I get this, I really do. Notice #7. I’ll bet, though I have no certain knowledge, that subs use electrical systems like aircraft with 400Hz. The reason they use this on aircraft is the transformers are smaller and the whole electrical system is lighter. We don’t need this any more as all the power supplies can be switching.

I also believe that with the larger size, especially the openings to enter and retrofit it would save huge amounts of money. We could build several of these more as haulers than highly sophisticated one off platforms. Some of these I’m thinking we could land 747′s on.

Survivability. Well you probably could see them, unless they were very deep, from space but this is really not much different from any other good sized sub. Looking at concrete bunkers from WWII they were blasted massively and are still there. It would really hurt our enemies ability to use smart weapons of great speed but less punch. It would take specialized bunker busters to get through the walls.

If we had the numbers I could even see building the basic shells of the ships and swapping the expensive equipment. The hatches would be big enough to drive trucks into them.

This is actually a kind of ploy to change military structure too. I’m personally against the vast massive military bases we have spread all over the planet. I see this as one way of getting rid of them, keeping global superiority, (you never know the future and if some sort of panic comes up…) and lowering cost over all while not completely throwing out the whole game like after WWII.

There’s also the idea of fooling Congress a little(not like they don’t know what’s going on but…). Build a bunch of the plain bulk carrier type models in a mass production basis for cheap then nickel and dime them to death with outfitting for more capability.

I did look for Pugh’s “The Cost of Sea Power”. No way I’ll get that any time soon. Maybe I can get it inter-library loan?

I found a decently priced one on Ebay.

As a first step on the cost rather than the vulnerability front, despite the thought you’ve put into the engineering I’m worried you’re focusing on reducing the wrong cost. The hull of a modern warship is a small proportion of its expense (usually no more than 12%). The biggest wedge of the pie is generally associated with fancy electronic equipment, mainly things like radar, fire control, and battle management systems.

Also, I think you would be very interested to read Pugh’s The Cost of Sea Power, the book I recommended to Isegoria a little while ago. It’s expensive on Amazon but you might be able to find elsewhere.

and I wanted to run an idea by you. It seems to me we are rapidly following the exact path to Defense destruction that Great Britain followed and noted in The Rise and Fall of Great Powers by Paul Kennedy. This will be a little long, my apologies. The premise is that aircraft carriers have become too expensive and too vulnerable to long range missiles and advanced guidance systems. The low cost of the missiles means they can swarm and defeat with numbers. So even if a carrier is useful, in a general war with an enemy of any sort of sophistication they’re to expensive and frail too be used.

A solution that’s reasonably simple, and mentioned many times before, is concrete submarines. Concrete can now be made with tremendous strength such that they could rest on the bottom of the deepest parts of the ocean and concrete is relatively cheap.

Here’s a list of things that need to be done to keep cost down.

1. Low labor cost. If you’re going to build a framework of plywood to form the concrete you’re going to waste a ton of money. To belay this cost you need repeating forms that can be tied or joined together in some form. There’s a guy who works on fabric form-work that has a lot of interesting ideas and technology that is in this vein. The panels could also be made in forms with sprayed concrete, (Shotcrete), on forms that are rapidly mass produced.

History and overview of fabric form-work

http://www.block.arch.ethz.ch/brg/files/suco_201100014.pdf

2. You need to use a reasonably low cost reinforcement that won’t rust. Steel reinforcement will eventually rust and destroy the concrete. There’s new reinforcement made of S-glass, E-glass and my favorite basalt-fiber glass reinforcement.

http://www.build-on-prince.com/basalt-fiber.html

3. You pour the floor on a leveled ground covered with plastic or a polymer used for silt fence or water drainage. Rebar, hopefully, basalt, protrudes into the air from the floor. The automated precast forms are propped up to form the inside vertical walls then reinforcement is added. The outer wall forms are added and tied to the inner forms. The roof and it’s reinforcement is added.then the whole of the walls and roof is poured in one pass or in sections.

4. The entry ways to the sub should be conic sections that fit into the roof with caps. The could be concrete also. They could have a connection to the floor level inside the sub. The whole of this section would raise up, operate as an elevator, when the sub was surfaced. It would be strong enough to carry a plane. You could have one, or more, at one end of the sub to take off and one at the other end for the plane to go down.

5. Cables could be embedded into the forms before pouring and then post tensioned to make sure none of the concrete structure is ever exposed to tension forces. This is done in floors, slabs and large concrete structures now. A link explaining.

https://www.concretenetwork.com/post-tension/basics.html

6. To vastly lower the cost of installing structures throughout the interior of the concrete structure you need something like unistrut installed in the walls.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strut_channel

Except you wouldn’t use metal. You would use a wedge shape channel formed into the concrete forms that you mass produce. The wedge would have the thinnest opening towards the interior of the sub and the thickest towards the exterior and would be open to the interior. This would make it easy, like the unistrut, to make a simple mass produced bracket with nut, bolt and other type holders that could be wedged into the channels with friction to hold whatever structure, equipment, pipes, electrical conduit, that need to be installed.

7. Another way to reduce cost would be to use standard industrial electrical systems instead of non-standard stuff.

The key to all this is to lower cost and to lower the vulnerability of aircraft carriers. Think of the cost of welding together many sheets of metal compared to automated spraying of forms and mass pouring. They could be made big as the biggest aircraft carriers. Designed as a catamaran they could be stable on the surface but could submerge to hide or sneak up on the enemy.

Heinz Lipschutz worked on this a lot and had some patents on concrete subs.

http://www.electromagnetism.demon.co.uk/11124.htm

https://www.secretprojects.co.uk/forum/index.php/topic,6510.0.html?PHPSESSID=0eukagstunveuuf375q8gm4125

A short paper on concrete test done on sphere’s at deep depths here. They did these test for long periods of time and the results are online.

http://www.concreteconstruction.net/_view-object?id=00000153-9692-dbf3-a177-96bb16bd0000

The thing to do would build a small model of one of these and test it.

It was a bolt-from-the-blue opportunity to serve as the apprentice to a senior (read: near retirement) person who had been performing this niche role for many years. There had been several attempts at filling the role before, but none of the people they trialed lasted more than a few months.

I thank God every day that I blundered into it, mainly thanks to my wife suggesting me for an unrelated position in the same group.

I myself am in a bit of an odd niche, doing a combination of OR/OA (shading into what Kahn would have called Systems Design), historical research, and a bit of concept design.