Stuart’s DDG-1000 essay

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klagldsf
Post subject: Permission to repost Stuart's DDG-1000/Zumwalt essay?PostPosted: Sun Dec 05, 2010 1:31 pm
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This still remains the best essay I have read on the project, and I'd like to request permission to either repost it here or if Stuart can do the honors himself.

It really should be mandatory reading for anyone even thinking of becoming a naval architect.


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Beastro
Post subject: Re: Permission to repost Stuart's DDG-1000/Zumwalt essay?PostPosted: Tue Dec 07, 2010 4:41 am
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Best to send a PM to him.

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Frank Underwood
Post subject: Re: Permission to repost Stuart's DDG-1000/Zumwalt essay?PostPosted: Tue Dec 07, 2010 8:38 am
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klagldsf wrote:
This still remains the best essay I have read on the project, and I'd like to request permission to either repost it here or if Stuart can do the honors himself.

It really should be mandatory reading for anyone even thinking of becoming a naval architect.


No problem; ggo ahead. I may ammend it slightly when up.

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Scott Brim
Post subject: Re: Permission to repost Stuart's DDG-1000/Zumwalt essay?PostPosted: Tue Dec 07, 2010 9:55 am
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I've shown Stuart's essay on DDG-1000 to friends who are naval reservists, both officers and senior enlisted.

Once the reality of the issues with DDG-1000 sinks in, a typical comment goes like this, "The Navy has any number of processes and procedures to get the job right in designing and building a warship. How could such a thing happen?"

My response has been, "Remember what the Car Guys, Al and Ray, on NPR's Car Talk once said: You can be ISO 9000 certified and still build a Yugo."

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Scott Brim
Post subject: Re: Permission to repost Stuart's DDG-1000/Zumwalt essay?PostPosted: Mon Dec 13, 2010 3:22 pm
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In August 2008 when it appeared DDG-1000 was on a pathway towards cancellation, the naval analyst Stuart Slade wrote up this informal critique of the DDG-1000 program for his audience on the stardestroyer.net website.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

STUART SLADE ON THE DDG-1000, AUGUST 2008:

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 than 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.

Examples. The ship is supposed to use a radical hull form to reduce its radar cross section. Great, only that hull form uses a wave-piercing bow and a tumblehome shape. Now, let’s look at this more closely. It’s 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 it is moving at the speed of the wave plus the 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 strong enough to sweep men off their feet. In fact, it’s 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 for tumblehome hull form. This means the ship's sides slope 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 buoyancy 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 buoyancy on the side that's going down, giving a moment that pushes downwards in the 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 minimally-manned machinery spaces. This will save manpower etc. etc. etc. There's a problem, all of that automation doesn't work. It’s 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 go around and do things. Its to try and patch the holes and put out the 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 the 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 each other 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. Oops. 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 occurring at 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.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

NOTE: Later in the summer of 2008, the Navy reversed course a second time and decided to construct three DDG-1000s, assuring that the program would survive even if truncated at just three hulls.


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p620346
Post subject: Re: Permission to repost Stuart's DDG-1000/Zumwalt essay?PostPosted: Sat Aug 04, 2012 10:26 pm
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I seem to remember reading, possibly in Conway's Navies in the Nuclear Age, that when first commissioned. due to incompatible computer speeds and word lengths, USS Texas (CGN-39) was for all practical purposes non-operatioal for over a year.
When I was in the USN in the early 1960s, there was a government requirement to purchase computers from all of the US manufactures (IBM and the 7 dwarfs) which resulted in a number of compatibility problems. Honeywell used 3/4-in magnetic tape while IBM used 1/2-in, fortunately almost everyone used standard 80 column IBM cards, although Remington used their own smaller sized cards with round rather than rectangular holes.


