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Largest Destroyer Built For Navy Headed To Sea For Testing (ap.org)
An anonymous reader writes: The first Zumwalt-class destroyer, the USS Zumwalt, the largest ever built for the U.S. Navy, headed out to sea today. Departing from shipbuilder Bath Iron Works, the ship left to undergo sea trials. The AP reports: "The ship has electric propulsion, new radar and sonar, powerful missiles and guns, and a stealthy design to reduce its radar signature. Advanced automation will allow the warship to operate with a much smaller crew size than current destroyers. All of that innovation has led to construction delays and a growing price tag. The Zumwalt, the first of three ships in the class, will cost at least $4.4 billion."
A nice book about this ship and its class in an alternate future is Ghost Fleet.
http://www.amazon.com/Ghost-Fleet-Novel-Next-World/dp/0544142845
To compare, NASA s 2011 budget was 18 billion. Compare this to one project for one branch of the military, not counting ongoing ops.
Silence is a state of mime.
Unfortunately the military and by extension Congress cannot make up their goddamn minds to save their lives.
I hope it's not running Windows... like the last time
Windows!
I retard my case
http://www.popularmechanics.co... The U.S. Navy has a ship-killing problem. The service has, over the past 25 years, neglected the basic mission to sink and destroy enemy ships. Now, with the Russian and Chinese navies on the horizon, the Navy is looking at ways of making its ships more lethal—by repurposing missiles as ship-killers.
Captain James Kirk
This is crazy. Any nation seriously interested in naval war should be spending their money on developing a swarm-based navy. If you could develop a small swarm warfare ship with a price tag of say, $250K, you could produce 16,000 of those at this cost. Good luck fighting those 16,000 ships with this one.
Pretty hard to hide a surface ship from a satellite. Just one touch of a "rod from God" and you're sunk.
Admiral, are you prepared to fight a hundred duck-size destroyers or one destroyer-size duck?
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
I hope it's not running Windows... like the last time
Windows had nothing to do with it. Application software controlled the equipment, not the operating system. If an application fails to validate data coming from a database, if it fails to handle an exception like divide by zero, then the application crashes and the equipment is not available for use. Windows or Linux makes no difference.
The Zumwalt being in it is part of the eye-candy of a brilliantly researched futuristic
setting where China attacks the US and our high-tech stuff turns against us.
Awesome writing, good facts, great insight, and a well-developed plot make it
a must-read.
I agree with the OP!!!
E
God. That would be epic.
I am quite sure you'd see 16,000 of the most uninspiring fireworks.
Considering that the Phalanx weapon system can target and hit all the falling pieces of the incoming missile it just destroyed? Not a problem with your swarm that will be destroyed quite quickly.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Pretty hard to hide a surface ship from a satellite. Just one touch of a "rod from God" and you're sunk.
Actually, ships are hard to hit from orbit, ships can maneuver. Make a modest turn during the rod's descent and its a miss.
Also depending on what part of the ship the rod hit it might just put a small hole in the decks and hull. We are talking destroyers here, they aren't really armored except for a few key spots.
should have completed the work and made it a sub!
Actually more like 45 small, cheap fireworks and one BIG, multi-billion dollar firework.
This is crazy. Any nation seriously interested in naval war should be spending their money on developing a swarm-based navy. If you could develop a small swarm warfare ship with a price tag of say, $250K, you could produce 16,000 of those at this cost. Good luck fighting those 16,000 ships with this one.
And do what with them? Build big sea catapults to hurl them at inland targets?
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
Did you read the Daemon by Suarez, if not, check out the book series. It plays out this exact scenario with a swarm of drones loaded onto a boat.
And who is going to crew and service those 16,000 ships? People cost money too, you know. Not to mention dock/mooring space...
Not sure your math checks out.
One thing I don't understand about modern naval warfare: Couldn't you just send 50 cruise missiles in skimming across the wavetops and take a ship like this out? Or a few ballistic missiles raining down from above at hypersonic speeds? Can these ships really defend against an attack like that?
At least the first few missiles. the next few will get through.
Checks out perfectly. 45 that the destroyer manages to destroy, before the other ones all launch their own missiles that send the destroyer to the seabed.
That destroyer doesn't even carry 16,000 rounds of anything, so even if it should achieve 1 shot 1 kill against the swarm, it still dies before the swarm dies.
