Navy aluminum ship cracking
Appears at 2 points in 2 lectures.
Appearances across the corpus
Early-1980s David Taylor effort to replace aluminum superstructures with lightweight corrugated high-strength steel, in response to the Falklands and Belknap fires.
In any case, in the early eighties the Navy was trying to do waffle-membrane construction of the superstructures. They've got to be light, so they were using high-strength sheet-metal steel and making something that looked like a cross-section of corrugated cardboard in steel, to replace the lightweight aluminum structures. It's a serious problem for ships in general. Does anyone know what an aircraft carrier gains per year in weight? 250 tons a year. If you plot the Nimitz-class carriers from the early sixties all the way up through 2000 or so, they gained 250 tons a year. And most of it's up top.