Trump has suggested steam catapults every year since 2017, saying digital systems are too ‘complicated’
After nearly a decade of loudly complaining about the fact that modern US aircraft carriers use electromagnetic systems to launch fighter jets instead of steam-powered catapults, Donald Trump has directed the Pentagon to redesign a new aircraft carrier to replace the modern system with the old-fashioned catapults he prefers.
Trump signed a national security memorandum on Thursday directing the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, and the acting navy secretary, Hung Cao, to make the change he has had his heart set on since at least 2017, when he first described his idea to Time magazine.
The memorandum gives the Pentagon leaders 60 days to come up with “a plan on the required measures to replace the Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System and Advanced Weapons Elevators with steam and hydraulic systems for the construction of” the USS Doris Miller, a Ford-class aircraft carrier, which is already two years behind schedule.
He’s got a pool company that can do it?
and if they mess up your lawn just call the four seasons
Water and steam are the same thing, so the last pool company can do it.
That he’s never met before and never worked with
Which one of his friends sells steam systems?
his friends
You must be the type that truly believes the stripper loves you
tbf its a common shortform of business friends which also has nothing to do with friendship
I know, I should’ve used quotation marks instead.
“Friends? Have you met this guy?”
The issue between the two systems is isolation. In the old C-13 series if one track needed repair, you have to shut steam off to that track. The rest can keep going. In the EMALS there’s just the one centralize power architecture, so if a track has to go down, it takes the whole thing down with it.
Few really want to return to steam. It requires a lot of the ship to house special high pressure equipment and requires more maintenance overall to keep it running. Additionally, a lot of the drones designed need the precise control that the EMALS provides to not break apart. But it’s hard to point out all the various tooling that has to go on behind the scenes when one track goes down with steam, when the whole effing thing with EMALS has to go down and no launching happens for hours.
And that’s ultimately what happens, the metrics that are being used are getting aircraft into the air, not overall downtime or cost to operate. And EMALS is still struggling to hit the numbers it has to hit and likely won’t hit them till around 2030. Every time it goes down, every zero aircrafts it gets pulls that metric down hard.
It’s so simple to solve though, just have the track squirt up a bit of fog machine smoke each time it runs and tell him it’s steam powered again. What is he going to do, go check? Just lie, that’s our culture now, just lie about it.
But her EMALS
(sorry, I actually enjoyed your contribution though)
5 stars, that was a good one!
5 stars is truly top-tier, in general
*coughs* Ok, I’m leaving
You’d think that an electric system should allow for relatively easy isolation – isolating electric circuits from each other with breakers is hardly new technology. Is this lack of isolation a design flaw of EMALS or is there an actual physical reason why it couldn’t be designed with independently powerable tracks?
Looks like they’ve already issued a contract to fix it so it would appear it’s entirely possible and someone just fucked up the requirements/design first time around.
Absolutely wild that this wasn’t part of the original design. I can turn off power to my stove without shutting down my whole house, but the US Navy can’t independently power launch systems.
You’d think the United States would take great care when designing their main tools for global power projection. And you’d probably be right; I can imagine that countless hours were invested into determining where the parts get built and which senators get to politically benefit from that. Technological details don’t really matter; at worst you can just turn flaws into lucrative followup contracts for companies in the stock portfolios of top politicians.
Ding, ding. Yeah. Happens with Government contracts. Corners get cut. Just a symptom of … gestures towards Washington DC
As the other person mentioned, they’re looking to fix the “shortcomings” of the current system. Happens in government projects that corners get cut and that short-term “fixes” ends up having long-term “issues”.
That said, dropping the whole thing to go back to steam because of corners being cut is a royally stupid idea. But I mean we are talking about a guy who decided to just level an entire wing of the White House before anything to replace it was actually thought out and approved.
I’m wondering if they mean that the points of failure are overall harder to isolate? Like, I don’t know… can the steam system work if the ship looses power? That would be a level of isolation that I imagine EMALS can’t do. But then I’d wonder, what if each track had its own generator? Oh… hey, just use steam generators. Problem solved, Trump won’t tell the difference,
US military too dumb to isolate a track electrically, checks out
No they don’t, there’s still 4 units one per launcher. Most of problems you mention seems to come from energy storage system. Energy is stored in the flywheels, which requires annoying converter, so chinese variant uses giant set of supercapacitors instead which is just a bit heavier and has less problems with communications interference. Also can be split in many parts and fit in any space you have. Mostly benefit of being designed later. Zero surprises if americans figure it’s better but institutional inertia keeps them using the old one
The inevitable lunacy of your garden variety dictator. Dictate ALL the things, my whims are more important than reality.
I can’t wait until trump orders the aircraft carrier to be made capable of dive-bombing.
“Gold is the best material, all new vessels will be made out of solid gold.”
“But gold is incredibly weak, malleable, heavy, expensive…”
“GOOOLLLDDD!”
Hear me out, we make it a Zeppelin and fill it with half water.
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This motherfucker has no clue how magnets work.
This motherfucker has no clue
how magnets work.That’s a much better statement of fact.