At 250k what weapon system will they be using??? If you have a massive swarm coming at you over the horizon, one tactical nuke, or thermobaric weapon takes them all out.
No sir I dont like it.
Raise your hand when you think that is an excessive amount for a boat.
This is the ship still running NT 4, that the Navy paid alot of money to M$ to keep on life support.
This is crazy. Any nation seriously interested in naval war should be spending their money on developing a swarm-based navy. If you could develop a small swarm warfare ship with a price tag of say, $250K, you could produce 16,000 of those at this cost. Good luck fighting those 16,000 ships with this one.
Modded flaimbait. Do you ever get the sense that certain ideas dangerous to those with budgets big enough to pay guys to watch slashdot are being systemically downmodded?
Lol, no. The Phalanx doesn't carry much more than 1500 rounds of ammunition, AND it can only shoot one thing at a time, killing perhaps one target every few seconds. Large boats mount several, but only several. They will be overwhelmed in a saturation attack, and if not, it runs out of ammo before it runs out of things to shoot.
The USN routinely loses its own simulations against swarming attacks.
And who is going to crew and service those 16,000 ships? People cost money too, you know. Not to mention dock/mooring space...
Drones. At least a lot of them.
And how do you get your 16,000 small ships across the ocean to attack your target? Just hope that the waves aren't very big? Are these 16,000 ships carrying enough fuel to cross an ocean or do you put sails on them too? What about carrying water generators and food for the crew? And what happens if one of the goals of your navy is to not lose a lot of equipment and personnel when you decide to attack something? This is the kind of boat you can get for $250,000, assuming of course that you don't have the additional expense of military equipment. That will carry 600 gallons of fuel, giving you a range between 300 and 1500 miles depending on how fast you're going. So, at minimum speed, your boats can leave Florida and attack Venezuela, assuming you don't care about getting them back home. This also completely ignores the mission goals of the Zumwalt compared to the goals of 16,000 small ships.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
(Looks at size of ship ordered by Admiral in charge of the Navy) "Do you think maybe he's compensating for something?" -- Shrek
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Falkland War. Exocet.
Made me think of the line" Flannel with Chalk" LOL
There is an unproven idea that animals and organizations tend to grow over time until they get too large to survive because bigness is ordinarily an advantage in competition. The Zumwalt ship is almost twice as long and four times heavier than WWII destroyers, so it has grown way too large. A carrier needs a lot of smaller ships that will sacrifice themselves to protect the mother ship from missile, air and submarines so it is not obvious to me why the while concept of an enormous destroyer even arose.
At a mere 4.4 billion a ship I imagine we'll be building these by the hundreds ... oh, right ... well 3 of them anyway. If anyone remembers, these are are the stealthy ships that replace the 'absurdly expensive' Iowas in their naval fire support role (~70 million/year each to keep operational). Unlike the highly visible and vulnerable Iowa's however, our enemies will never be able to locate these itty-bitty 600 foot long 'steath' destroyers in order to damage them!! And think just think of all the money we're saving! We are a shrewedly led country.
Man! That looks ugly. Uglier than even Steve Job's aluminum yacht with iMacs in the bridge. Waste of money too. There ain't nothing our enemies got that is even worth putting 4.4 billion in jeopardy.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
This "futuristic" hull design isn't anything new. The French did this already, long ago. They sold a small fleet of these "rollover" design ships to Russia. And, Russia lost the only engagement in which they participated to Japan.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The Arleigh Burke class has 1.5 times the righting arm that the Zumwalt does, up to about 50 degrees. From 50 to 90 degrees, the Burke has three times the righting arms. Right around 95 degrees of roll, the Zumwalt stops trying to right itself, and capsizes. The Burke continues to right itself all the way to 110 degrees - that is, when the ship is lying on it's side, with the mast underwater, it can still roll itself back upright.
http://www.phisicalpsience.com...
Long story short - the Zumwalt is a fair weather sailor, and it won't be worth a shit in the real world.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
I don't think you understand how a swarm works. Hint: You have more swarm members than the other guy has bullets.
Phalanx? What an waste of money! A few .50 cals would work just fine.
Wonder how DIVADS would work against the swarm. Small=vulnerable.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Visualize more than one Phalanx on each side of the ship...
