MKSheppard
Post subject: LCS/Streetfighter/Zumwalt Threads/Posts of InterestPostPosted: Mon Jul 27, 2009 9:30 am
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Stuart wrote:
It all started off with a guy called Wayne Hughes who proposed what he called "rebalancing" of the fleet, essentially replacing our existing force of combatants with a larger number of small craft. Esentially he was proposing the sort of FAC-M fleet that had already been discredited in the past. Boiled down to its simplest, what Hughes was suggesting was that future naval battles would consist of a single exchange of missiles. Any ship that was fired on would be hit and any ship that was hit would be sunk. Therefore what mattered was to have more ships than the other side so that some would be left afloat at the end of that single exchange.
In reality what this meant was that instead of defending ships we should assume that they and their crews would be obliterated and accept the casualties involved. His theories weren't taken that seriously and he got little attention until he teamed up with a guy called Cebrowski.
Cebrowski had taken over as the head of the Naval War College and wanted to make his name. He picked up on Hughes' theories and created a concept called Streetfighter. This was a 300 ton surface combatant capable of 60+ knots and armed with 8 anti-ship missiles etc etc. He then staged a series of war games that showed the Streetfighter devastating its opponent. That wasn't surprising, the rules were that any ship fired upon by a Streetfighter would be sunk while the speed of the Streetfighter would prevent it being engaged effectively.
When other simulations showed the Streetfighters being slaughtered by real warships under real conditions, he started a screaming campaign in the press, the usual nonsense about how his forward-thinking ideas were being suppressed by hide-bound admirals etc etc etc etc etc etc etc. He also came up with another idea to back up Streetfighter, a small aircraft carrier displacing 3,000 tons, capable of 60 knots also and equipped with an air group of 20 F-35Cs and 10 SH-60Js. Anothers eries of games showed this also devastating the opposition.
The fact that the largest conceivable hull buildable on 3,000 tons couldn't even carry that many aircraft let alone operate them was neither here nor there.
Anyway, the whole Streetfighter concept got very popular with naval cadets, primarily because a fleet of small craft offers command opportunities at a much lower rank. Congresscritters got hold of the idea and started to press for Streetfighter construction.
That's when LCS got into the world (LCS standing for Let's Castrate Streetfighter). It proposed a radical small surface combatant (intitally 500 - 1,000 tons) with a target speed to 50 plus knots. Various shipbuilders were asked what they could provide to meet that spec. There was much tooing and froing and much confused questioning, the Navy took a look at what it was offered (basically a PT boat), vomited in horror and laid down a decent spec. The contractors took one look at the spec and passed out with shock. After the administration of smelling salts and a liitle brandy, they chorused "You have got to be kidding".
The new spec was essentially that of a frigate, essentially a faster version of the FFG-7. So, LCS went up in size to frigate dimensions (roughly 4,000 tons) and the speed went down to more normal levels. That's what is being built now.
The whole point is not to build small combatants, they can't defend themselves, lack range and seakeeping and are damned uncomfortable for the crews. So LCS has already suceeded; Streetfighter has been forgotten, people have moved on to other things now, with a little luck, LCS can be cancelled.
DavidEC wrote:
Hang on; why do these people need a fleet of super-fast boats?
Stuart wrote:
I have been asking that question (at a variety of high levels) for ten years and I have never, repeat never, had a sensible answer. The nearest I have had was (from one female U.S. Navy officer) was that standing on the bridge wings at 60 knots would help dry her hair after a shower.
In the LCS program, the need for speed is a demonstrated end in itself. You're not supposed to ask why.
Pu239 wrote:
How useful are (The Pegasus Class PHMs) compared to LCS?
Stuart wrote:
The Pegasus class were a truly horrible experience and they probably did more to kill off the idea of a hydrofoil surface combatant than any other consideration. They were very badly armed indeed; their 76mm gun was wildly inaccurate due to pounding and vibration and jammed like cray for the same reasons. The ships had virtually a zero sensor fit - they had a navigation radar and a fire control set and that was virtually that. So their ability to shoot their main weapons was severely restricted. They were appallingly expensive to run since they basically had two speeds, up to 12 knots or 48 knots and nothing in between. (The reason for that was that they required a specific speed to get up on their foils and that was that). So, they either allowed around doing nothing very much or ran around flat out and drained their gas tanks. Their operational range was very limited and they were utterly defenseless against air attack. They share that with all FAC-M; a helicopter gunship is a devastating weapon against such craft.
