Submarine Ventilation Hatch Houses

It started as a stopgap

The original hatch house was not designed for the job it was doing. It was an interim answer that stayed in service, which is a familiar story in fielded equipment.

Interim solutions accumulate problems. Something does not seal as well as it should, an assembly step takes longer than it needs to, a detail that was acceptable as a temporary measure becomes a recurring cost once it is permanent.

Redesigned through successive engineering changes

HPS did not rebuild the original. We re-engineered it, in stages, into a product fit for its actual purpose.

That distinction matters. A build-to-print shop can only make what the drawing says, so a flawed drawing produces flawed hardware indefinitely. Changing the design requires engineers who can justify the change, and who are close enough to the work to know what is worth changing. Design-build means the customer brings the goal and HPS produces the engineered solution that meets it.

Successive changes, each analysed and each fabricated in house, turned a stopgap into a purpose-built product.

Why in-house engineering makes this affordable

An engineering change routed outside a company is expensive and slow: an outside firm, a revised drawing package, a re-quote, a new schedule. Multiply that by several iterations and most customers stop iterating and live with the flaw.

Here the engineer and the fabricator are in the same building. A change is a conversation, then a revision, then a part. That is the mechanism behind design-build engineering, and it is why HPS gets asked to fix products rather than only to make them.

What the build involves

Sealed enclosures for a marine environment on a submarine: welded assemblies, doors and frames, gasketed and sealed openings, and a finish that survives salt water.

Structural fabrication and welding by certified fabricators, with welds inspected in process. Coating in our own paint booth, for equipment going to sea, having the finish applied and inspected by the same organization that welded the assembly is not a small thing.

The pattern

Repeat defense work follows from this kind of outcome rather than from pricing. HPS holds sole-source positions on certain DoD products, and faces no competition on some of them.

More on defense fabrication, or read about the brows and gangways we build for the Navy.