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Poohbah
Post subject: Re: Permission to repost Stuart's DDG-1000/Zumwalt essay?PostPosted: Mon Aug 06, 2012 4:40 pm
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p620346 wrote:
I seem to remember reading, possibly in Conway's Navies in the Nuclear Age, that when first commissioned. due to incompatible computer speeds and word lengths, USS Texas (CGN-39) was for all practical purposes non-operatioal for over a year.
When I was in the USN in the early 1960s, there was a government requirement to purchase computers from all of the US manufactures (IBM and the 7 dwarfs) which resulted in a number of compatibility problems. Honeywell used 3/4-in magnetic tape while IBM used 1/2-in, fortunately almost everyone used standard 80 column IBM cards, although Remington used their own smaller sized cards with round rather than rectangular holes.


One big issue is that weapons systems are the province of NAVSEA, and C4ISR systems are the province of SPAWAR.

NAVSEA simply doesn't understand those compu-doohickeys.

What ends up happening is that SPAWAR winds up doing the weapons system engineering work that NAVSEA didn't want to do, usually in response to fleet CASREPs.

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OSCSSW
Post subject: How does Stu's zumwalt article hold up today?PostPosted: Sat Aug 03, 2013 9:53 am
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Seems to me most of his concerns are still unsolved.

Am I wrong?

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drunknsubmrnr
Post subject: Re: Permission to repost Stuart's DDG-1000/Zumwalt essay?PostPosted: Sat Aug 03, 2013 1:09 pm
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I drove by BIW a month ago...that ship is huge. The modules are like buildings.

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OSCSSW
Post subject: Re: Permission to repost Stuart's DDG-1000/Zumwalt essay?PostPosted: Sat Aug 03, 2013 2:38 pm
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drunknsubmrnr wrote:
I drove by BIW a month ago...that ship is huge. The modules are like buildings.



How are you settling in?

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drunknsubmrnr
Post subject: Re: Permission to repost Stuart's DDG-1000/Zumwalt essay?PostPosted: Sun Aug 04, 2013 9:35 am
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Very well thanks!

Driving in NYC is a bit different from Boston. The only speeds are fast and faster, and turn signals appear to be a sign of weakness. If you just cut off the most expensive car around they'll let you in.

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Scott Brim
Post subject: Re: How does Stu's zumwalt article hold up today?PostPosted: Wed Aug 14, 2013 11:27 pm
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OSCSSW wrote:
Seems to me most of his concerns are still unsolved. Am I wrong?

I've made a promise to Greg Lof from warships1 and Commander Salamander that if the DDG-1000's hullform proves to have no real issues in higher sea states and/or if more Zumwalts are ordered beyond the three now on the books, I will have to buy him dinner at his favorite restaurant in Portland, OR. Only time will tell if I have to pay up.


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Scott Brim
Post subject: Re: How does Stu's zumwalt article hold up today?PostPosted: Mon Oct 21, 2013 6:51 pm
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Scott Brim wrote:
OSCSSW wrote:
Seems to me most of his concerns are still unsolved. Am I wrong?

I've made a promise to Greg Lof from warships1 and Commander Salamander that if the DDG-1000's hullform proves to have no real issues in higher sea states and/or if more Zumwalts are ordered beyond the three now on the books, I will have to buy him dinner at his favorite restaurant in Portland, OR. Only time will tell if I have to pay up.

From the "Phisical Psience" website comes this critique of the DDG-1000 hullform:

US NAVY - DDG 1000 - Zumwalt Class Destroyer, Tumblehome Hull

The Phisical Psience web site was established in 2011 by the experimental physicist Park McGraw, who is apparently a US Navy veteran.

He recounts his own experiences in trying to operate and maintain complex electronic systems aboard warships operating in higher sea states.


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Poohbah
Post subject: Re: Permission to repost Stuart's DDG-1000/Zumwalt essay?PostPosted: Mon Oct 21, 2013 7:19 pm
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BTW, the PCO for the Zumwalt is (drumroll)...

Captain James Kirk.

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ByronC
Post subject: Re: Permission to repost Stuart's DDG-1000/Zumwalt essay?PostPosted: Mon Oct 21, 2013 7:52 pm
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Poohbah wrote:
BTW, the PCO for the Zumwalt is (drumroll)...

