Spanish F-100
Posted on 05/11/2017 9:57:08 PM PDT by sukhoi-30mki
Spanish F-100
They could employ a SPY-1F radar instead of SPY-1D. It's a much smaller version of the SPY-1D used on Arleigh Burke class destroyers and the F100. Navantia already integrated the SPY-1F on the frigates they built for the Norwegian Navy. I'm surprised those Norwegian Frigates wouldn't be in consideration, actually.
My only concern is that we keep the “know-how” U.S. based, so that we keep up with the latest tech and designs of this class of warship.
We need to pick up where things left off, if some of these relationships ever go South.
While this sounds like outsourcing, I wonder how much of it may in fact be our President tweaking our builders/suppliers in order to break loose some better deals design and cost-wise.
The Norwegian ships are some of the ones mentioned in the article as having been built to lower, “commercial” survivabilty standards. Indeed, from some reports the Norwegian variants deliberately removed some compartmentalization and battle survivabilty for more crew comforts.
Part of the problem is that the Navy and most of America’s naval contractors put all their eggs in the now clearly failed LCS basket and the very troubled DD-X project. We no longer have any modern designs between the two ready to go and the modern threat picture is such that we do not have time to start from scratch and retrain people to design a new one.
We simply don’t have any strategic thinkers.
We knew the Space Shuttle was going to sunset for a decade before it did. We didn’t plan any replacement.
Here you lay out the case for our Navy having a shortfall of the designs and ships in the pipeline.
I’m sure there are a number of other issues out there like these.
This really disgusts me. Obama, and even Bush should have been looking down the road. They didn’t.
Our last shuttle flew in 2011. We hadn’t even started on a replacement.
I’m not convinced a new shuttle should be the goal. I did think a strategic space plane was called for, but our guys didn’t follow through.
There was talk of that clear back in the early GHW Bush days.
I do think we have dark opps aircraft and technology that might get us a long way toward our goal of getting into space, if we just turn Lockheed loose and told them to make it happen.
We haven’t yet..., of course that we know of.
Doesn’t help that NASA spent 30 years killing off everything they saw as a potential ‘threat’ to the Shuttle. DC-X, Rotary Rocket, others - all dead due to NASA sabotage.
I agree.
You know, that wasn’t something I was in tune with all along. You expect them to take care of things. Then you find out some of the things they did, and it seems very destructive.
Who thinks like that?
Academics and bureaucrats. Very turf-sensitive and vicious about maintaining their power base.
Also, re your prior post: NASA gave Lockheed the contract to develop a shuttle replacement at the same time they were running around killing DC-X and Rotary. What we got was the X-33 which was to beget the VentureStar ‘space plane’. Only problem was that they designed the fuel tank last and it turned out to be unbuildable. After going way, way over budget, funding was finally killed off in 2001. NASA and Lockheed later claimed that they’d figured out how to build the fuel tank in 2004 but oddly nobody ever made a test model...
I find it extremely poetic justice that NASA is now reduced to relying on the private space industry they tried so hard to kill off from the 80s to the 2000s and buying rides from the Russians. Not great for the US in space, but poetic justice for the NASA asshat administrators who so successfully wreaked havoc with the private sector.
Why not just build 4 new shuttles with updated hardware/software? I would venture to say that they should be looking at ways to land the shuttle on the moon and be able to take off again.
Because the Shuttle *never* lived up to the original envisioned “space pickup truck” idea and had many problems that were never resolved. The Shuttle was a huge money sink that never lived up to its goals. It was supposed to be low-cost rapid access to space and it never was. Instead, it made access more expensive and slower. In fact, NASA’s insistence on the Shuttle actually helped kill the Skylab program, more moon missions and uncountable other programs were also sacrificed to the Shuttle God.
It would be far less expensive to start over with a completely different design and a new design would have a far better chance of actually meeting the 52 launches a year + 1/100 max launch failures. (Actual Shuttle stats: average about 3 launches a year, ~1/50 losses to launch ratio)
More criticism here:
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/424586/was-the-space-shuttle-a-mistake/
Put another way, what you are asking is “why can’t we build more Trapdoor Springfields with updated stocks and sights and issue them as front-line rifles to our troops” when people are walking around with FALs and SCAR-Hs.
