From: gherbert@crl3.crl.com (George Herbert)
Newsgroups: sci.military.naval
Subject: US Navy ships for scrapping
Date: 22 Dec 1999 17:49:18 -0800

Andrew C Toppan wrote:
> George Herbert (gherbert@crl3.crl.com) was seen to write:
>> We have to do something about this rediculous law requiring them
>> to get scrapped rather than sold off (obviously, demilitarized first)
>> to interested buyers.
>
>There is no practical use for converted warships in the
>civilian sector.  The Navy would end up with a huge
>liability on its hands if they started selling ships
>to John Doe Citizen.  Besides, the Navy _makes_ money on
>scrap sales - the ships are sold for money, not given away.

There's no practical use for sailboats, motor yachts, etc. either.
Doesn't stop there from being an active market.

Used as large yachts, there would be an active market.
As marine research vessels.  Someone could make a lot
of money supporting fishing boats out on the Grand Banks
in the middle of the season, and a north-atlantic proven
FF might be a good first choice of hull (if it's not falling
completely apart at initial purchase... I have seen some of
the hulls up for current scrap contract, and some of them
Wouldn't Do for the North Atlantic right now...).  As upscale
liveaboard houseboats for silicon valley geeks in need of Yet
Another Something New.  My former Yacht Club could use an old
landing ship for a operations platform... the bay around the
main club property keeps silting up.

Obviously, as I said, they need to be demilitarized to the
point they're no longer an active weapons platform.
I don't see, at that point, how they're any more liability
to the Navy than any other shipowner selling them to
yet another owner.  As long as everyone knows what they
are buying.


-george william herbert
gherbert@crl.com

From: gherbert@crl3.crl.com (George Herbert)
Newsgroups: sci.military.naval
Subject: Re: US Navy ships for scrapping
Date: 22 Dec 1999 23:36:34 -0800

Andrew C. Toppan <actoppan@gwi.net> wrote:
>George Herbert (gherbert@crl3.crl.com) was seen to write:
>> There's no practical use for sailboats, motor yachts, etc. either.
>
>Sure there is: pleasure.  That's a use.

And I wouldn't have fun driving around a OHP?

>> Used as large yachts, there would be an active market.
>
>How many can afford yachts of this size?  You can count the numbers on your
>fingers and toes.  If they can afford a yacht in the first place, why on
>earth would they spend the money to convert some old warship into a
>half-assed yacht?

Because it's neat, and would be a lot bigger than your average yacht.

There's an active market turning old *missile silos* into houses.
Millions and millions of dollars is going into it.  Never underestimate
the potential market for neat unique things.  In this case, which are
mobile, an added bonus...

>>[...marine research]
>For the research and survey ships, sure.  Former naval survey/research
>ships are routinely sold into civilan or foreign military service. For the
>rest - impractical, uneconomical, or impossible.

I have had a scientific ROV operator *drool* over the description of
the towed array gear on the back of your average modern naval vessel.
They have all sorts of problems because they haven't got the space
and proper equipment to keep their tethers in the water in rough
seas, and would love something more capable along those lines.
But they can't afford it, because their hulls are fundamentally
too small to have the space to do it right.  But a surplus naval
vessel with tail handling gear is already set up to go.

>> Someone could make a lot
>> of money supporting fishing boats out on the Grand Banks
>> in the middle of the season, and a north-atlantic proven
>> FF might be a good first choice of hull (if it's not falling
>
>But a former frigate or destroyer is no good for fishing, even if you gut
>it out to the bare hull and start over.  There's a reason trawlers don't
>look much like frigates in the first place - the two types have totally and
>completely different requirements; you can't just switch from one to the
>other.

Let's start over again.  Not use the fig as a trawler.  Use fig as
an unrep *tender* for trawlers.

I had a bite on a business plan to do that once.  Nobody at the Navy
took me seriously or wanted to discuss selling the ships.  Plan sunk.

>> Obviously, as I said, they need to be demilitarized to the
>> point they're no longer an active weapons platform.
>
>And the extent of work necessary to do this results in you having nothing
>but a gutted hulk.  The ships we see being sold for scrap are NOT
>"completely" demilitarized - the scrapper is required to do a lot of
>demilitarization that can only be done in the process of cutting up the
>hulk.

The definition of demilitarization leaves something to be desired.
As far as I'm concerned, if the weapons mounts can't mount weapons,
if the military grade radar gear and sonar gear is removed and the
mounts welded over, the magazines special weapons handling stuff
removed, etc. then it's demilitarized.  Abandon cable runs in place.
Don't need to take the ship apart to do that.

>> I don't see, at that point, how they're any more liability
>> to the Navy than any other shipowner selling them to
>> yet another owner.  As long as everyone knows what they
>
>Because they're still former naval vessels, and when it ends up tied to a
>pier rusting, breaking loose and becoming a hazard, etc., the Navy will
>still have to deal with it.

