Lockheed Sea Shadow (IX-529)

If memory serves it was offered as a museum ship, but no one took the offer.
 
It was offered as a museum ship only if the taker also took the Hughes Mining Barge and displayed Sea Shadow inside of said barge. I don't see the horrible loss, the ship never did anything in service, it has very little on the inside for people to see other then the bridge and the engine room, and the US has too many underfunded museum ships already. Some are literally sinking at anchor.
 
I feel it was a tragic loss that the IX-529 (Sea Shadow) was scrapped, watching the ship being ripped apart, day to day was horrifying, but before I get there a little back story. I found this forum through my Flickr stats, yes I went in January of 2010 with Amy Hieden to the G-Row of the Susuin Bay Mothball Fleet, but we never we allowed on board the Sea Shadow, merely on the HMB-1. In September of 2012 my path once again crossed with the HMB-1 at Treasure Island in San Francisco. From September 2012, until the final scrapping of the Sea Shadow in December of 2012 I made 23 visits to the ships, climbed through almost every compartment of both ships, toured the Sea Shadow with one of the Ex-Lockheed Engineers, and was one of the last people to set foot on the Sea Shadow before it was gone. Through all these visits and once of a lifetime access I developed an understanding of what the US Navy was testing on the Sea Shadow, which goes far beyond the stealth technology and reduced manning that the Navy has explained publicly. As far as I can tell my photographs tell the most complete story of the scrapping and destruction of an amazing ship. When the scrapping kicked up a notch by bringing on three four hundred excavators, the amount of difficulty the scrapping encountered was amazing, including the Sea Shadow sliding forward off it's supports, a bent nose, and the excavators burning through $7,000 heads at an unheard of rate. At the moment my Flickr set is as complete of a public library as I'm posting for now, http://www.flickr.com/photos/soundguy20000/sets/72157631960059129/with/8390152916/
Thanks for looking and reading!
 

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Not really. The only thing they have in common is the SWATH hullform, and the FSF version is actually quite different -- more of a semi-SWATH approach. Also, FSF-1 isn't notably low-signature (look at the exposed railings, for example).
 
soundguy20000 said:
Thanks for looking and reading!
Thanks for sharing, Eric. What a mess...sad loss for history. :'(
 
Thank you so much Eric for joining and sharing this unique part of engineering history.

Was "IX-529" the official Lockheed designation for the program, or merely the vehicle's serial number?
 
IX-529 was the Navy's hull number. IX indicates "unclassified miscellaneous" and is used for all manner of unusual or uninteresting non-commissioned vessels -- everything from experimental craft like Sea Shadow to barges.
 
You probably know about this already, but one of the Lockheed MP-UAV concepts appears to have a UAV carrier version of the Sea Shadow in the background. It's on Hitechweb, though I can't find it at the moment.
 
Interesting article, thanks.
One minor comment, about the sentence "The twin hulls allowed for an extremely angled upper hull which looked completely unlike any ship before it."

Could instead be "...which looked strangely reminiscent of civil war ironclads like css Virginia, uss Cairo, uss Carondelet and their brethen. "

One man's opinion, anyway.
 
Sea Shadow hit the zeitgeist of the time when it was revealed in 1993, I was ten at the time and thought I was looking at the future. Almost immediately Electronic Arts put it into the videogame Urban Strike in 1994 (set in 2001). Everyone assumed this was the stealth fighter for the seas but it never worked out like that and today's stealth shaping for naval vessels has never gone to these lengths. Indeed even SWATH has fallen from favour since the late 80s/early 90s too.

I'm still curious how effective it really was, it seems to have had some input into USN programmes but seems very much to have been a DARPA project that the USN never really brought into or cared about.
I'm also curious as to how much of the design work was done by Skunk Works and how much by Lochkeed Shipbuilding, being an aviation company it would seem incredible that they designed and built a novel ship from the keel(s) up without any problems when they were not nautical architects. Perhaps this was another reason why the USN distrusted the programme?
 
Lots of good info at San Francisco Maritime National Park Association website.

These would have probably been quite useful:

Sea Shadow Manual

Saving some of these PDFs here for posterity.

- The Sea Shadow, Naval Engineers Journal, May 1994
- Sea Shadow 1983 to 2006 (slides & photos)
- Sea Shadow manual, Navsea
 

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