Navy HY130 development sunk-cost fallacy

Originally the Navy spent $50 million in the '60s developing HY-130, which was really supposed to be an HY-150 but they downgraded it. I remember having to go meet with the chief engineer of the Navy around 1990 and explaining to them that they were trying to sell the Seawolf as an HY-130 ship, and I said, no, it's going to be a big enough challenge to go to HY-100. It turns out it was. I said, you're never going to build a ship out of HY-130. But there were people in the Navy who said, well, we spent $50 million on it in the '50s, it must be worth something. I said, just because you spent $50 million doesn't mean it was worth something — let's be realistic. They also tried to develop an HY-200, and they did build some research vessels that were sort of classified, and there have been some very special applications.

Tom's meeting with the chief engineer of the Navy circa 1990, telling him not to promise Congress HY-130 Sea Wolf ships. $50M in 1960 dollars spent; weldable only for specialized thicknesses and conditions; not for full-scale ship construction.

I had to go meet with the chief engineer of the Navy once and tell him why he shouldn't. They were going to promise Congress around 1990 that the third or fourth ship in the Sea Wolf class — this is before peace had broken out with the former Soviets — they were going to start making HY-130 ships. The people at David Taylor had been trying to tell the people at NAVSEA that they couldn't do it. People now say, well, we spent fifty million dollars in 1960 dollars developing HY-130, why can't we weld it? If you weld only a certain thickness under certain conditions you can weld it, but a real submarine has to have different thicknesses, and not necessarily under those conditions. So from a practical point of view, HY-130, you can use for specialized applications, but you couldn't build a whole ship out of it.