Captain James Kirk.

Are you serious? That's like General Tibbets commanding the B-29 unit in TSW, except it's not a joke. If only he was an aviator...

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jemhouston
Post subject: Re: Permission to repost Stuart's DDG-1000/Zumwalt essay?PostPosted: Mon Oct 21, 2013 8:04 pm
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ByronC wrote:
Poohbah wrote:
BTW, the PCO for the Zumwalt is (drumroll)...

Captain James Kirk.

Are you serious? That's like General Tibbets commanding the B-29 unit in TSW, except it's not a joke. If only he was an aviator...



He's James A. Kirk http://www.public.navy.mil/surfor/ddg10 ... /Bio1.aspx

So many things going through my mind.

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fnord
Post subject: Re: Permission to repost Stuart's DDG-1000/Zumwalt essay?PostPosted: Tue Oct 22, 2013 2:39 am
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Imagine all the guff he's copped, especially when he got promoted to captain. No mention of whether he served on Enterprise, though.


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Belushi TD
Post subject: Re: Permission to repost Stuart's DDG-1000/Zumwalt essay?PostPosted: Wed Oct 23, 2013 11:27 am
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jemhouston wrote:

He's James A. Kirk http://www.public.navy.mil/surfor/ddg10 ... /Bio1.aspx

So many things going through my mind.



So does this mean his 17xgreat grandson will be James T. Kirk?

That gives us, at 3 generations a century, over 500 years before we have really spiffy interstellar flight.

Belushi TD


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The Bushranger
Post subject: Re: Permission to repost Stuart's DDG-1000/Zumwalt essay?PostPosted: Wed Oct 23, 2013 12:46 pm
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Belushi TD wrote:
So does this mean his 17xgreat grandson will be James T. Kirk?

That gives us, at 3 generations a century, over 500 years before we have really spiffy interstellar flight.

I dunno, there's always the Archers...

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Scott Brim
Post subject: Re: Permission to repost Stuart's DDG-1000/Zumwalt essay?PostPosted: Sun Dec 22, 2013 11:23 am
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The first DDG-1000 is in the water now, and people who have stood next to it at its fitting dock report that it is One Truly Impressive Chunk of Metal.

From looking at the pictures of it in the water, my first impression is how completely the deckhouse dominates the ship's visual impact.

What happens next with this ship?

Its sea-keeping abilities in its initial sea trials will be the most closely watched facet of the ship's performance, as will be the performance of the ship's extensive automation features.

After the first year of DDG-1000 sea trials, if we see a pair of outrigger ammas being welded to the hull, and pallets full of hammocks being brought aboard, then we will know that at least some portion of the Zumwalt critic's various opinionations were justified.


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[MKSheppard]

This was originally posted on SDN in July 2008 under the title of "The USN repeats the Seawolf fiasco"

DDG 1000 Program Will End At Two Ships
By christopher p. cavas
Published: 22 Jul 19:01 EDT (23:01 GMT)

The once-vaunted Zumwalt-class DDG 1000 advanced destroyer program - projected in the late 1990s to produce 32 new ships and subsequently downscaled to a seven-ship class - will instead turn out only two ships, according to highly-placed sources in the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill.

Instead of more DDG 1000s, the U.S. Navy will continue to build more Arleigh Burke-class DDG 51 destroyers, construction of which had been slated to end in 2012. (Northrop Grumman)

Top U.S. Navy and Pentagon brass met July 22 to make the decision, which means the service will ask Congress to drop the request for the third ship in the 2009 defense budget and forego plans to ask for the remaining four ships.

Each of the two ships now under contract will be built, according to the new decision. That means the General Dynamics Bath Iron Works shipyard in Bath, Maine will build the Zumwalt, DDG 1000, and Northrop Grumman's Ingalls yard in Pascagoula, Miss., will construct the yet-to-be-named DDG 1001.

According to sources, the Navy also considered canceling the second DDG 1000 and building just one, but potentially high cancellation costs led to the decision to keep the ship.

