Donald Trump wants the Navy to rip out an electromagnetic launch system and replace it with a steam one.
Once again, the dimwitted President has gone full Juggalo.
Could you imagine the dumb shit Harris would be doing as president?
This mother fucker said magnets stop working in the water and are therefore a stupid thing to put on a boat.
This can’t be my original timeline. This is the demented rantings of an old man. But he happens to be the fucking president…
Fuck this.
The timeline split in 2000.
Man I wish I was in the other one and Bush wasn’t able to steal the election from Gore.
They must have it good over there.
FUUUCK
Still haunted by hanging chads. Fuck
I’ve launched off the front of aircraft carriers hundreds of times, have a Master’s degree in aeronautical engineering, and am a test pilot and even I wouldn’t suggest to the Navy how to engineer specific systems on its ships,
Naval aviator, combat veteran, test pilot, aeronautical engineer, space shuttle pilot, space shuttle commander, captain Mark Kelly significantly understates his qualifications. People who know a lot of stuff usually know what they don’t know.
Its why I hate being the “smart one” at work and amongst friends and family. The smartest people I know don’t automatically answer every question they get asked or don’t take it upon themselves to find an answer. I have some fucking horrible compulsion to find the correct answer to everything.
The smartest people I know can stick to their domain. They seem far less stressed. And they are able to be content knowing there are things they don’t know.
To me, knowing a lot doesnt equate to intelligence in the slightest.
The more you learn, the more you realize just how much knowledge you lack. And it never stops getting worse. At some point I started realizing there were things I didn’t even understand how I knew them. I’m sure all of you are aware of how disturbing that feels. The inability to provide knowledge of the self.
I would NEVER give medical or legal, or safety advice outside of the realm of electronics and softwate. I can certainly tell you what I know but I will also tell you that a person with a license and malpractice insurance behind them is necessary to tell you want to do with that knowledge.
People don’t like that. People don’t like it when they think you are smart and state something “without confidence like that.” They like it even less when they find out your knowledge was sufficient and they “wasted money on a professional.”
Trump does this shit the same reasons mid level and higher level managers do all their stupid shit. Because people prefer it when you are strictly confident, especially when you are confident about something that would benefit them, completely detached from the reality if it will or won’t.
I was talking with a retired admiral this morning about this issue. He said it can’t be done without rebuilding half the ship. You would have to rip out and then relocate most of the engineering compartments.
Yeah, they are not going to do this. They will redefine electromagnetic launchers as steam launchers before they actually dismantle an aircraft carrier.
Standard Tactical Electric Acceleration Mechanism.
You misjudge the motivation, which is probably to spur massive payments for renovations from contractors that will send kickbacks.
I hate that this is correct.
Me too brother, me too.
So the case is EMALS had a few corners cut when it was put in. Long story short it’s isolation issues. The old steam systems could isolate a track, the electrical system is just one big unified thing. So on steam, a track goes down they can just turn off that track and keep launching on the others. On the electrical one track goes down, they have to shut the whole thing off, zero aircraft get launched.
There’s already contracts to fix this issue being put out. But this happens with Government projects. Corners get cut to hit a deadline, those cut corners then come back to haunt everyone.
And the thing is what the Government sees isn’t the whole picture. They’re looking at the metric of “number of planes system got into the air”. Which I’m sure we all understand averages here. If a system is getting a 0/hour when one track goes down, that zero brings that average down hard.
But very few want to go back to steam. It’s very costly, requires a lot of very specialized equipment to house all the high pressure systems, and some drones we toss into the air with these systems aren’t made to take the sudden thrust steam gives it. The EMALS system can give a very clean and well defined ramp up for thrust that drone engineers can build around.
But this is one of those things where some wise guy’s cut corners idea starts to threaten a full project because people start getting all worried about sunk costs and what not. But the electrical system is flawed, but we can work around those flaws to bring better isolation to it. It’s just going to take time because… you know, it’s a military vessel, it’s kind of hard to be like “let’s just drag it out of an active war zone and dry dock it for half a year.” Clocks tick differently on projects like that.
But going back to steam, and to be fair it took a while to properly develop those systems as well, is less than ideal. It’s got a much high cost and takes a whole lot more maintenance to keep running. And some aircraft we’d have to yank off duty and fix them to handle steam’s level of yeeting things. But Congress and what not aren’t looking at that dollar metric, they’re mostly focused on “how many aircraft did the system on average get into the air?”
But to be fair here, we are talking about some dude who decided to level an entire wing of the White House before actually going through any kind of approval or formalizing any kind of plan. So… He’s consistent in that whole doing shit and thinking about it later.
My guess is that Kegseth really wanted to see testosterone filled Seamen covered in hot, damp steam.
Universal Healthcare? HOW WILL WE PAY FOR IT!!! billions on pointless horseshit that will also have to be fixed with billions more when he’s gone? FINE!!!
Back to the steam age we go! Forget microcontrollers and magnets, we want steam and coal!
Not quite to the middle ages as I was expecting. The first industrial revolution would do.
Wait for it. It won’t stop in the middle ages, we are going dark in this motherfucker. It will take some time to fall that far into the abyss.
Ah yes, let’s get rid of actually good technology and go back to the fucking 1800s. What next, no more nuclear powered ships, only coal engines?
I mean, nuclear is just a steam engine with long lasting fuel…
hence why I said coal lol
also that is true for literally everything except wind and solar
Hey, enough of that! Stop insulting the Juggalos!
He most certainly is not ‘down with the clown’ .
EMALS is woke
This is consistent with all the other times the president ordered the government to spend billions of dollars to undo years of work.
Trump’s long-standing grudge against electromagnetic launchers seems to stem from his frustration about the production of the USS Gerald R. Ford, which cost roughly $13 billionto make and experienced delays and cost overruns. There’s no reason to think its launchers don’t work, however.
Anybody else have a boss that made a terrible decision that cost the company too much money. And rather than admitting they fucked up, they told everybody the entire process was wrong and needed to be fixed everywhere. Resulting in massive additional costs and an all around worse process.
I dont know the details but wouldnt steam make sense in case of an EMP? Taiwan is currently training loss of electricity too.
Of course this is probably just for like backup purposes. But you want the posibility of withstanding such an event and fend off possibly prepared attackers.
The demented 80 year old in charge thinks magnets don’t work when they get wet.
So the two systems are completely different. Classic steam cats use the steam generated by the propulsion plant to pressurize the catapults and propel planes off the carrier. EMALS uses the steam generated by the propulsion plant to generate electricity to launch planes similar to a railgun (as I understand it; might be wrong but the core concept is there). You can’t really have both, and retrofitting is costly and expensive, because now you need to be able to transport the steam to the right place, be able to contain the steam, etc. and that is not to mention any issues with whether or not the propulsion plant can produce the steam required to operate the cats. I have a hunch electricity generation is more efficient from a steam use perspective than steam cats.
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