As for landing a Shuttle on the moon... That’s like asking “Why can’t an F1 car be used to plow my field?” Here’s why, since I don’t want to type out what’s already been posted by others: https://www.quora.com/Why-did-the-space-shuttle-never-travel-to-the-moon
Also, this: http://www.asi.org/adb/05/sts-to-the-moon.html
bfl
Back in the seventies I used to see a number of Naval frigates in the US stockpile. I had heard later that the use of frigates by the US Navy was a stopgap type of a program until the Arleigh Burke class destroyers came out. But I’m not sure if that’s accurate.
You have a space plane. Google “x-37B”. Just got back from a 600 day mission in space.
Okay but the LCS’ were originally fully commercial ship designs adapted for USN work so perhaps that could be acceptable. Adaptation seems to be okay. For example the USCG National Security Cutters have no - zero - vertical launch cells yet it’s still in consideration. Surely the hull would have to be heavily modified to add some unless this is purely an ASW vessel.
I don't know about that but the Oliver Hazard Perry class frigates (FFG-7) were Anti-submarine warfare platforms, which the Arleigh Burke class destroyers can do that too but it's primary mission as Anti-Air warfare. So I'm not sure it's completely the case that they were planned as low cost gap fillers. I think instead the ability of a single vessel to have the firepower (basically the power of the missiles it can launch times the firing rate) that vertical launchers and phased array radars gave the navy in the 80s was a game changer against the soviets (where the "swarm" scenario of a hundreds of soviet aircraft coming at your battle group was a major concern) and it drove a desire for bigger vessels which could accommodate more vertical launch missile cells and a bigger phased array radars that could deliver more firepower than several older vessels.
Threats change and what's in vogue changes. The LCS was envisioned to be a post-cold war ship where the conflicts were coastal in nature - engaging small craft that you want to outspeed and outmaneuver. Now it seems the great minds think a blue water threat is more prominent but want lots of cheaper vessels. What comes around, goes around.
Actually, the LCS ‘adaptation’ and conversion seems to have been a pretty comprehensive disaster.
I wont disagree but not because of internal bulkhead structure. While there have been many high visibility technical snafus, from what I understand (and this is just hearsay) one of the biggest issue that never gets discussed is that the ships were planned to operate with a skeleton crew and it turns out to be not enough to maintain them. Of course putting more sailors on them raises their lifecycle cost through the roof so nobody wants to do that (might be a program killer). So you end up in a death spiral where the ships aren't maintained, they get worse, they fail more, can't be repaired, fail more, get CASREPs, etc.
Or so I've heard. Could well be wrong.
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Thanks for your insight on those things.
I consider access to space and ‘first knowledge’ to be very important strategic considerations.
With all the things we waste money on, like half a trillion dollars a year on welfare for folks who could work if they wanted, it amazes me the piddling dollar projects we cancel, due to budget concerns.
The space plane, the particle collider in Texas..., it just seems to me that strategically it is very important that we dominate space access and exploration. Imagine China up there and dominating, destroying our satellites and perhaps blocking access.
Imagine them getting to the Moon or planets first. Is that something we should allow to happen?
Should we allow Europe or China to find the next steps in particle dynamics (or whatever the proper term might be).
We should be at the forefront of these steps in the advancement of knowledge and new frontiers.
Particle dynamics, if you will, will be crucial to new weapons and other advancements we can’t even fathom clearly at the present time.
So we toss all this up in the air and act as if it doesn’t matter, until a crunch time comes and we must play catch-up.
NASA is a great example, as you have pointed out.
We landed on the moon in 1969 48 years ago. We let a half century go by without capitalizing on our achievement and taking next steps.
While I don’t think we should have gone broke doing these things, the costs associated with them pale in comparison to what we literally throw away each year on programs that should never have been started, and should at the very least be parred way way back to the essentials.
I’ve read enough to know that Lockheed and some other entities have evidently achieved some incredible things the public isn’t aware of. I still think we do could do more to discourage other nations from doing things, if we let it be known we’re light years ahead, and it would be futile to go up against us.
We just don’t seem to want to play the strategic games that have to be played to be the premier nation on the planet.
If you look at our domestic situation today, if anything we’re a nation teetering on the bring, a fantastic future or the abyss.
I do see this Trump administration to be our last hope. If this doesn’t pan out, the nation will not make it long into the future IMO. At the best it would result in even more of the movie Idocracy playing out in the U.S.
We’ve got to go after Soros and weed out the networks of the Left.
Of course that’s if we have the will to survive.
I’m just not convinced we do, looking at things as they are today in the United States.
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