The reprogramming decision was made at a conference July 22 hosted by Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England and attended by Navy Secretary Donald Winter, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Gary Roughead and Pentagon acquisition chief John Young.

Officials were busy throughout the day and into the evening making personal phone calls to senators, congressmen and government and industry officials notifying them of the decision. Initial reaction on Capitol Hill seemed to be largely positive.

The move appears to be based on fears that potential cost overruns on the Zumwalts - estimated to cost about $3.3 billion for each of the two lead ships - could threaten other Navy shipbuilding programs. The service declined comment on the July 22 decision, but in a statement released July 17, Navy spokesman Lt. Clay Doss provided some insight.

"We need traction and stability in our combatant lines to reach 313 ships, and we should not raid the combatant line to fund other shipbuilding priorities," Doss said. "Even if we did not receive funding for the DDG 1000 class beyond the first two ships, the technology embedded in DDG 1000 will advance the Navy's future surface combatants."

If the fears that rising costs could torpedo other new ships are indeed behind the decision, it is a tacit recognition that repeated warnings by budget experts from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), Congressional Research Service (CRS) and the Government Accountability Office that the ships face huge potential cost overruns - up to $5 billion each and more - were correct.

Ron O'Rourke of CRS testified March 14 before the House Seapower subcommittee that cost overruns on the first two ships could drive their combined cost to $10.2 billion - an increase of $3.9 billion. Using CBO's figures, O'Rourke pointed out that the remaining five ships, projected by the Navy to cost about $12.8 billion, would likely jump about $8 billion.

"The combined cost growth for all seven ships would be roughly $11.8 billion in then-year dollars, which is a figure roughly comparable to the total amount of funding in Shipbuilding and Conversion, Navy (SCN) appropriation account in certain recent years," O'Rourke testified at the hearing.

Publicly the Navy has long resisted the notion of building more DDG 51s, noting no more of the ships were needed - the class had been planned to end with the 62nd ship - and significant improvements to the design were hard to come by. But in March acting Navy acquisition chief John Thackrah told an audience that the service was looking at working in to the design a new SPY-3 radar to replace the current SPY-1 Aegis arrays, and the Navy also has studied fitting the 155mm Advanced Gun System into the DDG 51 hull. Both systems are part of the DDG 1000 design.

While it is not clear how many more 51s will be built, all sides seem in agreement that the majority of the hulls will go to Bath, which builds only destroyers. Northrop's Ingalls yard, in addition to destroyer construction, remains busy building three classes of amphibious ships and the Coast Guard's new National Security Cutter, and is still working to rebuild its infrastructure following damage from 2005's Hurricane Katrina.

"Bath will have to get the majority of these DDG 51s," said one source familiar with the situation. "They won't be able to go 50-50 with Pascagoula. Ingalls doesn't have the work force right now and Bath needs them."

Depending on the price of the new 51s, anywhere from 8 to 11 ships could be provided over the six-year future years defense plan. "They may continue to build these for the foreseeable future," the source said. "Nothing wrong with the hull, that is a good ship."

So let's see: All teh costs in developing the DDG-1000 hull, and integrating it's electronic systems? All gone.

The ships will themselves be undeployable due to spares costs -- I've heard that we really only have two Seawolves operational, because the third is essentially the parts boat for the other two; since all the spare part contracts were programmed for a much larger buy, and when they were cut to just three boats, the spares program suffered horrendously.

As someone said on Warships1:

Please tell me this is a bad dream. The Navy leadership can't be as stupid as to cancel the DDG1000. Not only is it impossible for the Navy to buy Burke class destroyers for any where near what it paid for the last six units. The cancelation fees will add hundreds of millions to the cost of the two under contruction. Added to that is the addition cost it will add to CG(x), most likely in the billions of dollars because of the lost of technology cause by suppending production of all the systems developed for the Zumwalt class and other next generation ships.

