I was kind of under the impression that air power had long since replaced sea-based artillery.
Well, I always knew The South would rise again!...................
I have always had two concerns about stealth technology.
1. That eventually someone will come up with a way of detecting it... rendering all of these crazy expensive stealth a huge waste of taxpayer dollars.
2. That if stealth can be used on boats, bombers, and fighters.. it can be used on nuclear armed ICBM’s too... which completely eliminates the ability to retaliate in a nuclear war since you are destroyed before you ever know your under attack.
Did they dredge up some old Civil War ironclad blue prints?
We used to defeat Communism by show of force before we started accommodating them by turning over our manufacturing base.
Nonetheless, these warships when finally delivered will be experimental platforms rather than useful ships. Question for the USN: If the Chinese find a way around your stealthy design (and they will), then what you've got is a $7 billion TARGET.
A railgun?! Wow, didn’t realize we were that far on the technology. The video on that link was pretty awesome too!
A railgun?! Wow, didn’t realize we were that far on the technology. The video on that link was pretty awesome too!
What do you get for $7 billion in stealth technology that doesn’t come for free in a submarine? (Well except for the base price of the submarine).
I haven’t followed rail gun technology, but I think it’s a safe bet, based on other technologies, that the first run will be problemmatic, short range, and bulky compared to what will eventually be available as the technology matures.
Given that, deployment on a ship would seem to make sense. It’s mobile, it’s big, it can generate a lot of power, and it’s a good test bed.
When viewed that way, perhaps the cost isn’t as much of a concern if it leads to smaller, longer range, and more portable versions later that have already been proven to be robust.
If this were on a nuclear ship (I don’t know if that is the case here), you would have a great source of power and wouldn’t need to stockpile explosives for projectile launches.
Depending on the eventual accurate range of this technology, the stealth aspect may end up like I understand it’s use on aircraft - our weapons are able to engage just about any enemy so far out that even defeating the stealth would not give a significant advantage in most cases. In close range combat, the ship obviously isn’t invisible to the naked eye so it’s going to be vulnerable no matter what to optical targetting. Let’s hope we don’t let anyone get that close.
I’m obviously not an expert, and I’m making a lot of guesses here, but that’s my sense of what may be the thinking in this case.
How well would the three, $7 billion ships stand up to 1000 $21 million ships?
$7 billion for a destroyer is a crime. Seriously. And the Zumwalt doesn’t even have the Burke class’ anti-air capability. Not enough room to shoehorn that caliber of AA electronics into the current design. This ship is a multi-billion dollar solution in search of a problem. Zumwalt would be appalled at his name being stuck on this turkey. He was all about “many and cheap”... building a huge fleet of small, easy to build and inexpensive warships vs. a small fleet with a few hyper-expensive behemoths. He was the brainchild behind the Sea Control Ship and the Perry class frigate. Sometimes I think someone in the Navy Department named this ship just to insult his memory.
I thought “Land Attack” was what those big, converted (from SSBN to SSGN) Trident subs were for? They replaced the Trident missiles with bundles of cruise missiles and added room for SEAL teams.
I wonder if the BBG (they sure as heck ain’t DDGs) Zumwalts will have any other useful abilities like air defense and ASW?
The current carriers being constructed are $4 billion a unit. Also worries me that there is so much new technology. Usually projects like that end up bad or have huge cost overruns.
If the technology is powered by Chinese chips with backdoors built into them, then yes, production, guidance, fire and control, engines...the whole boat will stop.
It would be cheaper to just give the Chinese the blueprints to the thing and get it over with. Plus it would give the free traitors another excuse to spend taxpayer money on outsourcing.