That's still just a weird lookin' ship.USS Zumwalt in the Pacific Ocean
That's still just a weird lookin' ship.USS Zumwalt in the Pacific Ocean
All that enclosed volume above the main deck to get the stealthy shape makes me think "that'll capsize in a light breeze with gentle waves. How is it still upright?".That's still just a weird lookin' ship.
Square riggers don't capsize because of heavy ballast down near the keel.Same reason square riggers didn't capsize, tumblehome. Look at the shape, as the ship heels with the wind and waves, it presents less area to the wind, meanwhile more volume is in the water, increasing buoyancy and improving the righting arm.
Where tumblehome becomes a disadvantage is when dealing with flooding.
I visited the place in 2013 during my sister's graduation; was really a cool experience.
USS Massachusetts
Military | Battleship Cove | United States
very interesting place if any of you are ever around the New England area
We need melta-guns!I know one of the problems with using aluminum to build your ships out of and then sending them to where there's a lot of sun is that this can make the alloying metals in the aluminum alloy migrate to the grain boundaries of the metal, and promote inter-granular corrosion, apparently in spite of paint and other coatings used. The way you would usually fix this would be to stick your chunk of metal in a furnace and heat it up to a certain point, but there aren't any ship-sized furnaces, so there was a program around 2010 to try and come up with a way to fix this in-situ somehow. I have no idea where, if anywhere, that program went, but I'm pretty pessimistic about it.
The thing I saw was basically a big flat plate with two handles, connected by cables to some power source, which heated that puppy to over 500 degrees in an effort to "de-sensitize" the alloy under it. The thing is, you would have to hold it there for a while, which would be pretty difficult to do by hand, and even if it worked, you'd have this zone around the particular patch you just did which would have had a partial heat effect applied to it, basically making it impossible to actually do since you'd probably end up heat-sensitizing portions of the hull you'd already heat treated. Also, the design of the thing made it seem like horrific burns of either the operator or anyone within arms reach were definitely in the future of that tool. So basically the only realistic solution to this particular problem would be to strip the ships of anything melty and to construct ship-sized furnaces to treat the whole ship, at least as far as I saw it. Or really, just to accept that your ships were going to have a much shorter lifespan than you'd hope, and retire them early, which is exactly what they ended up doing.We need melta-guns!