(Tale from the crypt for you. During Operation Desert Storm, the Iraqis tried to use Boston Whalers to infiltrate special forces behind coalition lines. The craft were intercepted by British Lynx helicopters which blasted their escort of FAC-M out of the water and forced to shelter in a bay.All sorts of helicopters turned up to join in the fun, mostly troop carriers using machine guns and grenade launchers out of the doors, but one ASW Sea King arrived and, lacking any other offensive weaponry, started trying to use its dipping sonar as a wrecking ball.)
The weaknesses of the whole FAC-M concept come from two things, both size-linked. One is that they lack the space to arrange tehir electronics properly. Some time ago, the company I worked then for did a study on the electronics fit of TNC-45 and TNC-62 class FAC-M. These ships are identical except the 45s have a 45 meter long hull and the 62s have a 62 meter hull. The radar/EW fits are identical - yet the TNC-62 outperformed the smaller ship across the board (when I say the equipment was identical, I mean they were exact clones - the manufacturers's serial numbers were consecutive). The reason why the difference in performance existed was quite simple; the bigger hull gave more potentially optimum positions for the antennas and reduced electronic interference.
The other weakness of the FAC-M is that internally, they are so compressed that all the ship's vital functions are essentially in the same place. Any sort of damage anywhere and a lot of vital functions go bye-bye. That's why Sea Skua is so effective despite its small warhead - even the small bang does a lot of vital systems damage.
There's many other reaosns why small craft are bad ideas (their inability to handle rough weather for example, severe on-board vibration and the proximity of the radars to the water resulting in multi-pathing for example) but overall, they're bad news. The final nail in the coffin of the Pegasus class was that they were very expensive to maintain as well as run - their foils needed frequent replacement due to water erosion and they were very prone to docking damage.
Sea Skimmer wrote:
Note that when it was first announced LCS was also a mere 1,000 tons, it’s now nearly quadrupled in size!
Patrick Degan wrote:
Naturally —to accomodate more subcontractors.
Sheppard wrote:
It didn't quadruple in size to accomodate the EEEVIL Military Industrial complex™.
It quadrupled in size because it was the only way of actually coming somewhat near accomplishing the contradictory goals set forth by the Navy:
1.) It must be fast.
2.) It must have a sorta decent range.
3.) It must be armed with something more powerful than a machine gun.
4.) It must be capable of supporting a helicopter.
etc
Patrick Degan wrote:
And this defeats the observation... how, exactly?
Sheppard wrote:
Your observation was that the reason LCS quadrupled in size was to accomodate more subcontractors - ie, more military pork barrelling.
May I suggest you do some research?
Obviously something capable of reaching 40+ knots and yet being heavily armed, etc is going to have to be gas turbine powered; for simple reasons of weight. It takes about oh, 49,000~ or so HP to get a 600~ ton ship with dimensions about 25% bigger than the Asheville PGs: (206 x 30 x 11.8 ft) up to 40 knots, and 84,000 SHP to get it up to 45 kts.
Now, you might say that these HP requirements are for a traditional displacement hull, and not for a high speed planing hull. One of the early design proposals for LCS put forth was for a really really BIG planing hull type of warship; which was based off a 1980s UK design. Unfortunately, the UK design was a deliberate fraud. Stuart will be able to tell you more about this.
So suffice to say, we can't do a planing hull, so we need 49-84k SHP. (actually 100k SHP due to 20% margin needed).
Because this is a USN ship, we can't just get around with one really big engine, because of battle damage requirements; so we need to have two engines; each with a rated power of about 50,000 SHP.
Something that meets our requirement is the GE LM6000 Marine Gas Turbine Link to it.
Since we need to have a 1000 nm range at 40 knots, that comes down to 25 hours of full power. We know from that page that the SFC is 0.329 lb/per shp-hour.
So 100,000 SHP * 25 hours = 2,500,000 shp-hours. At 0.329 lb/shp-hr SFC; that means....822,500 lbs, or 411.25 tons of fuel will be needed.
So what this means is that the original spec for LCS is going to need to be 68% fuel by weight to meet the goals for hi speed running. You can reduce the SHP needed by lengthening the hull to get a higher hull speed; but this adds more tonnage, etc; and then add in the demands for a armament, supporting a helicopter, etc; and you can see easily how a 500-600 ton boat quadrupled in size to a 2,500 ton frigate before it was acceptable to the US Navy's General Board Specifications.
Patrick Degan wrote:
The problem with that non-argument is that the ships, as they are, are pretty much worthless for anything. A boondoggle is a boondoggle is a boondoggle, whether it's a billion or 10 billion or 50 billion spent on the goddamned thing.
Stuart wrote:
Patrick, this isn't the point Mark was addressing. Remember, I also regard the LCS as being a criminal waste of money but that wasn't the issue being raised. The primary concern was why LCS went from 300 to 4,000 tons.