This makes no sense.  They have salvage value... we all agree on that.
If the person attempting to make a useful go out of using them can't
make it work, the obvious thing to do is sell it for scrap then.
You hear horror stories of ships left to rot, abandoned and breaking
free and causing problems, etc.  But if you look at the number of
ships going out of service any given year, the horror stories are
a terribly trivial fraction.  Shipowners want their scrap value;
unless there's some sort of legal problem with ownership, they get
scrapped to get that money out of them.  Assuming that these would
end up any worse than average doesn't make any sense.

>If there was some economically viable reuse for warships, the Navy would be
>selling them for reuse.  But there isn't any viable reuse for 95% of
>vessels, so they aren't sold for reuse.  It's really quite simple - no
>demand, no market.

I happen to know the demand is nonzero.
Navy apparently didn't want to hear it.


-george william herbert
gherbert@crl.com

From: gherbert@crl3.crl.com (George Herbert)
Newsgroups: sci.military.naval
Subject: Re: US Navy ships for scrapping
Date: 23 Dec 1999 12:34:48 -0800

Keith Willshaw <keith_willshaw@compuserve.com> wrote:
>George Herbert <gherbert@crl3.crl.com> wrote:
>> Because it's neat, and would be a lot bigger than your average yacht.
>> There's an active market turning old *missile silos* into houses.
>> Millions and millions of dollars is going into it.  Never underestimate
>> the potential market for neat unique things.  In this case, which are
>> mobile, an added bonus...
>
>Missile Silos don't need to fuelled , maintained and crewed

That is correct.  However, large yachts do, as do large civilian
vessels...

>First work out the cost of ripping out all the existing Milspec systems
>from comms to control systems and puting in civilian equivalents

I don't see why you'd have to rip out the control systems.
The ones for the missile gear, radars and sonars, sure.
General ships controls?

Comms... I hate to break it to you, but ship comm systems are
pretty generic.  Obviously the military band specific gear should
go but the rest is not very different.  If you did want to pull
it out, then the replacements are COTS sitting on shelves at
nearly every port of interest around the world, are cheap and easy
to install, etc.  Have you seen how compact the comms equipment
is on modern commercial vessels?

>Remember the costs of de-militarisation are not low

Again, depends on how you define de-militarization.
Taking away its utility as a weapons platform is not
amazingly difficult.

>Add in the costs of completely refurbishing the accomodations
>- unless you think this Millionaires guests would prefer standard
>racks

I would assume both the crew and passengers would prefer better
bunks than navy standard, yes.  It's not going to be free to do
that sort of conversion work.  Anyone who ignores that cost is
being foolish.  I am not ignoring it.

>Now  Work out the costs of replacing worn out machinery etc
> figure in the Costs of Fueling and crewing the dammed thing.
>Naval vessels are not designed with fuel economy or low
>maintenance in mind

Operated at reasonable speeds they tend to be reasonably efficient.
Not great, but not disasterous, for their displacement.  They only
drink fuel at unreasonable rates when galavanting around at a lot
higher than hull speed.

Maintenance issues are, as I addressed in other messages,
not as efficient as commercial built ships, but probably
manageable, not disasterous.

>Then work out maintenance and insurance costs and berthing costs

Yes.

>You aint goint to slot this into a Marina.

You hang out at the wrong marinas 8-)

>Do a web search on yachts and you'll find 150 ft long
>yachts going for $15m and described as Very Large

There are a few yachts over 200 feet.  Most are well
under 100 feet, of course.  I have a pretty good idea
of what that market looks like.

>An OhP is 3 times that length and would likely cost MORE
>than 3 times that amount

Cost more to do what with?  To buy?  Navy's junking them for
scrap price (five cents a pound? ten? something like).

[below using a rough guess of OHP volume and deck areas;
I haven't got detailed plans of one convenient]
Say you convert 40,000 square feet of the OHP into luxury
quarters and another 40,000 into crew and rennovated storage
and hab areas.  Luxury fitout of $100/ft^2 and crew fitout
of $25/ft^2; $4M for the owner's and guest's areas and
$1M for the crew areas.  Another five million for misc refit
and painting.  Permanent crew of 40; five non-engineering officers,
ten stewards, ten deck crew, fifteen engineers or so, payroll
somewhere around $2 million a year.

This is price comperable with one of those jumbo purpose
built yachts.

>Do all this and you will discover why there are dammed few yachts
>of more than a few hundred tons and no converted OHP's

There are no converted OHPs or other frigates because you
can't buy them.


