Spanish Submarines too heavy

[August]

Originally Posted by Spiced_Rum

Surely once the Spanish crew are on board all the methane gas they produce from eating hot spicey food will create some positive buoyancy.

That's sorta how the German U-boats were able to go below crush depth so often and survive. Clouds of sauerkraut farts increased the interior air pressure so much that it made the hull stiffer.

I can't help but think that this type of metal engineering in Europe is by and large is on the decline, well in the UK it certainly is. 75 tonnes over weight is not an error, this should have been picked up at the design stage on the Cadam long before building ever started, something fishy going on. I know when I worked on the shop floor, drawings where changed in mid production to hide drawing room errors, it was not unknown for this to happen at night when metal workers had gone home only to return in the morning only to find a dimension had changed and the build was wrong.

It's now seems to be accepted that the errors is Astutes design where down to Admiralty changes during the building process. One of my favorite quotes by guitar builder Jim Burns sums it up well for me, "we will carry on building mass produced one offs" seems to sum engineering in the UK quite well, lol. When a Nation starts loosing it's engineering skills, they take years to replace.

[Betonov]

Don't get me started on mid production and late production design changes

And they always arrive on fridays and they always have to be done by monday

[Spiced_Rum]

I love it when engineers do not factor in all the extra weight necessary for all the cables required by the systems. I think that Embraer had a similar problem a few years back when one of their aircraft was found to be too heavy to fly after it had been fitted to match the US specifications. They had not calculated wiring weight, and so lost the multi-million dollar contract.