HMCS Iroquois sidelined indefinitely after rust found in hull

OMG, rust in an ocean going salt water ship ?

The horror !!


Guess there is no money in the budget for some Rust-Oleum.

IIRC there's a very definite difference between rust on the hull and rust in the hull. One can be cleaned down to bare metal, primed with a zinc primer, painted and will last another couple of years. Whereas the rust in the hull means there isn't enough metal left to clean, prime and paint.

The offending section or sections will have to be removed and replaced with new steel and when you start removing hull components it becomes akin to a surgeon conducting a cancer operation. If the patient is young, and healthy there's a good chance the cancer hasn't spread and they can get it all. But, if the patient's old, out of shape and has numerous other issues the chances of the cancer spreading are exponentially greater. So, given the Iroquois is a 42 year old warship with a long ton of miles on her which of those scenarios do you think is the most plausible?


Besides, I'm pretty sure they'll have already started to inspect the rest of the hull for issues and if it was confined to one small area they'd fix it, especially considering it's a C&C platform were talking about here.

These ships have long since passed their shelf lives and it's really beginning to show which is to bad because they're the only warships left that have tiles in Burma Road a criteria I used when choosing where I'd prefer to be posted to.

It's time to retire the 280's, pretty obviously.

To add to the stresses and strains on their hulls, they were re-jigged circa 1990 during a major refit to do things that they weren't originally designed to do.

Anyway, when the Iroquois was new and shiny she was the most beautiful ship that I'd ever seen (despite the odd stacks), As ShepardsDog has pointed out in previous threads they were uncomfortable to sail on but for a young engineer, her all-gas-turbine power plant was the coolest damned thing. The 280's were the first ships like that anywhere and for a brief time, they were the most advanced warships on the water.

Should have all been replaced by now.

Wonder how the Navy plans on forming task groups without replenishment or command ships.

At the very least, they should have hulls laid down. Unfortunately, the war in Afghanistan ate up a lot of the defence budget and the current government spent billions on helos and transport planes that we hardly ever used there.

Perhaps we should have leased the CC-117s for a few years first like the Brits did so we could get hulls laid down. Then when the money was available, we could have bought them outright - again, just like the Brits did.

Sometimes I just hate being right...

Oh well, maybe this government will get off its ass after it has a surplus next year and we can get this project going;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Cla ... nt_Project

Keels should have been laid (for new destroyers and AOR's) before the Conservatives were even elected.

All the 280's should be SINKEX'ed or turned into razor blades by now. That's how long we've let this run over.

Here is the pre-Trump Iroquois in Halifax, complete with her original "bunny ears" stacks. Those gave her the infrared profile of the Bismarck with raging fires burning on her decks and they had to go.