It had nothing to do with providing more room for subcontractors. What happened was that the Navy finally got control of the project - previously it had been driven by a handful of fanatics, some supporters in the media and a group of gullible politicians. When the Navy got control of it, the first thing they did was lay down a series of specifications. They demanded range figures, payload, crew levels, sensor outfits etc etc etc. All of these are things that had to be defined before the ship could be designed.
What Mark showed you - very well if I may say so - was how unrealistic it was to fit those specifications into the originally-proposed hull. It wasn't that the ship grew per se, it was that the Streetfighter supporters had dramatically understated the size of vessel needed to support the claims they were making. Put another way, LCS didn't grow from 300 tons to 4,000, it was always a 4,000 ton ship, it was just that Cebrowski-Wayne et al knocked a zero of the displacement for public consumption.
That doesn't change the fact that the thing is a boondoggle, but it does tell us that there were sound design reasons for the apparent growth in ship size. Mark gave you one very good, well-argued example of that.
By the way, another thing that went wrong with LCS was that the Lockheed Martin proposal used a composite hull to save weight. I told them that was a bad idea but they wouldn't listen. Then a Norwegian minehunter, the Orkla, caught fire and burned out. In eight minutes (eight!!!) she went from an intact ship to a sinking hulk. When the wreck was examined, it was shown that the composite hull was delaminating and that all the other members of the class had the same problem. L-M were given a choice, build the ship out of steel or forget we gave you a contract.
That pushed the displacement up by over 750 tons alone and the cost ramped skywards.
DavidEC wrote:
I got schooled there, but then wouldn't it be better to have dedicated helicopter carriers for economies of scale? The Iwo Jima series apparently carries 20 helos per ship, that's a helo for every 1,000 tons of displacement roughly; an LCS would carry one per 4,000 ton displacement, and that's not even counting the different types the larger ship. In addition, Iwo Jima is presumably a larger, slower and therefore probably safer platform for helos. I don't think LCS is not going to be backed up by heavier forces a few miles offshore in any case. How would you land a helo on a hard-manoeuvering 40-knot speedboat in a hostile littoral environment anyway?
Stuart wrote:
This is a complicated question; on one side of the ledger, you're quite right, economy of scale suggests that a large helicopter carrier offers significant advantages over smaller ships. This is the approach adopted by the Japanese Navy with their new DDH, the Hyuga. The Thai Navy adopted a similar logic with their helicopter carrier, the Chakkrinareubet. There, the idea was to provide maritime law enforcement helicopter cover out of range of land bases. The requirement was to have two helos airborne at all times, working backwards that gave a group of around ten birds.
On the other hand, the problem with the larger dedicated helicopter carrier is that it isn't always there when its needed; the shipboard helicopter is a hard-worked piece of kit and the ships can't always rely on having a helo carrier in support. The only helo a destroyer can rely on is the one it carried itself, so there's a good case for that as well.
You're quite right on the safety aspects, trying to bring a helo in on an LCS doing 40 knots is an interesting thing to contemplate. That's one reason why I think that the whole LCS program is fundamentally misconceived; many of the things the ship is supposed to do can't be done at 40+ knots.
Another problem (just to add to the general air of gloom and despondancy) is that LCS is supposed to work within a network of sensors and can thus economize on the on-ship sensors (note that the provision of the sensor net is not included in the cost of the LCS itself). That sensor net is a horrible glaring weakness that nobody dares mention. The whole point about net-centric warfare is supposed to be finding the enemy center of mass and eliminating it. Well, that sensor net is LCS's center of mass, take it out and the ships are virtually defenseless (and to make it worse, we've been there before)
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MKSheppard
Post subject: Re: LCS/Streetfighter Threads/Posts of InterestPostPosted: Fri Apr 02, 2010 9:15 pm
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pengolodh_sc wrote:
Misconceived how? I am particularly interested in the Skjold-class, for obvious reasons.
Stuart wrote:
This takes us back a bit. During the 1970s and 1980s there was a great drive towards the use of fast attack craft as primary surface combatants. Basically the argument was that these ships packed the wallop of a frigate yet cost far less. The idea found particularly fertile ground up in the frozen north and Baltic for a variety of reasons but the idea of the FAC-M gained a cadre of dedicated supporters who clung to their beloved craft with all the tenacity of Betamax supporters and Mac users (and people who like Glocks come to think of it). They could be identified by their continued chanting of "this is the way of the future and anybody who says otherwise is a hide-bound reactionary". On the other hand, there were fabulously clear-sighted, deeply expert and incredibly skilled analysts (modesty forbids me going further) who had deep suspicions about the whole idea. Basically their doubts stemmed from the fact that the FAC-M was a one-trick pony. It had its battery of anti-ship missiles and that was that. It had no air defenses, it was completely vulnerable to any form of attack and it was totally dependent upon shore-based command and control stations for target location and attack vectoring.
