The new littoral ship that Lockheed Martin is building for the Navy is four percent overweight:

The Navy and Lockheed already have a plan to remove nearly all the additional weight from the ship over a period of about six months once the new ship, which is named Freedom, gets to Norfolk, Virginia, in December, said the sources, who asked not to be identified.

As I said, margin, margin, margin. If you miss your weight target by that much on a launch system, it’s bye-bye payload. In this case, it simply puts the ship at risk in combat.

As the emailer who sent this to me asks, “I wonder if Lockheed will remove excess weight from Orion at no additional cost.”