 
There is, at the policy level, and absolute, overarching requirement to balance the federal budget in 2015. There is nothing, anywhere in the Government of Canada, that comes anywhere near that single, political imperative. The budget will be balanced.

No one gives a sweet rat's ass about the Department of National Defence or the Canadian Forces or ships or mukluks ... except that you may have ships and mukluks after you have paid your full and fair share (and then some) towards balancing the budget. We went through this in the 1990s, during Prime Minister Chrétien's decade of darkness ~ his wasn't the first; that came, for me, in the Pearson/Diefenbaker era and was followed by real pain in the Trudeau years ~ and these "lean years" will not be the last ones, and nothing that people of my age endured compared, even remotely, to the 1930s. So: get used to it ~ this is what is meant by "the horrors of peacetime soldiering." You will, eventually, get new kit: possibly, even probably not what you want or what you said you needed; you will get what the people of Canada are prepared to buy, nothing more ... until Canadian Forces members start dying, in fairly large numbers, on "some corner of a foreign field."

I will repeat, over and over again: all the "support the troops" stuff, the red T-shirts and yellow ribbons and so on, may be a mile wide but it is, barely, an inch deep.

 
Sailorwest:I was not being facetious, even more I do not agree that Canada is a middle power currently except in the minds of dreamers, and i would go further to suggest that possibly Canada never was a middle with the exception of 1944-1960, and even then only in some marginal circumstances (5 divisions in Europe followed by a whopping big but temporary period as an air power in NATO in the fifties)  or events such as Suez.

I think Australia is rising to be a lower middle power ( in a military sense) while Canada is rapidly heading in the other direction. Germany, India, and Turkey are middle powers because they have military capability, real economic and political influence and are not very willing to do anything, anywhere, unless it is in their own best interest.

My main concern with all this talk about ships is that we are bombarded with fanciful and outrageously optimistic plans, repetitive words of little meaning, and the bilges overfilled with political BS. Until steel is being cut there is no truth to any of it and that will be the case today, next month or likely even in the next years. After that, the process is simply pointless. Bottom line is that No political document like a new CFDS will be able to overcome the lack of desire to defend the country properly. Unfortunately it will take a serious blood letting at all levels (civilian and military) and loss of a meaningful chunk of sovereign land to change that.....
 
jollyjacktar said:
ER, I hate it when you're right like this.
I've found he can be like that quite often when discussing things where government and military..... collide. 

Why, you'd almost think he'd "been there, done that"  :nod:
 
From a conceptual level, the LPD "Flight II" idea is very appealing, and adding back the hanger and AC facilities provides a means of creating a CSC. The CSC built on that platform will be larger and probably slower than many of its counterparts in other navies, but a hull that can be used as a BMD platform is large enough to do several upgrade cycles and add on a great many extra capabilities over the years. (Indeed, with the right sensor suite and the ability to carry a really large number of rounds on board, a CSC built on that platform will actually be closer to an Arleigh Burke class Aegis cruiser). And as an added bonus, since the ships would be built on an assembly line basis, there would be the ability to gain economies of scale as well.

Sadly, since it seems virtually impossible to get even a simple procurement program like new boots or replacement trucks done in a timely manner internally, and external budget pressures and lack of political support deny us resources anyway, this is interesting speculation and nothing more.
 
All we have to do is move past this idea of an outrageously expensive building program and it can all make sense.  I also would argue that capable and deployable corvettes would be an option, but in combination with a fewer number of frigates/destroyers.  Say purchase 10 of the Iver Class with as much value added for Canadian companies as possible and then build 12-16 very capable Corvettes that can handle coastal patrols, as well as escort/anti-piracy/anti-sub duties.  Spend $10 billion on the frigates/destroyers, $5-6 billion on the Corvettes, $2 billion on the AOP's and $2 billion on the AOR's, and it's all in for $20 billion.  Tweak the numbers a bit and it can be everything in for $20 billion, icebreakers, etc, included.

Also, it would likely be possible to build the Ivers and the Corvettes for less if it was necessary.  I don't buy the idea that it can't be done this way, it's an issue of pitching it the right way to Canadians.  One, we simply don't have money for this building program, so we either do it differently or the military may not be able to remain functional.  Two, if we buy some of the ships from other countries here's all the contracts we can get for Canadian companies which will build up Canadian industry. 

I'd still build some ships with Seaspan as I do have some confidence in them.  I'd cancell the program as a whole then give the contract for the Corvettes to Davie becuase they seem to have a production mentality.  You come up with a realistic plan and sell it.  In my mind, right now, that building program seems pretty much dead, isn't it??  Is it realistic to beleive that it's really going to go forward?

 
I'm sure canceling the program would end up costing us as nearly as much as just building the ships, as I'm sure there are large cancellation penalties built in.