As the 1990s broke and combat experience with the FAC-M started to grow, it quickly became apparent that the problems with the FAC-M had been greatly understated even by their most erudite opponents. Put bluntly, the damned things were floating death traps. When FAC-M fought FAC-M from comparable navies, it was a one-for-one exchange rate. Basically, the two sides wiped each other out. Iran-Iraq war was a good example. Pitch a FAC-M up against a frigate and the FAC-M died fast and bloody usually without seeing the ship that killed it. It also quickly became apparent that the FAC-M was completely unsurvivable unless it was provided with heavy air cover which gave rise to the obvious point that one might as well hang the missiles on the aircraft and leave the FAC at home. Operation Desert Storm really killed the FAC-M. The craft were slaughtered without ever getting a chance to defend themselves let alone attack anything. For them, surviving was a very real achievement. By the end of ODS, the FAC-M was a failed concept, utterly discredited.
This really did not amuse the legion of ferverant FAC-M supporters. For a while, they could be identified by them turning up in various places, repeating stories of how "their" FAC/FAC-M had hurtled out from cover and peppered some unfortunate destroyer (almost invariably American) with gunfire. Checking into these stories proved that they were, without exception male bovine excrement. Mostly they never happened (in one case up north, the destroyer claimed to be the victim of one such attack was in the Pacific Fleet at the time) and were simply the overwrought imaginations of the FAC-M clique. Others omitted vital information (for example the exercise in question had been over for a couple of days when the "attack" took place or that the FAC in question had been spotted and "sunk" by a shipboard helicopter and therefore was making its attack from beyond the grave). These days, when somebody comes around with such stories WE BEAT THEM WITH CANES.
Once the period of denial and bullshitting was over, the FAC-M clique tried to regroup and come up with ideas that actually worked. About that time, Stealth technology was the in thing and the obvious solution was to apply stealth technology to the FAC-M. At this point it's necessary to digress a little. The real horrible weakness of the FAC-M was twofold. It was all attack, no defense and its on-board sensors were so poor that it was invariably seen long before it could see. Therefore, faced with a real warship, it would be killed before it couuld launch an attack of its own. However, the FAC clique believed that ***stealth technology*** would eliminate this fundamental weakness. It would achieve two things. It would cut down the search radius of sensors mounted on opposing warships and it would prevent radar-guided weapons on said warships locking in on the FAC. Out of this concept came Visby and Skjold. Reinforcing them was the idea that a significant increase in speed would allow the invisible FAC-Ms to get in and out to launch their attacks.
Thus invigorated, the FAC clique once again resumed their "this is the way of the future and anybody who says otherwise is a hide-bound reactionary" offensive. Again, note, no evidence to back up their assetions other than highly dubious third party stories that fell apart on close examination and impassioned rhetoric. The Swedes came up with the idea for the Visby class; the proposal here was to build a class of 15 - 20 multi-role vessels that would replace the existing fast attack, mine warfare etc fleet. The Norwegians produced the Skjold design (the logic behind that being that Norway had a huge coastline so a high transit speed was necessary to get between critical areas while stealth would prevent them being seen. However, there were already serious doubts about the whole concept so the navies built prototypes. The Swedes built the Smyge, thw Norwegians the Skjold. Essentially, these were proof-of-concept ships stripped of anything that cost real money.
Both failed completely. It turns out that Stealth at sea is a short-lived phenomena; it depends on exact ship proportions and ships move and change with the sea. The wake proved to be unhideable and it glows in the dark most of the time. Real warships already had electro-optical gear that was fully capable of getting visual spots. The new prototypes were just as vulnerable as the older designs. Thens omething really startling was discovered; the "stealthy" FAC-Ms had massive radar cross-sections. They weren't less observable, they were more so. The reason why proved to be quite logical; by designing them to minimize observability, the designers had been forced to solutions that generated large spray clouds. Those spray clouds were major radar reflectors in their own right and gave the effect of a ship moving around in its own private chaff cloud. Smyge was pretty bad in this respect, Skjold was and is horrendous. As long as they drift without power, both ships are indeed quite hard to spot on radar. As soon as they start to move, on Skjold even at slow speeds, they become glaringly obvious.