-george william herbert
gherbert@crl.com

From: gherbert@crl3.crl.com (George Herbert)
Newsgroups: sci.military.naval
Subject: Re: US Navy ships for scrapping
Date: 22 Dec 1999 23:47:20 -0800

Mark Borgerson  <mark@oes.to> wrote:
>George Herbert wrote:
><<SNIP>>
>> There's no practical use for sailboats, motor yachts, etc. either.
>> Doesn't stop there from being an active market.
>
>Except that the operating costs are a few orders of magnitude lower.  A 175'
>oceanographic research vessel (with a crew of 13) costs about $1000/per hour
>to operate.  A 65' sailing yacht with a crew of 3 might be a factor of 10 lower.
>A 400' FF might be 5 times higher.

Might be.  Might not be.  If you don't need to run it around at
27 knots anymore, you can pull (or just ignore) some of the plant,
and save close to half the engineering crew.

You can drop the whole weapons crew, most of the electronics crew, etc.

Maintenance on what equipment is necessary will be on a scale with
the vessel size.  And should (can) not be ignored or minimized...
it does take a lot of people to just keep even just a fig painted.
Much less the rest of the stuff you'll have to keep going to keep
it seaworthy.

Surplus naval vessels have the disadvantage that they were designed
intentionally to be more manpower intensive than modern commercial
vessels are, due to damage control and maintenance constraints.
However, a lot of their upkeep effort is due to the specialized
mission and not inherent in the hull or plant.  Drop the military
mission, it starts to get simpler.

>> [...] As upscale liveaboard houseboats for silicon valley geeks
>> in need of Yet Another Something New.
>
>Yikes---as I understand things in the SF Bay Area  1) moorage
>cost are comparable to apartment rents.  2) You can't find
>moorage at any cost some places.

This is one of those perverse cases where bigger is easier.
There isn't enough marina space, but there are ship piers all up and
down the San Francisco waterfront which are now open.  The former
Alameda NAS.  Hunters Point.  The Hornet Museum found a perfectly
set up berth open up amazingly conveniently... and many more are
out there 8-)

Plus, moorage costs around here only cost what appartments do
in sensible parts of the country.  Nothing like what appartments
cost around here 8-P

>You might sell one to Bill Gates, though---cost is probably not
>an issue. And he already has waterfront property!  If he doesn't
>want to moor it on Lake Washington, he can always buy a country with
>a dock!

I think that based on prior experience trying to mix NT with
naval operations he'd pass on the idea...


-george william herbert
gherbert@crl.com

From: gherbert@crl3.crl.com (George Herbert)
Newsgroups: sci.military.naval
Subject: Re: US Navy ships for scrapping
Date: 23 Dec 1999 12:17:22 -0800

Keith WIllshaw <keith_willshaw@compuserve.com> wrote:
>George Herbert <gherbert@crl3.crl.com> wrote:
>> Might be.  Might not be.  If you don't need to run it around at
>> 27 knots anymore, you can pull (or just ignore) some of the plant,
>> and save close to half the engineering crew.
>
>No you cant just pull or ignore half the plant , it'll ALL stop
>working if you do.

It depends on the machinery.  I will fully admit I don't know
the detailed fitout on the FF-10xx vessels in the current
scrap list, but my impression was they're 1200 PSI steam,
multiboiler, single turbine/single shaft?

If they have say 4 boilers, scrap two and only operate the
remaining two.  Don't tell me you can't do that: that was
normal operational procedure.

For an OHP, it's got two LM2500s on one shaft.  I'd probably
leave both in but only run one of them regularly.  Some of the maint
effort on a GT is just due to time going by, but a lot of it
is hours of operation based, so only operate one... you probably
don't need the top 10 knots of speed anyways.  You could pull
one LM2500 and replace it with a diesel if you wanted to improve
fuel efficiencey.  I would personally leave both LM2500s in
and run them on LPG instead of jet fuel for short range ops,
park a big LPG tank on the fantail.  Save loads on fuel costs.

>> Surplus naval vessels have the disadvantage that they were designed
>> intentionally to be more manpower intensive than modern commercial
>> vessels are, due to damage control and maintenance constraints.
>> However, a lot of their upkeep effort is due to the specialized
>> mission and not inherent in the hull or plant.  Drop the military
>> mission, it starts to get simpler.
>
>Nope - Commercial vessels have systems designed
>for economy and ease of maintenance. Since Naval Vessels
>need large crews for damage control etc. they tend
>not to. You'd need to spend mega bucks to change this

It depends on the system.  Obviously, if you take away half
of the moving parts and ninety percent of the electronics
on the vessel, something like half of the mechanical support
and ninety percent of the electronics support goes away.