Maybe we could just focus on maintaining the few ships we have left first, then working on replacing key requirements, like being able to refuel.  The AORs are at the end of their life support, and the 280s are winding down over the next few years before they become razor blades and I-beams, and cost a fortune to put to sea anyway.  Get rid of those, focus on what is left, and then when we have a few properly maintained and capable vessels, plus the critical auxiliary ships (tugs, fire boats, fuel barges, etc), see what's left to build new.

I seriously doubt we will have much of a real blue boat navy capability left within 10 years due to the costs.  Even if we do, they are looking at diesel powered ships, which is kind of shortsighted given that oil will become increasingly (possibly prohibitively) expensive over the 40 year lifespan.
 
Diesel fuel will be relatively cheap and abundant for decades to come, even if we only depend on Canadian sources. The oil sands are the second largest deposit of hydrocarbons on Earth, and new technologies like fracking are bringing new sources of oil production on line. Just read the "No Oil" thread.

And of course new developments in power technology will make diesel and turbine engines more efficient (modern container ships use heat recovery to generate steam power from their diesel engines, for example), and new technologies like Solid Oxide Fuel Cells may emerge to supplement or replace diesel and turbine engines.

To go really far on a limb, there are nuclear technologies like molten salt reactors which are close to commercial application and would be robust and low cost enough to power ships. So from a technical POV there are plenty of ways to power ships into the future.
 
It's not that oil won't be available; but even with highly efficient engines the actual fuel consumption for a ship that size are many tanker trucks every single day, just to be out at sea puttering around at low speeds.  At full power, you can go through a normal household oil tank faster then you can drink a coffee.

Even at today's costs, operations are being limited because of how much it costs to fill the tanks.  Actually one more reason to get rid of the 280s; as an (almost) completely first generation gas turbine ship they are pigs.
 
Agree that moving something as big as a ship will require lots of energy (and that will mean diesel for the foreseeable future), just not as pessimistic that this won't be doable. In the private sector they do things as seemingly ridiculous as using jet airfreight to fly fresh cut flowers from Colombia to market daily, so long as there is a compelling reason to do something (make a profit, defend the nation) then it can be done.
 
From a fuel consumption point of view, a "Small-Honking-Ship" capable of a maximum sustained speed of 20-21 Kts using an all diesel-electric power plant with azipods is likely to consume much less than the FFH's.
 
A bit of a tangent, but Rolls Royce is working on totally unmanned cargo ships. While the "LHS" is explicitly about carrying troops, unmanned cargo ships might be a compliment in some future operation. All we have to remember is not to put everything on one ship (like the Brits did with the cargo ship "Atlantic Conveyor" during the Falklands War; a single missile destroyed virtually all the Chinook helicopters for the task force...). Self defense "pods" designed to the same form factor as an ISO container could line the top layer, providing extra combat power in the form of missile launchers remoted from the command ship, for example.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-02-25/rolls-royce-drone-ships-challenge-375-billion-industry-freight.html

Rolls-Royce Drone Ships Challenge $375 Billion Industry: Freight

By Isaac Arnsdorf Feb 25, 2014 3:18 PM ET

In an age of aerial drones and driver-less cars, Rolls-Royce (RR/) Holdings Plc is designing unmanned cargo ships.

Rolls-Royce’s Blue Ocean development team has set up a virtual-reality prototype at its office in Alesund, Norway, that simulates 360-degree views from a vessel’s bridge. Eventually, the London-based manufacturer of engines and turbines says, captains on dry land will use similar control centers to command hundreds of crewless ships.

Drone ships would be safer, cheaper and less polluting for the $375 billion shipping industry that carries 90 percent of world trade, Rolls-Royce says. They might be deployed in regions such as the Baltic Sea within a decade, while regulatory hurdles and industry and union skepticism about cost and safety will slow global adoption, said Oskar Levander, the company’s vice president of innovation in marine engineering and technology.

“Now the technology is at the level where we can make this happen, and society is moving in this direction,” Levander said by phone last month. “If we want marine to do this, now is the time to move.”

The European Union is funding a 3.5 million-euro ($4.8 million) study called the Maritime Unmanned Navigation through Intelligence in Networks project. The researchers are preparing the prototype for simulated sea trials to assess the costs and benefits, which will finish next year, said Hans-Christoph Burmeister at the Fraunhofer Center for Maritime Logistics and Services CML in Hamburg.

Developing Designs

Even so, maritime companies, insurers, engineers, labor unions and regulators doubt unmanned ships could be safe and cost-effective any time soon.

While the idea of automated ships was first considered decades ago, Rolls-Royce started developing designs last year. Marine accounts for 16 percent of the company’s revenue, data compiled by Bloomberg show. Descended from the luxury car brand now operated by Bayerische Motoren Werke AG, Rolls-Royce also makes plane engines and turbines.

The company’s schematics show vessels loaded with containers from front to back, without the bridge structure where the crew lives. By replacing the bridge -- along with the other systems that support the crew, such as electricity, air conditioning, water and sewage -- with more cargo, ships can cut costs and boost revenue, Levander said. The ships would be 5 percent lighter before loading cargo and would burn 12 percent to 15 percent less fuel, he said.