Both navies looked at the experience gained and shuddered. The Swedes mothballed the Smyge (I believe she is a museum ship now where naval cadets are taken and told if they propose something similar, THEY WILL BE BEATEN WITH CANES). The Visby program was slashed from 15 - 20 hulls to five. Even so, they're abortions with massive electronic problems. Great candidates for the deep sea target game. The Norwegian Navy got the Skjold back from the USN after we'd leased her for a whle (our verdict being "this ship has no conceivable use or value" - in the special forces support role the Cyclone class were considered to be much more effective). The Norwegian Navy then tried to cancel the whole program. They made repeated efforts to do this between 2001 and 2007 with, for example, General Sverre Diesen describing them as being "of negligible military value". The Norwegian Parliament kept refusing pleas to allow the cancellations and kept restoring them to the budget (allegedly because the shipyard was paying off key members of the government. The truth of the matter is that the tactical rationale for the Skjold class has long since vanished. The Norwegian coast isn't threatened by anybody and Norwegian strategy looks to stabilization and intervention operations far from home. The Skjold herself was an interesting experiment, but the passage of time and changing operational requirements have left the concept behind. On purely military grounds, the entire program would have been cancelled almost a decade ago. The continued construction of the Skjold class was purely a matter of a political decision to support a shipyard that has no other military business. This wasn't even an investment in preserving necessary defense infrastructure since the yard is of no great value to the naval shipbuilding industry. The Skjold program is corporate welfare at its most blatant, spending scarce defense funds on a program that offers no corresponding military capabilities.
The Skjold class makes an interesting comparison with the Chinese Project 022 missile-armed fast attack craft. The two represent different approaches to a similar tactical requirement; Skjold is a surface effect ship that rides an air cushion generated by lift fans. The Project 022 is a much simpler design using a wave-piercing catamaran hull. Both ships carry similar armaments allowing for national origin. The big differences lay in two areas. The conceptually simpler Chinese ship sacrifices much in the way of speed, apparently being capable of around 36 knots as opposed to the Skjold's 45 knots. However, so far, more than 40 Chinese craft have been built (out of a planned total of 100) and are in operational service. Ten years after the conceptual prototype was completed, the Norwegians still have to complete their first operational Skjold. Given that both the Chinese and Norwegians envisaged their fast attack craft adopting a loiter-ambush attack strategy, it is hard to deny that the Chinese have achieved the better design solution. Both countries have a long, rugged coastline to defend. The Norwegians adopted a philosophy of using high transit speeds so that a small number of craft could move to the point of threat. The Chinese built their craft cheaply and in large numbers so that there would already be ships deployed at the point of threat. It's hard to argue against the proposition that the Chinese got it right.
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Post subject: Re: LCS/Streetfighter/Zumwalt Threads/Posts of InterestPostPosted: Thu Apr 08, 2010 4:17 am
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Darth Wong wrote:
Any idea what their reasoning is?
Stuart wrote:
At its simplest, nobody has any faith the ships will work and if they do work, nobody quite knows what they will be working for.
DDG-1000 has been a screwed program right from the start. The people behind it broke every single rule of naval design and consciously did not discuss the ship or her basic theoretical precepts with anybody. The ship was, you see, a break from the hidebound traditions of the past that tied the navy to obsolete ideas and prevented them from striding forward into the bright days of the future!!
Those thirty words have doomed more naval programs that guns, torpedoes and missiles combined.
Some of the hide-bound conservative ideas they discarded included floating, moving, shooting, steering etc.
The big problem was that they changed everything in one go. They wanted new weapons, new electronics, new machinery, new crew levels, new hull design. Everything was new, everything was a major break with past practice. Of course, it all ended in tears, there's no way it could have done anything else (PS, check HPCA and you'll note I told everybody a week before teh official announcement that this was going to happen).
Examples. The ship is supposed to use a radical hull form to reduce its radar cross section. . Great, only that hull form using a wave-piercing bow and tumblehome. Now, lets look at this more closely. Its a wave-piercing bow. That means it - uhhhh - pierces waves. In fact the water from the pierced wave floods over the deck, along the main deck, washes over the forward weaponry, hits the bridge and flows down the ship's side. Now, that water weighs quite a bit, several tens of tons in fact and its moving at the speed of the wave plus teh speed of the ship. That wave, when it hits the gun mount and bridge front is literally like driving into a brick wall at 60mph. The gun mount shield is made of fiberglass to reduce radar cross section. The wave also generates suction as it passes over the VLS system, sucks the doors open and floods the silos. The missiles don't like that. Spray is one thing (bad enough) but being immersed in several tons of water flowing down is quite another. Then we have the problem of the water flowing over the deck. It is stronge nough to sweep men off their feet. In fact, its so dangerous that ships that operate under such conditions have to use submarine rules - nobody on deck. But to work the ship, we need people on deck. Uhhh, problem here?
