[sandworm101]

No. Shipbuilding isn't an area for startups and unions are a very very small hurdle compared to getting the necessary materials. Just think of the steel. Anyone can order a few tons of rebar, but ask for 10,000 tons of plate steel suitable for ships and you will be laughed at. That isn't sitting in a warehouse or a back lot waiting for customers. An order out of the blue might take years to fill. The people that make steel work with regular customers and will always put those regular paying customers above a random startup who might not ever pay. If anything, they will want insane down payments.

Then think ship engines, the ones with blocks bigger than most houses. Order one of those out of the blue and, again not joking, it might be 10+ years. Those engines are targeting at future ships still on drawing boards, each is accounted for long before any metal is assembled. Any startup's order would be at the back of a very slow line.

A startup wanting to get into ship construction would have more success launching a new social media system, getting lucky, IPO, then use that money to purchase an existing shipbuilder. But at that point the "startup" is really just another a hedge fund investing in ship construction.

[wizerdrobe]

What makes this so much more impossible than SpaceX building rockets?

Is the payoff worse for ship builders?

[sandworm101]

Totally different scales. A falcon 9 rocket weights in at 550 tons, and most of that is fuel and the rest can be broken down into small parts. The average cargo ship might be 50,000 tonnes, literally orders of magnitude larger, and none of the major parts are road-mobile. The logistics are just totally different. Space X also competes in a rocket industry that is maybe 60 years old. Shipping is a 1000+ year-old industry making it, again, a couple orders of magnitude more mature. One might even argue that commercial cargo ships have existed for two, three or even four thousand years. Pharaoh paid someone to ship those blocks down river for the pyramids.

[roenxi]

Then do the obvious thing - don't start with 50kt cargo ships. There was a funny article the other day about how some group - possibly the Columbians? I forget - was getting into sub manufacturing because they needed to transport drugs. That isn't military grade nuclear subs but it is on the path to them if for some weird reason they keep chugging away.

No company in the world starts with massive state of the art. It is a recipe for failure, the engineers need to learn in a lower-risk environment.

[nickelpro]

There's no path from point A to point B.

Building crab fishing boats doesn't have an evolution that leads to building nuclear submarines anymore than manufacturing charm bracelets or ready-to-eat delivery meals. The requisite materials, logistics, and labor expertise are effectively unrelated to one another and separated by mountains in terms of capital and material resources.

As was said before, the only way in is basically to buy into an existing operation, at which point where you got the money from originally is irrelevant.

[roenxi]

> Building crab fishing boats doesn't have an evolution that leads to building nuclear submarines

You're putting words in my mouth because that is probably not how people would start out.

But the literal incorrectness of that statement is so wrong it is puzzling. The shipbuilding industry, which builds nuclear submarines, started with some extremely modest boats. The path we followed to get to where we are was precisely starting with little fishing boats and evolving to where we are now. There is obviously a path from small boats to large boats. To suggest otherwise is absurd. As is the idea that small companies can't become big companies or move to make more sophisticated products.

You might be about to make the argument that government funding is necessary or something, but the big problem here is unusually simple - the US is not globally competitive at manufacturing, a startup would be expected to fail if left to compete in the market and that is why nobody is going to try (or succeed). They've already been beaten out of the market.

[nickelpro]

> You're putting words in my mouth because that is probably not how people would start out.

I'm making concrete your vague handwaving, feel free to provide a more complete explanation of how you think this goes.

> But the literal incorrectness of that statement is so wrong it is puzzling. The shipbuilding industry, which builds nuclear submarines, started with some extremely modest boats. The path we followed to get to where we are was precisely starting with little fishing boats and evolving to where we are now. There is obviously a path from small boats to large boats. To suggest otherwise is absurd.

No it didn't. And certainly not the military shipyards discussed in this article. While a couple (Newport News, Brooklyn Navy Yard) have origins as more modest shipbuilding sites, the vast majority were purpose-built sites for military construction built with US government dollars. Like the Manhattan Project or the Hoover Dam, there wasn't a smaller initiative that gradually developed into a massive industry. Massive industry was the go word.

These types of projects, continental railroads, interstate highways systems, and military naval shipyards, they can have private-public partnerships but they do not grow organically from more modest roots without public dollars.

> You might be about to make the argument that government funding is necessary or something, but the big problem here is unusually simple - the US is not globally competitive at manufacturing, a startup would be expected to fail if left to compete in the market and that is why nobody is going to try (or succeed).

This is irrelevant, pick your foreign military shipyard and you will find that the story is the same. Bohai, Zelenodolsk, Cherbourg, any of them. The government recognized a need for a new, larger, more powerful class of ships and either built or expanded the logistics necessary to construct the vessels.

[Manuel_D]

What will the startup do that's so much better than the existing shipbuilders? China has much cheaper labor, and produces a huge amount of steel domestically. They build big ships and smaller ships. What does your hypothetical startup do that will let it compete against existing incumbents that have established incumbents with much more experience?

With drug trafficking, it need for new manufacturing is because they had an illegal use case. And those subs usually don't last more than one journey. It's not really comparable to the shipping industry at large.

[Staple_Diet]

Who were the existing providers in the space/rocket industry? NASA and their foreign counterparts?

Shipbuilding is much larger. Shipping is a huge industry with many parts. It is not necessarily impossible for a new company to come in to any single area, but they wouldn't be able to break into something like military ship building.

A possible avenue for 'disruptive startup' is the USV area, see Anduril. But even then that required immense amounts of capital because you are competing against the big dogs (Raytheon, Northrop Lockheed, Boeing, BAE etc.)

[Perceval]

The existing providers were NASA and United Launch Alliance, the latter of which is a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed. They merged their space launch businesses in 2006, because neither could individually sustain their launch services given 1) the expense of their systems, and 2) the low number of launches in the late-90s/early-00s. They were the sole provider to the USG from 2006-2015, only because SpaceX won its lawsuit against the Department of the Air Force in 2015, which had been blocking SpaceX from competing for DOD/NRO launches.

[credit_guy]

Maybe a startup can focus on making maritime drones, just like the Ukrainians do. I bet there's probably a lot of demand nowadays for that kind of thing. I checked and Anduril appears to be making something they call AUVs (autonomous underwater vehicles).

[dylan604]

> Anyone can order a few tons of rebar, but ask for 10,000 tons of plate steel suitable for ships and you will be laughed at.

Sounds like yet another reason supporting concrete ships

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concrete_ship

[whynotmaybe]

Well there's the annual concrete canoe competition but we'll need a lot of canoe to replace a ship.

https://www.asce.org/communities/student-members/conferences...

[dylan604]

or one might say, "we're going to need a bigger boat"