And please don't tell me thay will use those system on the new destroyers. To do that means they would almost have to completly redesign them from the hull up, which I guarantee will cost as much do as the DDG1000 design work, and the only differnce between them will be that the new design will be less ablilies, less firepower, less survivablable, more costly to operated, and will last for only twenty years, because they won't be worth paying for a midlife refit.

Frankly this is just one more reason we need to abolish the Sec of Defence and return to seperate services. Under the current plan. civilian bureaucrates, who have no stake in getting weapon built, but every reason for preventing successful weapon programs, have taken over the Pentagon. The only solution for this problem is to abolish their power base and remove they permanently. This can only be done by returning weapons development and purchasing to the uniform services where the bean counter will be evaluated by hows well they support they follow serviceman and not how much money they can 'save' by crippling weapon development.

BTW I suspect the Navy will be 'surprised' when NG and GD both bid over 2 billion dollars each for the replacement destroyer, and that to keep the other yard from closing will cost a quarter billion a year. Of course they could get the Zumwalts for the same price, if the order them is groups of five or six like they did with the Burkes.

Stuart will be along shortly, He argued a while back in a consultancy role against the DDG-1000 program as it was structured; arguing that the Navy should have put the new gun and new electronics into a hypothetical Flight III DDG-51 and built several hulls to debug everything; and THEN put them into the all new DDG-1000 hull to reduce development problems.

Any idea what their reasoning is?

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 occurring at 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.

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 event 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.

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.

I've seen footage of the tank tests of the hull form, courtesy of Sea Skimmer who found it, and the hull really does work in reducing the motion of the ship in moderate sea states.

However, Skimmer and me talked about the other problems we found from the other footage -- we noticed the fact that in higher sea states, it's literally submarining; hence I predicted that Zumwalts 3 through 7 would be built with a more conventional clipper bow and that it would be backfitted to the first two ships after sea trials with DDG-1000 ended up with half the VLS cells flooded.

The gun mount shield is made of fiberglass to reduce radar cross section.

What kind of jiggery pokery is that? I know that the gun shields on a lot of ships are fiberglass to save topweight; but they had to have known that this was going to be a very wet position.

But to work the ship, we need people on deck. Uhhh, problem here?

Doesn't that only apply to the bow at decent speeds? You'd still be able to man the rear helicopter deck at a decent clip.

Repairing damage cannot be automated (did I tell you that DDG-1000 was supposed to have automated damage control systems ?

I've actually thought about that, and they went about implementing it. I'd imagine the hull is subdivided into many compartments with built-in automated pumps in each compartment, so you don't need to have people dragging handy billys around.

Put all the antennas into a single structure and we can cut RCS. That causes a problem called electronic interference.

Yay!

The integrated deckhouse would have been nice once the bugs were worked out, by reducing the number of subsystems that had to be kept functioning and allowing easy under-cover access to all the antennas, instead of some poor schmuckatelli having to climb a mack...

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?

Oh man. I never considered the rolling inertia problem -- I can see how that would mess up missile launch. My main thoughts were around the fact that the peripheral VLS was an excuse to actually have a lot of explosions and fire -- instead of concentrating the missiles into a compact VLS system in the center of the ship where we can shield it from damage, we'll spread them around the ship and make it more likely for a missile cell to be hit and the missile inside to ignite!

Wow, Stuart's post was very informative ... and disturbing. I wonder what the design process for this thing looked like. It sounds like it was the result of a brainstorming session, but without the subsequent critical analysis.

Almost as if they took the principles of writing a script for Star Trek and applied them to military design.

Sounds like the ship, from Stuart's description, will be among the most expensive white elephants ever built, if not the most expensive.

You know, I thought that design engineers and every other proper engineer knew basic physics.

Actually, I think they do. Why else would the deckhouse be so huge?

The problem is even with such a huge deck house, due to the positioning, you'll get a lot of interference with beams from all the antennas on it; and working out the integration problems is where the $$$ for ship 1+2 come from. Stuart was talking about Multi-Function Antennas -- which make a lot of sense -- for certain things, you don't need a constant data rate and you can have the antenna do:

Time Cycle A: System A
Time Cycle B: System B
Time Cycle C: System C
Time Cycle D: System A

and so on and consolidate three antennas into one. The big problem is once again, systems integration -- getting it all to work is $$$.