Now tumblehome. This means the ship's sides slop inwards from the waterline, not outwards like normal ships do. Now, we take a slice through the ship at the waterline. That's called the ship's waterplane. There;s a thing called tons per inch immersion, the weight of water needed to sink the ship one inch. TPI is proportional to waterplane area. As the ship's waterplane area increases it requires more tons to make it sink an inch. as the waterplane decreases it requires fewer tons to make it sink per inch. Now, with a conventional flared hull, as the ship sinks in the water, its waterplane area increases, so it requires a steadily increasing rate of flooding to make the ship sink at a steady rate. If the rate of flooding does not increase, eventually the ship stops sinking. This cheers up the crew immensely.
However, with tumblehome, the waterplane area decreases as the ship sinks into the water. So, the ship will have a steadily-increasing rate of immersion at a steady rate of flooding. in short, for a steady rate of flooding, the ship sinks faster and faster. The ship will not stop sinking. This is immensely depressing.
The problem is the damage goes much further than that. As a ship with a conventional flared hull rolls, the increasing waterplane area gives her added bouyancy on the side that is submerging and gives her a moment that pushes upwards, back against the roll. That stabilizes her and she returns to an even keel. With a tumblehome hull, as the ship rolls, the decreasing waterplane area reduces bouyancy on the side that's going down, givinga moment that pushes downwards in teh same direction as a roll. This destabilizes her so she rolls faster and faster until she goes over.
Having dealt with the hull design, we now move to the machinery. The DDG-1000 is supposed to have mininally-manned machinery spaces. This will save manpower etc etc etc. There's a problem, all of that automation doesn't work. Its troublesome, unreliable, extremely expensive and it needs somebody to watch it and make sure it does it's job. In fact, its useless. It gets worse. The purpose of a crew on a warship is not to make it goa round and do things. Its to try and patch the holes and put out teh fires when other warships do things to it. Repairing damage cannot be automated (did I tell you that DDG-1000 was supposed to have automated damage control systems ? Ah, forgot that but it doesn't matter, they didn't work either). So, having designed a hull that sinks if somebody looks at it crosswise, we now remove teh people who were supposed to try and stop it sinking.
Now we come to the electronics. Great idea here. Put all the antennas into a single structure and we can cut RCS. That causes a problem called electronic interference. The systems all shut eachother down. And they did. Very efficiently. The radar suite on DDG-1000 was the world's first self-jamming missile system. Oh, they took down the comms and gunnery fire control as well. Did I also mention that the flow noise from the wave-piercing bow was enough to prevent the sonar working? That was an easy problem to solve. Remove the sonar. Anyway easy way to solve the interference problems, use multi--functional antennas. That sounds good. One day, when they get them working, I'll let you know. MFAs are pretty good when used in their place but NOT for operating mutually incompatible systems.
The gun. Ah yes, the gun. It fires shells, 155mm ones. Guided shells whose electronics can withstand 40,000G. The acceleration in the gun barrel is 100,000G. Ooops. Problems. Then we come to the missiles. They;re in new silos, all along the deck edge. Can anybody see the problems with that? Like moment and rolling inertia? The designers couldn't which proves they know slightly less about the maritime environment than the deer currently eating the bushes outside my office window.
Now, all these problems are occurringa t once and the fact that everything in the ship is new means that one can't be fixed until the rest are.
And that is why DDG-1000 got cancelled.
Lonestar wrote:
So, wait...does that mean we're likely to see more Burkes?
As for the crew thing, that was much discussed when I was in. The community Surface Warfare magazine had an article at one point gushing over how on the LCS they were going to be minimally manned with cross-training of rates.
The example they used was FCs being in the same division as ITs and doing the same job as them.
The minimal manning also mandated that in the case of GQ, no repairs lockers would be manned up, everyone would sit in their space/Force Protection station. Sorry, there are no extra sailors to be had in the eevent of a fire.
Finally, in regards to DDG-1000 manning, a lot of sailors looked at the manning levels and thought "Holy....what are the in-port duty sections going to look like?" What's retention going to look like if you have to spend every other 24 hours in port on the ship? Pierside in San Diego?
Yeah, there's a lot of skepticism among the blueshirts whenever someone says "minimal manning", either on the LCS or DDG-1000.
Fingolfin_Noldor wrote:
Sounds like the ship, from Stuart's description, will be among the most expensive white elephants ever built, if not the most expensive.
