This is a highly deceptive plot. If you move the threshold of “large warship” from 7500 tons to 6500 tons then the apparently huge increase in the number of “large” warships totally disappears.
US Military News, Reports, Data, etc.
- Thread starter tphuang
- Start date
This is a highly deceptive plot. If you move the threshold of “large warship” from 7500 tons to 6500 tons then the apparently huge increase in the number of “large” warships totally disappears.
They can get into laser 3D printing to minimize titanium waste.
I can understand a commercial/civilian company doing it, sort of. But when it comes to military contracts its just cutting corners to increase profit margins.
I can't imagine how bad things will be if China ends up in a similar situation to Russia.
TerraN_EmpirE
Tyrant King
Titanium wasn’t considered a strategic material. As such the firms and makers sourced from the open market without attempting to maintain an large secure supplier outside the token Utah mines. With the end of the Cold War 30 years ago Russia wasn’t supposed to be in this position. Just as China wasn’t supposed to be a threat. Globalization “Liberalization of the market leads to Liberalize the nation”.
In most commercial products there is the option of alternatives. It’s just a question of if it’s implemented in time. You don’t need Nikes made in China as there are other brands sourced out of China.
Heck in that category Chinese made isn’t even the cheapest option anymore.
Electronics that’s the trouble spot, rare earths above all else as assembly of electronics can be moved. Processing and sourcing of battery and other rare earth materials will take time to develop. Those steps today are in the infancy stages. Of course China is also highly reliant on imports in agriculture, raw materials and energy.
Lethe
Captain
???
No it doesn't. The only change to the graph from lowering the displacement criteria to >6500 tons would be to add future Constellation-class frigates to the mix so that the number of large combatants would just keep going up instead of cresting in 2021. The main reason for setting the criteria as high as 7500-tons is specifically to exclude the Constellation-class frigates in accordance with USN's own classification of it as a small combatant.
The largest combatants excluded from the list by the >7500 ton criteria are the 5700-ton Farragut-class destroyers.
Really, the 7500-ton criteria MINIMISES the trend of increasing numbers of large combatants. Shifting the cutoff down adds the Constellation-class frigates so that numbers keep going up, while shifting the cutoff higher would eliminate the Leahy and Belknap cruisers from prior eras and make today's numbers look even greater in comparison.
The thing is, Japan will never be a proper replacement for Russian titanium metal to the industry.
Like I said, a major part of the cost to get titanium metal is energy, and Japan has next to no native sources of cheap energy they can use to produce titanium metal. Typically the industry uses the Kroll process and this requires many melting steps at extremely high temperatures and a step where it goes through an electric arc furnace as well. As global energy prices go up, you will see the price of Japanese processed titanium increase dramatically, let alone all those customers competing for their supply. The idea these clients will easily switch production elsewhere is, I think, kind of naive. It takes many years to get one of these plants operational and years more to optimize the processes to get it to be efficient. The processes need to be tuned to the ore you are processing among other things. This is typically a painstakingly slow process with much trial and error. You might be looking at 5 years at least to get the production at a decent clip. I heard someone once say 8 years. So this would be like the Russians just saying they can manufacture their own semiconductors. It just isn't as simple as that. I think they will just continue buying either Russian or Kazakh titanium and pass it as something else.
I still remember a couple of decades ago there was much hype about FFC Cambridge process replacing the Kroll process and making titanium as cheap as aluminium. It did not happen. They never got it to work reliably enough in practice.
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It makes sense for them to develop a heavy fighter that can negotiate the vast distances demanded by sparse basing in the Pacific. The current US 5th gens are terribly configured for this theatre with their short legs.