It's possible we might see all the money spent on DDG-1000 back in the form of all this research into solving these problems; allowing for integrated deckhouses by 2014 or so...

Sounds like the ship, from Stuart's description, will be among the most expensive white elephants ever built, if not the most expensive.

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.

Almost as if they took the principles of writing a script for Star Trek and applied them to military design.

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.

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?

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.

Why in God's name would anyone consider tumblehome now that you have no real danger of being boarded during combat?

Tumblehome was adopted because of the over-riding requirement was to reduce radar cross section. Now, ina 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..

Isn't there also a CGX/CGNX program that was supposed to be heavily influenced by the Zumwalts?

There's a new cruiser coming. Probably nuclear powered. Plans to use the DDG-1000 hull have been dropped.

My google-fu is a little weak here, what's HPCA?

History, Politics and Current Affairs. My internet community. It can be found BEWARE HERE BE REPUBLICANS

Well, the Maine congressional delegation thinks the USN is going to order an addition 9 Burkes.

The figure I have is 12 but its up for grabs. Also, the word is that, cash allowing, they'll be built in a series of small sub-flights that progressively introduce the technologies intended for DDG-1000 and develop tehm so tehy can be back-fitted to the earlier -51s.

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.).

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?

Exactly; as the ship rolls, the angle between teh ship's side and tehs ea 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.

As I recall isn't massive size of the ship partly driven by the need to accommodate some really big active roll stabilizers, and also to accommodate large ballast tanks so that the waterline is always fixed and properly trimmed? I cant think all the water washing up that tumblehome slope does anything to help RCS either, unless a radar in a sea search mode just filters that out thinking its a wave.

However, in the current program of record, the DDG-1000 cannot perform area air defense; specifically, it cannot successfully employ the Standard Missile-2 (SM-2), SM-3 or SM-6, and is incapable of conducting Ballistic Missile Defense. Although superior in littoral ASW, the DDG-1000 lower power sonar design is less effective in the blue water than DDG-51 capability. DDG-1000's Advanced Gun System (AGS) design provides enhanced Naval Fires Support capability in the littorals with increased survivability. However, with the accelerated advancement of precision munitions and targeting, excess fires capacity already exists from tactical aviation and organic USMC fires. Unfortunately, the DDG-1000 design sacrifices capacity for increased capability in an area where the Navy already has, and is projected to have sufficient capacity and capability.

The more I hear about the Zumwalt class, the more convincing Sparky's argument (on reactivating the Iowa class battleships) becomes, especially considering the possibility that doing so would give the USN a more cost-effective platform for shore bombardment.

By the way, do we have the aviation technology to let USN and USMC aircraft to attack land targets in all weather conditions from relatively safe distances (beyond the range of enemy air defenses) with reasonable accuracy, which would support the claim that "excess fires capacity already exists from tactical aviation"? It would suck if the marines relearn what the Israelis learned the hard way in the Yom Kippur War.

The more I hear about the Zumwalt class, the more convincing Sparky's argument (on reactivating the Iowa class battleships) becomes, especially considering the possibility that doing so would give the USN a more cost-effective platform for shore bombardment.

More cost effective? You’re looking at a couple billion to reactivate one battleship with bare bones modernization, and then another billion dollars for DDG-51 ride shotgun to defend it. And for all that you get some 24 mile range guns which are lacking in accuracy and a hull that has perhaps 10-15 years of life left while being extremely expensive to operate. Battleships are not cost effective for anything, they are in fact the least cost effective option available; Arsenal Ship loaded with navalized GMLRS rockets and Army Tactical Missiles would be cheaper, longer ranged and generally more effective. What’s more you could actually put just as many GMLRS rockets onto Arsenal ship as you’d have 16in shells on a battleship, so you aren’t even losing volume of fire.