Stuart wrote:
You know where the expression "white elephant" comes from? Most white elephants come from Thailand where they are considered to be both royal and sacred. So, in the good old days, when Thailand was still Siam and the French were still in France (in-joke for any Thai readers) the King would look over his aristocracy and decide if any of them were getting to be rich enough and powerful enough to be a threat to him. If they were, he would give them a white elephant. Now, since it was a royal gift, the recipient wouldn't be able to kill it, that would be an act of treason adn give the king an excuse to execute him. Since it was sacred, the recipient would be unable to send the elephant out to work, that would be sacrilege and give the king an excuse to execute him. Since it was an elephant, it would eat him into bankruptcy.
So, you see, white elephants served a strategic purpose; DDG-1000 doesn't.
Patrick Degan wrote:
Almost as if they took the principles of writing a script for Star Trek and applied them to military design.
Stuart wrote:
That's pretty close to the truth. There's a small number of ideas that come up for the "new super-technology of the future" that will create a uber-ship if only the hidebound traditionalists in the design bureaus would etc etc etc" They crop up at regular intervals with only the time cycle differing. The short fat ship crops up regularly at roughly 18 year intervals (I was at a Parliamentary sub-committee once takinge vidence on the 1988 incarnation of the idea when one of the other witnesses read a report on the alleged advantages of the short fat ship. After it had been applauded by Giles, he revealed it had been written by Barnaby in 1886), the multi-hull comes up at roughly 23 year intervals etc. Now, what has happened over the last few years is that all those cycles coincided and everybody came up with all these ideas at once.
This is where Star Trek design art comes in. Science fiction films tend to give people the idea that if something looks futuristic enough and weird enough, it must be an advance on what we have now. All that is needed is the technology to make it work. So, people took all these weird ideas (it's not a coincidence that the two weirdest and least practical of the LCS designs were ordered into production while the practical, proven design was the first to be dropped), kludged them up into a single hull and then looked for the technology to make it work. After all, it looked futuristic, it looked different it had to be good, right? And if it looks as if it should be good, there has to be a way to make it work, right?
Now, sometimes one can get away with that; one can start a design process on something that should be workable and try to solve the problems as one goes. It isn't a bad idea in many ways, the USN did that with the Lewis and Clark AKEs; they took a conventional AKE design and put a wholly-electric engineering system into it. That's all, but getting it to work was a swine. Delayed the ships by about two years. But, it was the only thing that was radical in those ships so everybody concentrated on the problem and solved it. Once the problem was solved, NASSCO poured the ships off the line and the program is now ahead of schedule and so far under budget that the Navy is able to order two additional ships using the money saved from the first group.
The trouble with DDG-1000 is that everything is new; its literally as different from DDG-51s as the Startrek Enterprise is from CVN-65. Now, the catch is that individually, we can solve the problems; the trouble is that all the solutions contradict each other. The designers tride to hide it with technobabble and they gota way with it for several years. Then, too many people started looking at the technobabble and saying "hey, hang on a moment, I read that in 'The Trouble With Tribbles'" and the whole scam was busted. It only needed a few people to make the remark and everybody else started looking and spotted the problems. The result of that has been the Navy's credibility in Congress has been flushed down the toilet. Congress just doesn't believe Navy testimony any more. They question everything and make their own plans. In a very real sense, Congress is actually running the Navy now (certainly the shipbuilding side of it) and shaping the navy the way it thinks teh navy should be shaped. That's the real story behind the death of DDG-1000. Congress simply lost patience with the Navy.
Starslayer wrote:
How the hell can you not understand that having lots of broadcasting equipment in one place will interfere with itself if you've taken basic EM?
Stuart wrote:
The logic is that one can timeshare the antennas. In the old days when radars, EW sets etc were hardware-controlled, that wasn't really an option, one had to switch one system off before using another (Sheffield sank because of that. Sort of). Today, with software-controlled systems, we can flash systems on and off so that we can have two systems running apparently simultaneously but in fact they're alternating transmissions on a microsecond basis. A lso, one can steer antenna beams so that they don't interfere. Now, all that is very easy to say. Its also very easy to put a calico dress on a pig and call it Florence but its still a pig. Multi-tasking antennas is a lot harder in reality than it sounds in practice (for example, the primary beams may be clear of interefence but the side-lobes and harmonics may not be. Those things shift with transmission modes and what may be clean in one application may not be in another. So, what sounded like a good idea, turned out to be very hard to implement. To give you some idea, the first MFAs were suppose dto be used on the USS Harry S Truman (CVN-75). They still weren't ready for CVN-77 and their use on CVN-78 is looking iffy.
Starslayer wrote:
Why in God's name would anyone consider tumblehome now that you have no real danger of being boarded during combat?
