Actually composites for a ship is a very very bad idea. There
was a Norweigian mine hunter that was an all composite ship and the
end result after a fire was the ship literally burnt itself out
into ashes very very fast. That's why the Swedish put in a lot of
effort to make sure the Visby has a lot of fire retardation, but
odds are, when it gets hit by a anti-ship missile, all that rocket
fuel with oxidizers is simply going to burn the ship up.
Wow F_N! Very authoritative statements couched in very
strong terms ... except that you seem to be indulging in
sensationalistic rhetoric rather than realistic analysis ...
"There was a Norwegian mine hunter that was an all composite ship
and the end result after a fire was the ship literally burnt itself
out to ashes very very fast"
Gee, "burnt itself out to ashes" indeed ... let's look at a picture
of the salvaged wreck of the HNoMS Orkla ...
Hardly burnt to an ash is it?
The accident report on the fire on the Orkla attributed the fire
and resultant sinking to ...
Quite unlike the simplistic picture painted where if you build a
GFRP vessel, heavens help you if it burns. FYI, almost all
MCMVs are pretty much built of GFRP or composites. Our guys
in the Bedok class must be crapping their pants now. Or are
they? After all, according to the report you so kindly
posted, a british minesweeper suffered and engine room fire that
blazed for a few hours but didn't sink? Instead of headlining
and sensationalising "Composites are combustible", why didn't you
tell us of the incident, just a few pages further?
To quote your report ... "Because composites are such good
insulators, fires often don’t spread to adjacent compartments. When
a British minehunter suffered an engine room fire that lasted
several hours, fuel that was in a composite day tank failed to
ignite."
In reality, composites can be made safer by a variety of treatment
and construction methods. While they may not as good as Steel
with regards to Ship Board Fire and Damage Control, the risk may be
outweighed by considerable benefits to vessels such as MCMVs and
other small, stealth focused vessels. Besides, there are
already plenty of fire & smoke hazards on a ship ... wire
cladding materials, POLs, paints, furniture padding, crew personal
effects, etc to be just focusing on composites as the root of all
evils.
On an aside, I think it may be worth considering that the
RSN/Mindef/DSTA may have weighed the cost/benefits and decided that
... the better SBF&DC benefits of steel outweigh the stealth
benefits of a composite structure. Rather than that
composites are fire hazards and to be avoided at all cost ... after
all we do operate 4 Landsort/Bedok MCMVs.
Another bone to pick with you on sensationalising issues.
"You do realise that for all that stealth, when the ship is rocking
away in uneven waters, or when water is splashing about, the RCS
goes up by a few orders of magnitude."
You do realise what is an order of magnitude right? A mutiple
of x10. A Formidable giving a radar return of a fishing boat
... that's about an order of magnitude.
A Formidable going up 1 magnitude, looks like a non-stealthed
Formidable.
A Formidable going up 2 magnitudes, looks like an aircraft
carrier.
A Formidable going up 3 magnitudes, looks like the world's largest
Super-Tanker.
Since you said "a few" OoM, I'd assume you meant 3 or
more OoM. Really now?
I know this is sgforums where a lot of crap gets thrown
around. But really, if you want to sound authoritative, don't
sling so much BS lah.
Care to tell us what you realy understand about Radar Signals, RCS,
RCS-SM issues in high Sea States and how a ships radar return
actually gets amplified by a few order of magnitudes in high sea
states? Quite a few people, including myself, are quite
interested to know.
