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Post Info TOPIC: why there are not more concrete submarines and concrete ships around


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why there are not more concrete submarines and concrete ships around
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A submarine in a military ambient is not a independent unit where you have a free choice of building materials.  It is built in a military shipyard that is basicly a steel plate building assembly line with steel workers bending the plates on steel plate bending machines, welding the plates with welding equipment, having a lifelong career in steelbuilding being trained in steel building.

It then is handled over to a crew that is trained in proceedures how to handle, maintain, survey, operate a completly different kind of sub - well you get the point - if you change the material you have to change anything - including the careers of the the people involved in yard and fleet.

So when there is a change of the building material - like from wood shipbuilding to steel shipbuilding in the 19th century - all the old yards and careers and fleets dissappear and new yards fleets, military tactics, and careers specialized in the new material (steel) come up.

So there will not be a switch like - hey concrete is a great material for building a sub - let's have one and incorportae it into our existing steel sub fleet.

The only kind of project where you do have this free choice of material is when you do a project outside a traditional yard in a new ambient in circumstances where you can build the yard, the skill setup, along with the boat - so basicly in a private small scale project.

It is a common perception and concept error that the reason why there are not more concrete submarines and ships around must have to do something with the (flawed) technical properties of the material.

It is well known that concrete is a great material for shipbuilding and subbuilding - in fact there are a lot of floating structures (both tubular structures under hydrostatic load, and honeycomb surface floating structures)  built in concrete in use while you are reading this.

The reason for the "no switch happening" is not in the material - it is in the inertia of industrial and military integration and logistic processes that reduces the possibilty of material switches to one switch every 3 centuries - at most.

To see what is out there in floating concrete structures made in projects where material logistics is not a driving factor check here: Outstanding floating concrete structures

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



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