Stuart wrote:
Tumblehome was adopted because of the over-riding requirement was to reduce radar cross section. Now, in a conventional hull design with flared hull sides, the outward slope forms an acute angle with the surface of the sea. That provides a strong radar reflection. A tumblehome hull with its sides sloping inwards forms an obtuse angle with the surface of the sea and that gives a weak radar reflection. (All right, who can spot the horrible flaw in that argument; I'll think of a nice prize for the first person to get it.). That's why the DDG-1000 had a wave-piercing bow. A comventional flared bow requires an outward slope. We can't marry a tumblehome hull witha flared bow because the transition between teh two will be structurally weak and have a nightmarish radar cross section. So, once a tumblehome hull has been selected, we HAVE to use a wave piercing bow. And now we've come to the horrible secret. The DDG-1000 hull wasn't designed by naval architects, it was designed by electronics engineers. They designed the perfect hull for reduced radar cross section and then gave it to the naval deisgners and more or less said "make it work" the answer "it can't" not being acceptable.
Stuart wrote:
A tumblehome hull with its sides sloping inwards forms an obtuse angle with the surface of the sea and that gives a weak radar reflection. (All right, who can spot the horrible flaw in that argument; I'll think of a nice prize for the first person to get it.).
RyanCrierie wrote:
Let me guess, is it because the ocean is not a perfectly stable environment, and as a ship pitches and rolls; it's cross section changes a lot as the interface between the sea surface and the ship hull changes on a constant basis?
Stuart wrote:
Exactly; as the ship rolls, the angle between teh ship's side and teh sea surface changes all the time anyway. Plus the waves change that angle as well. Again, you see, we're coming back to the original problem; the basic configuration of DDG-1000 wasn't designed by naval architects, it was designed by electronics engineers - and they'd done most of their work for the aircraft industry. So they designed ships the way they'd designed aircraft
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Scott Brim
Post subject: Re: LCS/Streetfighter/Zumwalt Threads/Posts of InterestPostPosted: Thu Apr 08, 2010 4:16 pm
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Let's remember something about DDG-1000 and the Littoral Combat Ship: When the requirements for these ships were being developed back in the early part of the decade, the senior Navy leadership bought into the contractor's technical proposals lock, stock, and barrel.
In the 2003-2004 timeframe, this was a topic of some discussion behind the scenes among The Battleship People of Northern Virginia, a group I was spending a lot of my free time supporting back then.
It was clear to everyone involved in this behind-the-scenes discussion that the Zumwalt Class especially was a bridge too far -- way too far, in fact -- and the question was asked, why is the Navy leadership pursuing development of surface combatants with the kinds of significant technical and programmatic issues these very ambitious projects, Zumwalt and LCS, are bound to have?
Essentially, the answer we heard was that Rumsfeld's transformationalist zealots in the upper reaches of DOD were running the procurement show, and if the senior Navy leadership didn't buy into the Zumwalt and the LCS, they wouldn't be getting anything else.
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MKSheppard
Post subject: Re: LCS/Streetfighter/Zumwalt Threads/Posts of InterestPostPosted: Sun Apr 11, 2010 10:07 pm
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To be honest, DDG-1000 didn't start with Rummy, it started in the 1990s under SC-21.
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Scott Brim
Post subject: Re: LCS/Streetfighter/Zumwalt Threads/Posts of InterestPostPosted: Wed Apr 14, 2010 10:50 am
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Quote:
Ryan: To be honest, DDG-1000 didn't start with Rummy, it started in the 1990s under SC-21.
There were early indications of SC-21's technical issues and its high potential for experiencing significant cost growth problems. Early in the decade, John Young, one of Rummy's proteges, discounted most of those issues in downsizing the SC-21 concept into what eventually became DDG-1000. Rummy's people had the opportunity to change course, but in their extreme transformationalist zeal were blind to reality.
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sferrin
Post subject: Re: LCS/Streetfighter/Zumwalt Threads/Posts of InterestPostPosted: Fri Jul 30, 2010 7:26 pm
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"Tale from the crypt for you. During Operation Desert Storm, the Iraqis tried to use Boston Whalers to infiltrate special forces behind coalition lines. The craft were intercepted by British Lynx helicopters which blasted their escort of FAC-M out of the water and forced to shelter in a bay.All sorts of helicopters turned up to join in the fun, mostly troop carriers using machine guns and grenade launchers out of the doors, but one ASW Sea King arrived and, lacking any other offensive weaponry, started trying to use its dipping sonar as a wrecking ball."
I could read this stuff all day.Top Profile Send private message Reply with quote
Dick B
Post subject: Re: LCS/Streetfighter/Zumwalt Threads/Posts of InterestPostPosted: Sat Jul 31, 2010 3:24 pm
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Same here. Details are fascinating.
And, I'm glad to know my old Gearing or Fletcher would still have eaten somebody's lunch!
