Dustin Walper

Let's build ships in America again.

Watch us land one of our drone-boats inside a moving US Navy warship during RIMPAC. This world-first resupply mission was performed completely autonomously using a Splash Industries Typhoon USV.

Shipbuilding is hard, but technology can make it easier. When you see steel over an inch thick warped to hell by submerged arc welding you realize two things: a) This is why ship fitters are worth their weight in gold. b) Maybe we shouldn’t weld things that way.

Got to see the inside of a Polar Security Cutter hull today. That steel is THICC. Really impressive stuff. Inspiring to see them getting built in America.

@Abhindas1 @theobot__

@DustinWalper @theobot__ PLA is soft and you can't do serious things with it. Plus most plastics can't last more than a few 100 hours under dynamic loading.

Spent 10 minutes with a new robotics founder. Now I believe in the Dunning-Kruger effect

@dirtman When two steel plates accelerated to 2500 m/s love each other very much…

@DustinWalper I thought that was just when they malfunctioned 🤣

Metal joining sits at the foundation of the world

@Abhindas1 @theobot__ Okay but what if instead of precisely machining harmonic drive gearboxes from high-strength alloy steel we 3D printed them with PLA.

@theobot__ Tbh, I love the spirit! Just don't forget about physics and first principles.

@Ki_fun_thoughts @Beyond7Designs 🤷‍♂️ Grew up in Canada, where people use pounds for weight, feet for height, and km for distance. Works fine.

@Beyond7Designs @DustinWalper 'Five tables laser-aligned to within ~250 microns.' and then 25x10 FEET. Ah, Americans... LOL youtube.com/watch?v=JYqfVE…

These Siegmund welding tables are gorgeous. Five tables laser-aligned to within ~250 microns. 25 ft x 10 ft, expandable later to 40x10'. Time to ramp!

@CroziusArtifact We talked to a few companies, Siegmund won because they had them in stock and could ship quickly. Also they're really, really nice tables. Those Germans know what they're doing.

@DustinWalper if you say Siegmund 3 times the Fireball tool guy will appear 🤣🤣🤣

@johnkonrad @TrentTelenko She cruises at… how quickly do tectonic plates move again?

She’s slow as molasses but sometimes she gets there eventually.

No, navy drones as well. And I don’t mean *all drones* will get bigger, I mean the largest will keep getting larger. The current crop of MUSV’s is a touch under 200ft, and even those are quite limited in terms of payload. It’s important not to learn the wrong lessons from Ukraine. Any conflict America would realistically be fighting will be thousands of nautical miles from the continental U.S. Even if your plan is to deploy thousands of small drones into theater, you still have to get them there with fuel for maneuvering/loitering & a meaningful payload. That means the ships get bigger, or require larger drone carriers to get them closer, or some combination. Any large-scale conflict would also involve troops on the ground. Keeping them re-supplied across vast distances through hostile waters will be a Herculean logistics task… so even if your last-mile delivery is a relatively small drone ship to, say, drop a container or vehicle on the shore, you’d still need hubs that can move and store supplies in bulk that can lurk outside the range of anti-ship missiles and enemy drone ships. It also helps to look at how China thinks about this: they’re producing more drones than anyone, but also more large ships like aircraft carriers. They clearly don’t think future conflict will be won solely with masses of small drones, though they are important. Finally, counter-drone technology will keep getting better. The history of warfare is offense and defense constantly jockeying for supremacy - directed energy weapons could plausibly make the entire current crop of drones obsolete within a few years in any near-peer conflict.

Commercial drone cargo ships, sure. But Navy ships have to operate in an environment with approching infinite precision weapons. That will drive them smaller to make them more expendable. This is true of every category that has been dronified. Ukraine uses cargo drones that weigh 120 kg and are horrifically inefficient compared to a truck in peacetime. But its more inefficient to have your whole truck destroyed at once.

Here’s why drone ships will keep getting bigger. For a given characteristic length, L: Displacement ∝ L³ Wetted surface area ∝ L² A ship that’s twice as large has 8x more cargo capacity but only 4x more frictional resistance. Larger ships also have lower wave-making resistance (Froude’s number), which is inversely proportional to L for a given speed. Thats why you get ~8x more cargo capacity but only ~4-5x higher fuel consumption. (Also why small, fast ships tend to have semi-displacement or planing hulls)

The cool thing about capitalism: price conveys an incredible amount of information. Given two people with identical income, they will spend money in vastly different ways that reveal their preferences. Person A values experiences more, so he spends a lot of money on travel. Person B values fitness, so he spends more on a premium gym membership and supplements. Socialism is miserable because it attempts to eliminate pricing as a way to express preferences. In the above example, maybe Person A has a low-cost gym membership and Person B a National Geographic subscription. If a socialist system said “price discrimination for gym memberships is bad, fitness is a universal good ergo we must have price controls - also, vacation flights are too expensive and we must regulate them”, it removes preference from the equation and leaves both parties worse off. You’d think this wouldn’t apply to things like healthcare, but it most certainly does. Healthcare is not binary - there isn’t a universal set of treatments that match all preferences. Let’s say you break your arm riding a bicycle. Sure, an X-ray might be universally indicated - but what should your cast be made out of? A plaster cast will get the same basic job done, but you’re training for a race and want to keep riding - so a waterproof synthetic cast would be a better match for your preferences. Socialists would argue that a cast is a cast, and plaster ought to be good enough for everyone, thus proclaiming that they have the One True Preference that all shall adhere to. These are just a few made-up examples, but billions of individuals express these preferences every day when they buy a cup of coffee, choose a neighborhood to live in or book a vacation. It just happens. Socialism doesn’t even attempt to model these implied preferences - something that would be computationally impossible to do with perfect fidelity - it attempts to outlaw them. And that’s why it keeps failing. Over and over again.