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Your idea is basically about the same as mine: figure out how to do the fire support mission, and use the latest technology throughout to design a modern, survivable, capable system. It will not be another Iowa-class battleship, but it will do the job.

Why not develop a new type of 16" gun that won't use bagged powder, and put it on a hull of Chobham armor?

It's almost a direct upgrade - all we really are doing is scaling up what we did with the 8" guns on the Salem-class cruisers.

There have been many discussions like this before, I have re all your posts. I seem to recall various incarnations of different designs, maybe they went no further than the paper stage. One had a towed a barge that functioned as a firing platform?

I don’t know how complicated a railgun would actually be, but the simplicity of chemical firearms must have advantages. I wonder if it would be possible to devise some type of an AB component mixture that would be basically inert until it’s loaded into the breech to negate the volatility of the magazine storage.

Another thing that comes to mind is if ships could be armored with something like the Chobram (sp?) used on the Abrams tank. Something that would increase the survivability of the hull without adding the weight of hardened steel.