I don’t recommend Arsenal Ship at all, but anything would be better then a battleship. Course Even if AGS works it still wont really meet Marine requirements for these infiltration tactics, but it would come much closer then anything sane that’s ever been proposed.

By the way, do we have the aviation technology to let USN and USMC aircraft to attack land targets in all weather conditions from relatively safe distances (beyond the range of enemy air defenses) with reasonable accuracy, which would support the claim that "excess fires capacity already exists from tactical aviation"? It would suck if the marines relearn what the Israelis learned the hard way in the Yom Kippur War.

We have plenty of all weather stand off weapons….but nothing can replace artillery. I am not really surprised that a Rear Admiral doesn’t understand that given the similar stupidity going on in FCS. Aircraft make raids, at best they stick around for 10 minutes (after you waited a half hour, to maybe as long as four to six hours, for them to show up) drop a few bombs and then fly back home for gas. Artillery provides all weather sustained and highly responsive fire support. This Admiral’s thinking is basically that all that matters is mathematical ability to strike aim points in a day, but war is not that simple and not all kinds of fires are equal.

Some kind of large loitering UCAV might be able to mostly replace artillery, but the USN does not have anything like that nor any public plans to gain that capability. Unless someone finds a way to make a Reaper carrier capable AND survivable against any kind of real air defence this is not going to change.

[MKSheppard]

https://web.archive.org/web/20080809173 ... -dead.html

DDG-1000 May Be Dead (now official - she's dead)
(07/15/08 08:01:47)

Just heard via the grapevine that the U.S. Navy is planning to axe the remaining five DDG-1000 Zumwalt class destroyers in favor of building another 11 DDG-51 Arleigh Burke class destroyers for no net change in cost. I understand that the new Arleigh Burkes will employ some of the technologies being developed for the CG(X) and DDG-1000. Still rumor at the moment but seems fairly solid

Cheaper by the dozen ??

Also, they get six extra keels on time, mostly on-budget, and well-set along learning curve...

This is the way they should have done it right from the start (I told them, but does anybody listen to me?) Design the new electronics and try them out in the tried and tested DDG-51 hull ( Flight III DDG-51 from say Hull 54 onwards). Then put the tested electronics into the new hull. Never do a new hull, new engines, new electronics, new weapons all at once. But no, everything had to be transformational and do everything at once........

HMS Dreadnought new hull, new engines, new 'electronics', new weapons all at once

Didn't that one work? Or had all the new bits already been tried out?

Guns were standard 12 inch L45s in twin turrets (in fact originally intended for Lord Nelson and Agamemnon), no electronics and the hull was simply a development of existing designs. The radical new bit were the engines and they'd already been tested.

The military's acquisition system is corrupt, not just inefficient

This is the way they should have done it right from the start (I told them, but does anybody listen to me?) Design the new electronics and try them out in the tried and tested DDG-51 hull ( Flight III DDG-51 from say Hull 54 onwards). Then put the tested electronics into the new hull. Never do a new hull, new engines, new electronics, new weapons all at once. But no, everything had to be transformational and do everything at once........

At least since the year 2002, the DDG-1000 ne DD(X) program has shown every external indication that its advertised costs were being drastically understated, easily by a factor of at least three, and possibly by a factor of as much as five.

It is fairly well-known in technology management circles that whenever you place a series of new and ambitious technologies together on one platform, the cost and complication of managing the development of that platform goes exponential; i.e., there is no longer a linear relationship between total capability and total cost, there is an exponential relationship. However, the skip-a-generation of technology advocates, as typified by John Young and Donald Rumsfeld, didn't want to hear this kind of talk, and still don't.

We have seen this problem in the F-22 program, we have seen it in the DDG-1000 ne DD(X) program, and I am predicting that we will not have seen truly the worst of what can happen in these kinds of circumstances until emerging cost control issues with the F-35 program make themselves very painfully evident within the next three to five years. IMHO, the F-35 will suck the Navy dry of acquisition funding before the full extent of its cost control issues come out of the shadows, and some future CNO is facing the same kinds of difficult decisions Admiral Roughead is facing with DDG-1000 today.

