ALAMO Fri Dec 10, 2021 10:24 am
That is not a matter of the material price per see, but the technology involved, and the cost of that technology.
The main issue is that titanium reacts with steel acting as a cathode when steel is the anode.
So it increase the corrosion of steel elements, forcing the designers to replace the steel from the whole structure with titanium or other non-reacting materials.
Every single bloody pipe must be made of titanium. That requires a whole new business, alongside the steel one, so functionally doubles the cost of the industrial base you must create to deal with that.
And that is only the beginning.
Welding of Ti is performed in a neutral gas atmosphere because it's melting point is below the ignition point.
So you need big size gas chambers at the yard facility and a specially trained crew with all the skills&approvances for special welding.
It is close to impossible to make a chamber big enough to weld the whole hull section, you can't weld the blocks on the slipway, so a brand new method of combining the blocks must be mastered. You can't weld the whole length piping system, so you need to combine them again and use a different method of sealing the system.
That is a huge mess in the supply chain, a giant additional industrial base needed to be created and sustained along with the traditional one, a huge human resources requirements, and needs extremely solid supervision.
That all combined makes them "golden fishes", not the price of the metal itself
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