Hell likely the contracted the elevators to some company and that company is dragging it's feet. I think the proper move would be weekly fine of millions for breach of contract on the timeline till the install the elevators. I think they would have them elevators installed in 2 weeks working perfect. It doesn't matter on overtime if you have millions to pay and they can tell contractors they'll be sued for that amount for their breach of contract also.

Surface fags, fagging it up. Meanwhile nobody notices the submarines coming in ahead of schedule and under budget, and silently kicking ass

I didn't read the article. I only read the headline to my Merchant Mariner husband who navigates munition ships for military sealift command. He went on this long lecture about how they installed magnetic elevators instead of cable elevators..... something about helping reduce fire risk, keeping jetfuel away...blah blah blah....big steal containers that have to be blast proof....blah blah blah.. to keep the munitions from exoloding (IDK I kind of zoned out). I thought I could gleen some interesting insights for you guys, but honestly the topic didn't interest me all that much.

Welcome to peacetime military, where the budgets are made up and the performance doesn't matter.

These things aren't built for fighting, they're not even built for functioning. They're built to enrich contractors and make heads of state feel as if they have large testicles, to look impressive when they skulk around in other people's territorial waters, and to put fear of a global superpower into third-world dirtdwellers.

It's especially bad with superpowers today, as they're a small, elite club; so either they spend bags of money and actual effort on being competitive against one another, or they just agree to mostly not fight, and just piss away money building whatever - because their massive technological and industrial advantages basically guarantee that whatever they shit out is still going to seem like future space death magic to 90% of countries, ahem, "countries" out there.

First thing stuff like this does in a real war is get shot to shit and then replaced with something cheaper to make and twice as effective, which then gets built by the shipment such that when the war ends, the government doesn't even know what to do with it all. What they don't scrap they sell off, so as to arm the dirtdwellers for the next decade's proxy wars.

I should've been a contractor for a peacetime military. I could've welded two ordinary boats together, and built a fearsome and high tech shell around them out of styrofoam, spackle, and surplus M2s. Some superpower would buy this thing for five and a half briefcases of large bills; it would look flash when sailing around, and as it menaces with spikes of (rapid fire and loud) weaponry, third-world dirtdwellers and backwards tribals will venerate its might while flights of strategic bombers from land-based airstrips thousands of miles away pass overhead and end their civilisation.

He cited “tight tolerances”

All this tech is great but in a time of war these tight tolerances are not going to help us. They can't even get it to work now when they have all the time in the world.

You'd think they would have learned this lesson by now.