The same dumb motherfucker who wanted to nuke a hurricane and also extended a hurricane path with a Sharpe because NOAA wouldn’t entertain his valuable input on hurricane path…of course a guy like that is vexed by magnets
… and he looked up at a solar eclipse without eye protection… multiple times!
And he also… shit, how long does everyone have? This list will take a fair while to get through
I’m vaguely recalling a press conference where Trump suggested that magnets can be deactivated by putting it water.
Is anyone else remembering this?
I remember him not knowing what they are, so one of those Trumps must be lying!
Yes, I remember. He doesn’t, but the rest of us do.
This idiot thinks he is an expert on everything. More people need to tell the baby NO.
To be fair a third of anything said to him is sycophantic praise, so why wouldnt he think he’s a genius?
I’m pretty sure it’s 100% at this point. I’m starting to think he’s not even a liar at all and he is just insanely delusional from all the yes men
Tell him No? Is that what you think the primary issue is, here? That his governing style needs more restraint?
Well… Yeah, kinda at a base level. If the law actually did its job and told him ‘no’ when he wanted to avoid prison, or even told him no to a million other illegal things he did, it’d be a lot better I think
“Grown ups are talking sweety…”
I can only imagine the hard facepalming going on in the Navy right now.
How many more before this government collapses, as it should? It’s truly an emperor-no-clothes situation.
Depends on what else Pootin and Nyetenyahoo want destroyed in the US govt by their kompromat chaos agent.
He’s gotta check with the Saudis, too.
The world will yield to US might when these are installed.
Trump is putting out Aladeen vibes…
Use the electromagnetic launcher just also add a tube that shoots out a stream of hot steam as it launches a plane so his dumb ass can brag about how he built a steam launcher.
I mean, China was bragging they made a bus a year ago. They called it a trackless train or some shit.
Y’know it’s usually the other way around, ya know folks reinventing the train but shittier and calling it a car or bus. Weirdly refreshing. Also trackless trains have existed since the 1800s with steam tractors, there was a nuclear powered equivalent in the 50s, and I’m pretty sure I’ve heard of something similar being used in Iraq and Syria back in the 30s where they just hooked up multiple trailers to a pair of modified trucks to move goods to places without rail.
There are also busses that can hook up to a tram’s electrical power net.
I feel like trams, trolleys, and electrified busses are in their own category seperate from trains. It’s kinda like a rabbit and a hare, there’s a lot of overlap but they are different.
The change there was that it could use both tracks and roads, allowing it more transit flexibility
The innovation wasn’t as much technical as it was logistical
This is a brilliant work-around. It’ll save a ton of R&D money and won’t take nearly the time and $ that a full retrofit would, all while pacifying the Orange Diaper Baby until the next dumbass idea comes along. How would you like a no-bid contract for the job?
Next: why do we even need the planes; we can directly catapult stones on the enemy! Wonder why nobody ever thought about it
Just wait until he finds out about trebuchets.
Sharp sticks were part of the world’s arsenal for thousands of not millions of years!
Not only part of the arsenal. In a lot of times and places throughout history, they’ve been your best option against most things (though generally this is only when you have the sufficient manpower to make them work; for 1v1 matchups, swords are usually better)
That takes way to much knowledge of physics for him to understand
Join me in some wild speculation about this aircraft carrier which is already behind schedule:
The ship, named for Messman Second Class Doris Miller, is the first aircraft carrier named for both an enlisted sailor and an African American.[9] The ship will be the second to honor Miller, who received the Navy Cross for his actions during the attack on Pearl Harbor; the first ship was USS Miller (FF-1091).[10] It is currently the only Gerald R. Ford-class carrier to be named after a person who was not a former president.
The president’s changes will slow things down. Now why would he want to slow that aircraft carrier down?
“The future Trump-class battleship – the USS Defiant – will be the largest, deadliest and most versatile and best-looking warship anywhere on the world’s oceans,” Phelan said…
“The U.S. Navy will lead the design, along with me, because I’m a very aesthetic person,” Trump said.
Is this because of his obsession with magnets and water?
Can the military not just lie to him and tell them they’ve done it it’s not like he’s going to check. Even if he did he wouldn’t know what he was looking at because his brain, not something to write home about the best of times, has now turn to cottage cheese.
He’ll be directing the military to return to wooden ships and musket next.
It’s been over 100 years since the last wooden battalion was sunk! That obviously means they are superior than metal ships
If he carrys on like this we can reenact the war of independence.
Don’t drag us into it! We can’t govern ourselves atm, bringing back the colonies would be worse for everyone! Just have a civil war like the good old days
This is so obviously irrational that I’m surprised that his cabinet hasn’t removed him for incompetence just for this. The man is a dotard.
His cabinet wouldn’t have their cushy jobs if it wasn’t for that dotard.
They’re not gonna kill the goose that lays their golden eggs.
And even with this, the US Navy isn’t going back in time anywhere as far or as fast as the US Department Of Health which has already reached the 18th century under a leadership that denies that vaccines work.
I can only imagine he really cares about this because he’s invested in the company that makes the steam-powered systems.
That’s probably all there is to it.
