The Navy Thinks This New $7 Billion Ship Is The Answer To All Its Chinese Concerns

Business Insider ^ | 06/03/2012 | Robert Johnson

[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."

[GreyHoundSailor]

The hull armor on the IOWA Class had a belt that was a tad over 12 inches, but the armor on top of the 16 inch turrets and that surrounding the ‘citadel’ was 16 inches thick.

[DesScorp]

"In 2008, Vice Adm. Barry McCullough, redefined these capabilities out of existence with Potomac spin. "

How it it "Potomac Spin" to say "Look, anti-air won't work here"? That's not spin, that's a flat out statement of lack of capabilities. The spin is coming from Raytheon. And it can't do BMD, because again, space constraints prevent the version of AN-SPY3 going into Zumwalt to do everything that a "full" SPY3 system could do. From the Wikipedia page for the system:

It can combine the functions of up to five radars and ten antennas.

Notice the up to part. From what I've read in professional Naval blogs, the problem is that Zumwalt's "island" just doesn't have enough room to pack all of the needed electronics into a fully capable SPY3 package.