Safety Standards

Crew costs of $3,299 a day account for about 44 percent of total operating expenses for a large container ship, according to Moore Stephens LLP, an industry accountant and consultant.

The potential savings don’t justify the investments that would be needed to make unmanned ships safe, said Tor Svensen, chief executive officer of maritime for DNV GL, the largest company certifying vessels for safety standards.

“I don’t think personally that there’s a huge cost-benefit in unmanned ships today, but technologically it’s possible,” Svensen said Feb. 4 at a conference in New York. “My prediction is that it’s not coming in the foreseeable future.”

While each company can develop its own standards, the 12-member International Association of Classification Societies in London hasn’t developed unified guidelines for unmanned ships, Secretary Derek Hodgson said.

“Can you imagine what it would be like with an unmanned vessel with cargo on board trading on the open seas? You get in enough trouble with crew on board,” Hodgson said by phone Jan. 7. “There are an enormous number of hoops for it to go through before it even got onto the drawing board.”

Regulating Ships

Unmanned ships are currently illegal under international conventions that set minimum crew requirements, said Simon Bennett, a spokesman for the London-based International Chamber of Shipping, an industry association representing more than 80 percent of the global fleet. The organization isn’t seriously considering the issue, he said by phone Feb. 6.

The country where a ship is registered is responsible for regulating vessels within its own waters and for enforcing international rules, said Natasha Brown, a spokeswoman for the International Maritime Organization, the United Nations agency in London that has overseen global shipping for almost 70 years.

The IMO hasn’t received any proposals on unmanned, remote-controlled ships, she said in a Feb. 6 e-mail. IMO regulations apply to seagoing vessels trading internationally and exceeding 500 gross tons, except warships and fishing boats.

As long as drone ships don’t comply with IMO rules, they would be considered unseaworthy and ineligible for insurance, according to Andrew Bardot, secretary and executive officer of the London-based International Group of P&I Clubs, whose 13 members cover 90 percent of the global fleet.

Union Opposition

The International Transport Workers’ Federation, the union representing about 600,000 of the world’s more than 1 million seafarers, is opposed.

“It cannot and will never replace the eyes, ears and thought processes of professional seafarers,” Dave Heindel, chairman of the ITF’s seafarers’ section in London, said in an e-mailed statement. “The human element is one of the first lines of defense in the event of machinery failure and the kind of unexpected and sudden changes of conditions in which the world’s seas specialize. The dangers posed to the environment by unmanned vessels are too easily imagined.”

Levander of Rolls-Royce said the transition will happen gradually as computers increase their role in navigation and operations. Container ships and dry-bulk carriers will probably be the first to forgo crews, he said. Tankers hauling hazardous materials such as oil and liquefied natural gas will probably remain manned longer because of the perception that having people on board is safer, he said.

Redundant Systems

Crews will offer no safety advantage after ships evolve equipment for remote control, preventive maintenance and emergency back-ups, Levander said. Unmanned ships will need constant and comprehensive computer monitoring to anticipate failures in advance and “redundant” systems to kick in, similar to those on airplanes, he said.

The computers would also be constantly analyzing operations data to improve efficiency and save money, he said. Cameras and sensors can already detect obstacles in the water better than the human eye.

“It’s a given that the remote-controlled ship must be as safe as today,” Levander said. “But we actually think it can be even much safer than today.”

Human error causes most maritime accidents, often relating to fatigue, according to Allianz Global Corporate & Specialty AG. Total losses are declining, with 106 in 2012, 24 percent below the 10-year average, according to the most recent data from the unit of the Munich-based insurer.

Repatriating Sailors

Unmanned ships would also reduce risks such as piracy, since there would be no hostages to capture, Levander said. It would also eliminate liability for repatriating sailors when owners run out of money or abandon crews, which has stranded at least 2,379 people in the past decade.

Drone ships would become vulnerable to a different kind of hijacking: from computer hackers. While the technology may never be fully secure, it needs to be so difficult to break that it’s not worth the effort, according to Levander.

Unmanned ships would still require captains to operate them remotely and people to repair and unload them in port. These workers would have better quality of life compared with working at sea, Levander said.

Academic Debate

Currently the debate is more academic than operational, said Peter Sand, an analyst at the Bagsvaerd, Denmark-based Baltic and International Maritime Council, whose members control about 65 percent of the global fleet. None of them have raised the question of drone ships with the trade group, he said.

Levander is accustomed to chilly receptions. When he broached the subject at an industry conference in London last May, the audience audibly scoffed, and other speakers on Levander’s panel dismissed the idea.

“If everybody in the industry would say, ‘Yes, this is the way to go,’ then we are too late,” Levander said. “I expect ship owners to be conservative, but it will change.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Isaac Arnsdorf in New York at iarnsdorf@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Millie Munshi at mmunshi@bloomberg.net
 
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