By Geoff Fein
Lockheed Martin [LMT] is well into construction on its second Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) as the its first ship, the USS Freedom (LCS-1) enters its second post delivery availability, a company official said.
The company held a briefing Friday, the day before laying the keel for the Fort Worth (LCS-2), at Wisconsin-based Marinette Marine.
“Nearly half of the Fort Worth is under construction,” Paul Lemmo, business development director, Lockheed Martin Maritime Security & Ship Systems, told reporters Friday.
The Navy awarded Lockheed Martin a fixed price incentive contract for LCS-3 on March 23. Lemmo said the company would deliver the Fort Worth in 2012.
While neither the Navy nor Lockheed Martin will discuss the cost of the ship or other specifics of the contract, because of the ongoing competition, Lemmo noted the Fort Worth will be built in sequence, unlike Freedom.
“One driver on the lead ship, we had concurrent design and construction,” he said. “LCS-1 was built out of sequence.”
Fort Worth, Lemmo added, will be constructed “the way a ship should be built, in a modular fashion.”
The build timeline for LCS-3 will be quicker than it was for LCS-1, he said.
“It will be greater than two years. We found that probably the optimum for this ship is somewhere in the 30 to 36 month range, and obviously it will get shorter as more ships are built,” Lemmo said. “But the pure production time will be somewhere in that range.”
According to the Navy’s budget justification documents, from contract award to delivery for both LCS-3 and LCS-4, being built by a General Dynamics [GD]-led team, is 41 months. From construction start to delivery is 32 months, according to the Navy.
Lemmo said the Lockheed Martin-led team is able to cut down on the build time because unlike with Freedom, Fort Worth is being built in sequence.
“It is being built the way a ship should be built when you are building it in a modular fashion,” he said. “[We are] building it in blocks. Those blocks get welded together and erected into a ship. The keel block is one of the first that we finish.”
One of the drivers on Freedom was that the build-team had a lot of concurrent design and construction going on, Lemmo noted.
“That was because the specifications for the ship were changed shortly after contract award. That churn created a lot of inefficiency and LCS-1 was in fact built out of sequence,” he said. “There is an optimal sequence for how you want to build each block and how those blocks should be put together to build each ship. For LCS-3, we are absolutely building that in sequence. We are also able to outfit each block to a high degree.”
Workers just don’t weld the seal together into a block and then put those components together, Lemmo said.
“We actually install the lighting, insulation, piping, on each module before the modules go together. The objective is to pre-outfit these modules up to about the 85 percent complete level before they get erected into the ship,” he added. “Before we put the ship in the water, she is 85 percent complete and we don’t have as much to do in the water, because it is a well known rule in the trade of shipbuilding, it’s much more expensive to do work once the ship is in the water than it is when she is on land and in pieces essentially. That’s how we are able to bring down the construction time and the cost for the ship.”
He added the team fully expects the time to construct to drop with each ship to a certain level.
Lemmo also pointed out that Lockheed Martin has kept parts and materials left over from the previously terminated LCS-3.
The Navy originally terminated Lockheed Martin’s second LCS in April 2007 (Defense Daily, April 13, 2007).
When the decision was made to terminate the ship, the company decided to continue manufacturing about 50 to 55 systems all the way to their completion, Lemmo said.
“Those systems have been in storage either at the manufacturer or at some of our facilities and they will be brought to bear on the ship,” he said. “The value of that material is about at least half of the total value of the material on the ship. Half the material needed for Fort Worth was already purchased. Generically a lot of it is long-lead propulsion machinery–the engine, the gas turbines, diesels, gears, water jets, shafting, those kinds of things…what was on order.”
And Lemmo added he does not anticipate any issues with the reduction gear this time around.
LCS has four reduction gears. One of those gears was incorrectly manufactured, he added.
The problem led to a $28 million cost adjustment and a 27-week schedule delay for Freedom (Defense Daily, Jan. 16, 2007).
The reduction gears were built by Swiss gear manufacturer Maag Gear AG, a subcontractor to General Electric [GE].
“We are already past what happened the last time…we are long past that. We have four complete gears that have been factory tested and are in storage,” Lemmo said.