Welcome to MSW’s Scuttlebutt! Here’s the news for the day.



Feature - River-boat Scratch Build

MSW Crew member Grzegorz Ziecina shares the build story of his River-boat Scratch Build.




Builder Blames Navy as Brand-New Warship Disintegrates
Source: Wired.com

The Navy’s newest warship is slowly disappearing, one molecule at a time.

This isn’t a sequel to the 1984 sci-fi flick The Philadelphia Experiment, in which a Navy destroyer-escort vanishes through a time portal in Pennsylvania only to reappear in Nevada, 40 years later.

No, this time the disintegration is real. And so is the resulting tension between the Navy and the disappearing warship’s upstart builder.

The afflicted vessel is USS Independence, the second in the sailing branch’s fleet of fast, reconfigurable Littoral Combat Ships. Eventually, these ships are supposed to be the workhorses of tomorrow’s Navy.

As Bloomberg reported, the Navy has discovered “aggressive” corrosion around Independence’s engines. The problem is so bad that the barely year-old ship will have to be laid up in a San Diego drydock so workers can replace whole chunks of her hull.

In contrast to the first LCS, the steel-hulled USS Freedom, Independence is made mostly of aluminum. And that’s one root of the ship’s ailment.

Corrosion is a $23-billion-a-year problem in the equipment-heavy U.S. military. But Independence’s decay isn’t a case of mere oxidation, which can usually be prevented by careful maintenance and cleaning. No, the 418-foot-long warship is dissolving due to one whopper of a design flaw.

There are technical terms for this kind of disintegration. Austal USA, Independence’s Alabama-based builder, calls it “galvanic corrosion.” Civilian scientists know it as “electrolysis.” It’s what occurs when “two dissimilar metals, after being in electrical contact with one another, corrode at different rates,” Austal explained in a statement.

“That suggests to me the metal is completely gone, not rusted,” naval analyst Raymond Pritchett wrote of Independence’s problem.

Independence’s corrosion is concentrated in her water jets — shipboard versions of airplane engines — where steel “impeller housings” come in contact with the surrounding aluminum structure. Electrical charges possibly originating in the ship’s combat systems apparently sparked the electrolysis.

It’s not clear why Austal and the Navy didn’t see this coming.




Battle of Sullivan's Island

Today is the anniversary of the Battle of Sullivan's Island.




Nelson Class Battleships

Today’s website is Nelson Class Battleships. Enjoy.


This Day in U.S. Naval History

1794 - Joshua Humphreys appointed master builder to build Navy ships at an annual salary of $2,000.
1814 - USS Wasp captures HMS Reindeer.
1865 - CSS Shenandoah captures 11 American whalers in one day.
1970 - USS James Madison (SSBN 627) completes conversion to Poseidon missile capability.


Diorama Idea of the Day



Flower class corvette HMCS Barrie in heavy seas. To see the original high resolution photo, click here.

Gator