Dustin Walper

We've never published this entire video before, but... what the hell. This is our vision for the shipyard of the future. This is how we fight back against China's shipbuilding dominance. This is how we produce 10x more in a single shipyard. From raw steel in to a full set of panels out, ready for erection. All autonomous. Every crane move, every assembly step, every weld... controlled by software we're building from the ground up. Our roadmap will see us build every part of this as modular, inexpensive cells that stretch standard industrial robots to their payload & reach limits. Cells we can build in months instead of years. We're starting in Austin, shipping out panel kits that accelerate the shipbuilding process for America's over-stretched and labor-starved shipyards. Then we'll deploy systems like this all over the country to accelerate production of everything from tank barges to tankers to unmanned surface vessels. It's possible to do this in America. I know because we're doing it. And because it must be done. Time to Accelerate American Shipbuilding.

@Jordan_Moorhead Built one!

@DustinWalper What gym do you go to?

Back in Austin. Just in time for leg day.

Exciting announcement coming this week. Big things happening at @ValstadShip.

The American Housing Corporation, Standard Electron, Allen Control Systems, Aalo Atomics, Icon, Saronic, Valstad, and more are all basically in this part of town tons of new warehouses going up

From our visit to C&C Marine and Repair this week in Belle Chasse, LA. Every ship is engineered to serve a specific purpose. There’s wonderful variety.

It’s Caliper Thursday. Show me your measuring devices!

@CoxonMark @bscholl I assume the $1.4M is because it's freestanding? The damn columns end up costing more than the crane itself.

@bscholl What tonnage and span? I could possibly save you $1m. Mine are likely too big though. 84’ span 100 ton with 25 ton aux.

Today we ordered $1.4M in bridge cranes for the Superpower factory.

From our visit to Thoma-Sea in Houma, LA yesterday. This is how every ship hull starts - and it’s exactly what we’re building autonomously at ⁦@ValstadShip⁩.

@DeveloperHarris Or...

imagine what the dutch east india company would’ve achieved if they had a forklift

Day 2 of our Louisiana shipyard tour. We're visiting shipyards every day this week to truly understand the state of the industry. Yesterday we walked through an entire building full of small panels waiting to be turned into blocks. We asked how long *one* of those panels took to build: roughly 2 days. Every panel in that building - every single one of them - was buildable using our prototype robotic cell. Not in 2 days. In 1 hour. We're increasingly confident we can cut the time it takes to build hulls by 1/2, and by the end of next year 5x. That's not the whole story - outfitting is important too - but this is how we seize a once-in-a-generation opportunity to truly change how we build ships in America. One piece at a time.

Exciting first day in our tour of Louisiana shipyards. It's awesome when a shipyard owner tells us that this is the first time they've seen robotic assembly - and they immediately see the value. This is how ships will get built in America in the future. Full stop.

@MattLoszak @AaloAtomics Looks like our neck of the woods 👀

Shopping for factory space is the best kind of shopping

Biggest advantage is speed - cubic relationship between speed and fuel consumption drives current designs. If your fuel has orders of magnitude higher energy density - as uranium does vs diesel - you can sustain potentially much higher service speeds. The Koreans have done design work on this, it’s just a question of whether mass production of SMRs can drive down the cost of reactors + fuel. No reason why ramping production of HALEU can’t decrease fuel costs precipitously as we saw with lithium batteries.

@RM13892698 @AaloAtomics Develop procedures and safeguards as you would with any other vessel containing hazardous material. Any of those things happening on an LNG carrier is also very bad. The engineering problems are solvable, it’s really just a question about whether the economics will pencil out.

Naval PWRs are quite different from the technology used in SMRs. A small, 50MWe plant (e.g. 5 @AaloAtomics reactor modules + 1 turbine) could power an MR2 tanker at a service speed approaching 30 knots. Passive safety = minimal on-site crewing. Not happening tomorrow, but absolutely possible in the next 10 years.

Ish. Oil companies will spend a surprising amount on marginal speed increases - even an extra 1/2 knot is valuable. They’ve largely settled where they are now because of the cubic relationship between speed and fuel consumption. If size was the only factor, you’d see nothing but ULCCs… but clearly there are routes where smaller vessels make sense, and roughly doubling the number of trips you can do over a ~20 year service life could be quite interesting.

@DustinWalper @AaloAtomics Tankers don’t need to go 30 knots, they need to carry as much oil as possible. Tankers don’t make their profits on speed, they make it on volume. Now speed is good for container ships so you might have a better chance of selling it as a fast container ship.

Hung Cao’s story is pretty incredible. Born in Saigon, brought to America when he was 4 after the fall of South Vietnam, spent 30 years in the Navy, and now acting SecNav. Everyone I’ve spoken to seems to have a lot of respect for him. Time to build!

Yep. For fun, we did a rough functional design for an SMR-powered MR2 Tanker. The math starts mathing when you get the cost of the ship + power plant under $200M or so, but with a 50MWe reactor you could double the service speed of a traditional tanker.

Velcro dog always ready for action.