France equally jubilant about French shipbuilder DCNS building 12 Shortfin Barracuda submarines in Adelaide
FRANCE is celebrating together with us, toasting the government’s decision to build 12 new Shortfin Barracuda submarines in Adelaide that will defend Australia for decades to come. Long may this bond last.
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FRANCE has fallen in love with Australia.
A week ago, the decision to build 12 new Shortfin Barracuda submarines in Adelaide to defend the country for decades set off wild celebrations across the state. Parisians are similarly swooning.
Within hours of the call being made halfway across the globe, France’s left-wing President Francois Hollande was demanding the attention of the nation and holding a model of the hi-tech sub aloft like a World Cup trophy in front of the country’s media and declaring it a great victory for local industry.
Only a train strike could knock it off as the main story on France’s leading nightly TV bulletin 20 Heures, and Australian flags are being flown all along the selfie strip of the Champs Elysees. In a welcome reciprocation, the French tricolour is now being flown proudly on buildings in central Port Adelaide.
A major newspaper from Normandy, the region which hosts the DCNS shipyard at Cherbourg where the first nuclear daddy of the Shortfin Barracuda has just been fully assembled, declared it a “marriage of two nations” which is going to last for at least 30 to 40 years.
Premier Jay Weatherill’s tour of the highly secretive DCNS site just over a day ago has laid bare the immense complexity of the challenge workers at Outer Harbor face.
It also made starkly clear that this task is one the two nations will only be able to pull off by working together.
The 500-hectare shipyards, located in a town of about 85,000 people on France’s extreme northwest coast, have an incredible story to tell.
It has built more than 100 submarines in a century. Its huge structure workshop and assembly halls are towering cathedrals of steel where about 3000 man machines that can bend metal as thick as a man’s thigh into any shape desired.
They do this for about 50 navies around the world, and will soon do it again at Osborne.
DCNS is currently preparing to duplicate its Cherbourg operations in Port Adelaide. An advance force of designers and engineers is expected to land next year as a massive investment in new construction at Techport begins.
Early State Government plans for an expansion — penned before France was declared the contract winner — have set aside room for an almost doubling of existing capacity as the new Shortfins are built out the back and Collins Class subs are sustained in front.
And, for all of the major physical challenges that lie ahead, it’s getting the design right that is going to matter most.
The Australian Barracuda is going to look much like the one about to be sent to sea from Cherbourg. Measuring 99m long, sleek and black, it could easily be mistaken.
But it’s what’s on the inside that really counts.
For various reasons — some political and others tactical — Australia will abandon the nuclear reactor which gives added speed and submersion time for a conventional diesel-powered engine which gives the Shortfin an uncanny ability to sit in the water silently and gather prized intelligence.
This is not as easy as simply swapping one power plant for another. It means weight and dimensions are shifted.
It’s one of the biggest changes you can make before having to call it a new sub altogether.
And the secret weapon in making it all come together is not something you can touch. It’s something that allows you to see, manipulate and imagine what the final beast will be.
In a briefing to Premier Jay Weatherill, State Government officials and media at noon on Friday, DCNS unveiled what it considers a game-changer. It’s a fully 3D computer model of its 4700-tonne sub which allows engineers to see everything from the entire boat to a small gas pipe and zoom around from the state-of-the-art propulsion system to the captain’s chair.
Previously, workers were given printed paper or wood models to work on. Once you put on the glasses, this thing literally jumps out of the screen like a James Cameron blockbuster.
Speaking after the briefing, Defence SA chief executive Andy Keogh said this may be the clincher which solves many of the problems Outer Harbor has been accused of harbouring.
Time and cost overruns in both the air warfare destroyers (AWDs) and Collins Class submarines have been blamed by some commentators on perceived fundamental flaws in the Techport model, be it government ownership of the building company or unionisation of the workforce.
But others have put it down to failures in the design stage which have been amplified through the building phase.
On the AWDs for instance, multiple pipes were meant to run through the same physical space. It wasn’t until building actually began that workers realised what looked great on a 2D piece of paper simply wasn’t going to come together in the real world.
A rush in bringing the Collins into service has led to expensive and costly rebuilds of its interiors which some defence experts have likened to servicing a car that’s moving at 100km/h.
Mr Keogh said DCNS’s breakthrough promised to make sure those errors was never repeated.
“The work that is done at Adelaide’s shipyards is absolutely exceptional, there’s no doubt about that,” he said.
“It is this new technology that is the breakthrough that will allow our workers to achieve greater productivity than ever before and achieve world-class standards.
“All the mistakes, the errors and issues, they’re all resolved inside that 3D virtual environment, well before it gets out on the production floor. They’re the type of things that high-value manufacturing and advanced countries and economies do to help them achieve that.”
Modelling undertaken by the SA Economic Development Board has indicated a significant technological “spillover” into the rest of the economy as know-how and training in Port Adelaide from DCNS is put to work in other industries. It’s the kind of thing that making cars used to do.
Port Adelaide Enfield mayor Gary Johanson said the past week — as well as decisions on frigates and offshore patrol vessels — had led residents to believe it was actually and finally “happening” in a part of the city which has been left to run down from its glory days of thriving docks.
“People are obviously happier since the announcement. You can see it in their faces,” he said.
“It’s a great sign the Port is turning that long-awaited corner and I’m sure it will have the positive flow-on effect of increased house prices, as with more people working in the Port Adelaide area.
With more families in the region, it will drive up demand for high quality education — perhaps even specialist education opportunities related to the naval or shipbuilding industry.”
Mr Weatherill also predicts a far less measurable spillover for the state, one which can’t be counted by economic models, accountants or the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
He’s confident there’ll be something of a Gallic flavour injected to SA as the French move in.
Cherbourg mayor Benoit Arrive said he was looking forward to closer ties between the regions in everything ranging from education and engineering to sports and the arts.
Mr Weatherill said this was a great chance to put Adelaide on the international map and lift its eyes toward a huge world that has limitless opportunities to be grasped.
“Circumstances have linked SA and Cherbourg through the means of this contract. It’s a very long way away, but now the distance between us has been closed,” he said.
“This is a relationship that will last for decades, and decades, and decades”.
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