The detail design of the other systems, naval practice
compared to commercial practice, is obvious.  I said so.
I have a naval architecture degree... please give me some credit.
What I said is that despite that, a lot of a military vessels
upkeep is due to the specific military systems not just hull
operations, and if you remove those specific military systems
it will get a lot simpler and easier.  That's not to say that
the engineering spaces will get easier to maintain, etc.
This is a disadvantage to trying to convert former military
vessels and does need to be taken into account by any plan
to so covert one.  But it's clear that a lot of the Naval
crew levels would go away with the mission specific gear.
It's bad, needs proper accounting, but not unmanageable
in my estimate; not having actually done one, I could
be wrong.


-george william herbert
gherbert@crl.com

From: gherbert@crl3.crl.com (George Herbert)
Newsgroups: sci.military.naval
Subject: Re: US Navy ships for scrapping
Date: 23 Dec 1999 17:16:29 -0800

Keith Willshaw <keith_willshaw@compuserve.com> wrote:
>George Herbert wrote in message <83u00i$8rc@crl3.crl.com>...
>>For an OHP, it's got two LM2500s on one shaft.  I'd probably
>>leave both in but only run one of them regularly.  Some of the maint
>>effort on a GT is just due to time going by, but a lot of it
>>is hours of operation based, so only operate one... you probably
>>don't need the top 10 knots of speed anyways.  You could pull
>>one LM2500 and replace it with a diesel if you wanted to improve
>>fuel efficiencey.  I would personally leave both LM2500s in
>>and run them on LPG instead of jet fuel for short range ops,
>>park a big LPG tank on the fantail.  Save loads on fuel costs.
>>
>
> That's
>
>1) A sizable conversion task

GE sells kits to run them on LNG and other gas hydrocarbons.
	http://www.gepower.com/products/lm_series/lm2500_plus.html

Come on, LNG carriers have been running
their engines on the boiloff for years.
Commercial gas turbines for shoreside
power have run on natural gas or LPG
or another hydrocarbon gas for decades
(optionally; diesel or jet fuel are also
commonly used).  Know your industry.
This is old hat.

>2) A HELL of a fire hazard

Not particularly.  The vapors dissipate
better than from kerosene, if you leak
any out of the pressure system.

>3) DUMB
>Why the hell use LPG not Kerosene ?

A factor of lots in cost, that's why.
Why did you think I proposed this,
an inherent monster truck must-modify complex?

The fuel costs of a thousand ton diesel vessel
and four thousand ton LPG vessel will, all things
considered, favor the bigger LPG one.  Turbines are
not particularly efficient at low power levels,
which is somewhat of a disadvantage, but the cost
savings is huge.


-george william herbert
gherbert@crl.com

From: gherbert@crl3.crl.com (George Herbert)
Newsgroups: sci.military.naval
Subject: Re: US Navy ships for scrapping
Date: 23 Dec 1999 18:28:22 -0800

Keith Willshaw <keith_willshaw@compuserve.com> wrote:
>Look old son I worked in the Offshore industry for
>10 years. We run our Gas turbines on Natural gas

Then you should know this.

>But stop and think for a second OK
>There aint too many dual fuel installations

I didn't say dual fuel.  I suggested convert to LPG...

>You currently have a system running on Kerosene.
>To  convert it to LPQ you dont just plonk a tank on the
>fanny

No, you change the fuel pumps, injectors, all the metering
and such involved.  But the turbine core itself remains
the same...

>>>2) A HELL of a fire hazard
>>
>>Not particularly.  The vapors dissipate
>>better than from kerosene, if you leak
>>any out of the pressure system.
>
>What are you talking about. Get LPG in the
>bilges and you have a hell of an explosion hazard
>A LOT of boats are blown up every year by this
>Kerosene is a lot less volatile.

Why is it going to get into the bilges?
I'm not proposing storing LPG in the double bottom...

I have seen kerosene tanks explode.  Admittedly, it was
an experiment, but people who rely on its famously low
volatility are in for a suprise eventually.

>>>3) DUMB
>>>Why the hell use LPG not Kerosene ?
>>
>>A factor of lots in cost, that's why.
>
>This is nuts. If LPG powered gas turbines are SO
>much cheaper than diesels to run how come the merchies use
>diesels ?

Higher installation cost.  In this case, though,
presumably your OHP comes with a pair, so all you
have to do is convert them to run cheap fuel,
which is the price of one or two engine conversion
kits and a tank on the fantail and one pressure
pipe to the engine room.

I have seen some ship designs float by where the lower
mass of a gas turbine and its lower maintenance requirements
compared to a marine diesel coupled with lower fuel prices
gave the vessel lower lifetime costs over even the first five
years of operation.  I wouldn't be suprised to see some
come around in the reasonably near future.

>Please provide figures to back up your notion that
>LPG is cheaper than Kerosene and that a 4000 ton LPG
>and Gas turbine ship will be Cheaper to run than a 1000
>ton Diesel powered vessel
>I just dont see it.

Call up bulk fuel suppliers in your area and get comparative
pricing on kerosene and the various gases.


-george william herbert
gherbert@crl.com