Posted on 06/04/2012 6:36:33 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Looking a bit like an old Civil War Ironclad, the $7 billion DDG 1000 USS Zumwalt will focus on land attacks, relying heavily on its advanced stealth technology to slip in close to shore before unleashing its massive onboard arsenal.
A new take on the Zumwalt was published today by the Eric Talmadge at the Associated Press who points out that in addition to the ship's wide array of conventional weapons the Zumwalt will eventually carry the Navy's much anticipated "railgun".
The railgun is an electrically powered artillery weapon that launches massive projectiles at high speeds without the use of gunpowder or explosives. Instead, an electric current is run through the artillery shell, the current interacts with the magnetic fields in the rails and pounds the shell from the barrel.
The Navy successfully tested the railgun in February, but it has not yet been fielded for service.
The Zumwalt was originally estimated to cost about $3.8 billion, but so much technology crammed on board that its cost has nearly doubled, and after the first three are built, production will stop. Including the exhaustive research and development required by each vessel to total cost jumps to $7 billion apiece.
In addition the Zumwalt will be built to receive the Navy's new electromagnetic rail-gun that can fire projectiles at over five times the speed of sound. All this new technology adds up.
Defense analyst Jay Korman says "They were looking to introduce so many new technologies at once, and the cost ballooned." Korman works with the Avascent Group concluded, "I don't think people have changed their minds that it's a capable ship. It's just too expensive."
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
I agree.... I had a thought for a radical, cheap fast attack force...
Take some of the old burke class destroyers, gut them leaving only the reactor and engines... install fast lifting marmac elevators, 1 fore and 1 aft. Convert lower decks into hangar bays. Each ship will carry 4 f35b vertical lift aircraft. Add the laser cannon forward, or the long range gun.
4 of these ships make up a squadron. With one ship carrying 2 helo’s, you have 16 aircraft and 2 helo’s.
That would be one hell of a punch. Pretty hard to take out an entire squadron of these at once.
You could do 8 squadrons of these attack carriers for the price of one big floating target. And these could go where the big boys could not.
1. That eventually someone will come up with a way of detecting it
Wow! Who would have thought of that!
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.
This statement is factually wrong. Even if it were possible, the only way they could attempt to enforce this would be to confiscate American assets in China. In which event we would probably begin seizing Chinese assets around the world to compensate the US corporations affected.
I'm all for making what is left of the US manufacturing base more competitive. But, until you have been in my place where the Chinese competitor is able to sit across the table and offer what you have been making for your material cost alone, you don't realize how big the gap is.
I have to question the wisdom of spending such sums on an admittedly potent (and very cool) defense platform when we're broke. Maybe we should think about securing our national borders first. Can we build a reliable fence for $7 billion?
I'm good with that.
1. Not radical. This comes up every generation or so.
2. Cheap? you are keeping the cheapest part of the ship, the outer hull, going to the expense of gutting it and installing entirely new systems.
3. "Convert lower decks into hangar bays". Sounds so simple. But the only people I can think of who ever did it were the IJN with Hiyo and Junyo. And in that case it was an option allowed for in the original design.
4. C3: you can't really share it out.
CNS built ‘em that way to deflect cannon balls. USN is building ‘em that way to deflect RADAR emissions.
I misused the words “calling in” in this context, when what I intended to say was “selling”. China currently owns over $1 trillion in US debt in the form of bonds of various maturities, which it can theoretically sell any time it wants to whoever will buy them. However, mature debt securities must be accepted and redeemed by the issuer (the US) or else offered to be rolled over upon new terms acceptable to the buyer.
Any ship without 16 inch armor isn’t a Battleship
I suppose that one could call the Zumwalts Monitors. They do weigh as much as early dreadnaughts.
This ship is a multi-billion dollar solution in search of a problem.
Creating a stealthy fire support ship and being the basis of the CG(X).
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.
No disagreement.
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