Too Small to stand up to bigger ships, too large to be a deterrent to the smaller ones, yet still not big enough for long endurance missions.
U.S. Navy FAIL!!!
-Roll Tide-
That ship looks cool. Purpose built.
Not even close to the cruisers of my day.
That thing looks badass.
Want...for my personal yacht.
I’d sail it through Somalia.
BTW, why is there always water pouring out of ports on boats?
I would think they are sealed preventing the ship from taking on water.
Just out of curiosity, since the article specifically mentions China, how well do the Predator drones survive against actual military anti aircraft fire and not just a pack of Jihadis with AKs?
Too Small to stand up to bigger ships, too large to be a deterrent to the smaller ones, yet still not big enough for long endurance missions.
U.S. Navy FAIL!!!
The ship(the whole class) is a HUGE boondoggle, it has major design issues and very bad electrolysis problems. What’s more, it doesn’t even carry an engineering crew capable of even minor repairs. The Navy doesn’t want to admit it bought a lemon
Admirals Yacht....
The danger to this ship is skimmer missiles, the aluminum hull crushes like a beer can instead of a soup can. The robotic fly and swim toys are nothing but highly expensive bells and whistles. Not going to do much good to launch a drone if there is no place to land it when it runs out of fuel.
More stupidity by the Goobermint, put these government political designers on these boats and they will end up armored like the cars they drive. But when its only sailors, then heck, build them out of aluminum.
I suggest putting a deposit on them like a soda can for recycling, cause your going to need to.
http://www.naval-technology.com/projects/littoral/
Better get used to seeing these since it looks like the Navy has already ordered a dozen and plans on 50+. The project history is interesting to say the least.
What it actually needs are some much, much better anti-surface missiles (ASMs) with range enough to defeat the other littoral corvette sized ships it is apt to face who will be carrying between four and eitght such missiles themselves.
In the atni-surface role and mission pack, the NLOS missile (whose range was shorter than our adversaries) has been cancelled and now they are making due with the Griffin missile that have less than a ten mile range.
Either they should bolt tywo dual or quad cannister Harpoon launchers to these vessels, or supply them with a 16 cell Mk-41 VLS, which they are both designed to carry, and put at least eight of the new ASM Tiomoahwks in there with the rest being ESSM anti-air missiles.
That is where these ships are the weakest, and while the things DARPA is proposing are neat...they will not save it in an engagement with another modern corvette sized vessel in the littoral spaces.