Norman Friedman has an excellent column in this month's issue of Proceedings as to why warships cost so much more than they used to, and as to why the true costs for warship development programs don't become evident until the programs are well along. Over the last twenty years, the Navy's design bureaus were largely eliminated, meaning that the Navy is no longer a knowledgable customer for the warships it buys. The people who understand the technology, the design processes, and the relationships between project complexity and project cost have all been sent out the door. So there is no one at the head end of the feasibility design process who can balance desired capabilities against estimated costs and say "no" to somebody's desire for some new and very ambitious technological capability.

In addition to Norman Friedman's observations about the current lack of knowledge on the Navy side, there is no incentive on the contractor side to point out -- up front in the preliminary design process -- what a capability will actually cost, even though they do have people in their own shops who can do accurate cost estimates. The contractors are in business to make a profit, after all, not to dispute what the customer says he wants.

There is also the problem on the military customer's side of gaining in-house consensus on the bidded design spec. The easiest way to gain consensus on a bidded design spec is for the military's own system integrator to simply cave in to pressures from various agendized factions and specify all the features that are being asked for. From a short-term perspective, there is everything to be gained career-wise by doing this, and no penalties since the person responsible up front will be long gone from that position by the time the cost control issues become clearly evident.

Then there is the circumstance where the customer doesn't really know what he wants, as in the case of the USAF and its tanker replacement spec, or in the case of the Navy's LCS. The temptation on the part of a contractor to manage the design process so as to favor more capability over less capability is overwhelming. And there is no one there to tell them different and make it stick at the same time.

At any rate, I am highly sympathetic with Stuart's attempts at donning his mil-spec Superman suit to do battle with the current military acquisition system. I've been there myself in working other types of government acquisition programs, and it is no fun at all to buck the system, regardless of how much weight your arguments carry or the consequences to the project if the acquisition process for some important piece of equipment goes awry.

That Stuart was not successful in his efforts to bring some measure of sanity to the DDG-1000 specification is, in my humble opinion, a measure of how corrupt the military's acquisition system has become over the last twenty to thirty years.

I had exactly the same problem with the Seawolf/NSSN problem, I wrote a long paper with exhaustive numerical analysis that showed canceling the Seawolf program and going to NSSN would not save any money; rather it would dealy new submarines entering the fleet for 5 - 7 years and the NSSN would end up costing the same as Seawolf. I did a cost analysis for building 9 Seawolfs as opposed to three and six NSSNs and the numbers came out as saving more than 9 billion dollars. Guess what, Virginia came in six years later than the Seawolfs and there was no difference in cost.

Perhaps if I'd worn a mil-spec Supergirl suit I might have done better.

I'm lucky; I'm paid to rock the boat and make unpalatable suggestions.

But if I'd had my way, we would now be commissioning the first Flight IIIA Arleigh Burkes with a stretched hull, the forward missile magazine extended to 64 rounds, provision for AGS in place of the five inch gun (retaining the Mark 45 as an interim), additional VLS silos amidships for ESSM and with combat automation to reduce crew requirements.

Oh, by the way, guess what. All that snazzy automation and crew reduction technology? It doesn't work. It's maintenance-heavy and fouled up all the time. It actually costs more to run it than to have people in the loop. In short, expressing it politely, the concept came backwards out of a non-constipated bovine.

When I think of what we could have done in the 1990s and 2000s witha little common sense and a procurement process that wasn't systemically broken, I could literally cry.

It's a crying shame what has happened

Ah well, rant over.

[Paul Nuttall]

But if I'd had my way, we would now be commissioning the first Flight IIIA Arleigh Burkes with a stretched hull, the forward missile magazine extended to 64 rounds, provision for AGS in place of the five inch gun (retaining the Mark 45 as an interim), additional VLS silos amidships for ESSM and with combat automation to reduce crew requirements.

Curious but has anyone done any designs for this possibility?