And visualize more ammo...
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
It kinda reminds me of the CSS Virginia (nee Merrimac). On the Virginia, the angled sides were to deflect cannonballs rather than try to outright resist them. On the Zumwalt the angled sides are deflect radar rather than bounce it right back and provide a signal for the originating radar to lock onto.
It's a trap!
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
The navy has been playing this game where it builds a large ship and call it something smaller, because Congress is willing to build small-sounding ships without checking to see that they're actually small. The Zumwalt, at 14.5k tons, is more than half again as big as Tico-class cruisers at 9.6k tons. "Oh my God, that new destroyer is expensive," say critics. Well, yeah, because by displacement it's really not a destroyer; it's a cruiser. Maybe even a heavy cruiser.
I hope it's not running Windows... like the last time
USS Yorktown (CG-48) was a Ticonderoga-class cruiser launched in 1984 and in 1996 a test-bed for the Navy's COTS Smart Ship program. The ship remained in active service until her retirement in 2004. It's telling that the geek never cites a reference to the Yorktown and Win NT published later than 1998 ---- and ignores the integration of W2K into next-generation ships like the Nimitiz-class carrier USS George HW Bush (CVN 77).
kamikaze, gas bombs.
Propaganda. The propaganda is that surface ships have a viable defense. There is none. Against a single harpoon type missile, yes; the Phalanx does exactly what you say it does; propaganda is usually true.. Against what they would actually shoot at our ships, no.
Multiple, staggered, svelte ICBMs coming down at mach 22. With nuke warheads if they are serious. There is no defense against that. All surface ships are stupid and redundant in the real war that the United States is worried about. I guess they are still handy against the Iraqs of the world.
And for that, apparently we only need three.
...do you have to plug it into the charger. Seriously, where does all the electricity the ship needs come from?
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
I've never heard of a destroyer being built for anyone other than the Navy; isn't "Destroyer Built for Navy" redundant? Or is there someone else who we are building destroyers for?
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Visualize 100 missiles impacting the ship simultaneously while those 2 phalanx guns on each side of the ship shoot 4 or 5 of those missiles down. And it can only shoot a few down before running out of ammo, and your "visualize more ammo" comment is idiotic: it takes significant time to reload it, during which the missiles do not stop coming.
Yeah. That.
Saturation scales far cheaper and easier than gun-based defense does.
I can imagine that in the near future seeing Barak Hussein Obama and Fucker Jo Biden masturbating on the deck to the delight of the BGLTQ crew.
Of course anti-missile defenses are somewhat more sophisticated than terminal defenses such as Phalanx. Already ships are prepared for multiple attacks, wavehopping, ballistic, shore-to-ship, a-s, any intentional attack would likely involve multiple methods and vectors.
Carriers rely on a significant defensive perimeter, support and shield ships, and of course air cover, all of which are intended to deal with different threats. In an all out warfare scenario, carriers are important targets, and if the adversary has capable submarines, these are likely the most lethal. Yes, we shadow each other's subs, and in an all-out scenario I suspect tactical nukes are authorized, which makes a mess of carrier defenses. But that's probably an escalation force. Holes in the carrier will do fine.
Destroyers also have support fleets, plenty of defense. I miss the BBs. Those could take a licking. Kinda expensive to float. Imagine modernizing those, adding cruise missile projectiles, something they could carry a hundred or so of, heck just retrofit standard munitions with fins and GPS...
But the modern Navy needs to be less labor-intensive, even faster on the water, and of course more fully integrated into the battlefield. So we get Zumwalts.
Oh, and 'more ammo' means 'longer belts'.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
This is the ship that runs Linux.
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/10/the-navys-newest-warship-is-powered-by-linux/
There are names for sizes of ships. There is no such thing a super-sized destroyer. It's called a light cruiser. I guess Congress funded a destroyer, but they get a cruiser instead.
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
Huh?
WTF! It looks like an Ironclad from the civil war.
There are three kinds of falsehood: the first is a 'fib,' the second is a downright lie, and the third is statistics.
Largest Destroyer Built For Navy
As opposed to all the destroyers built for commercial use?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Wondering why this is designated a Destroyer? Political considerations?
It is multi-role suggesting a Cruiser class ship.
At 15,000 tonnes it is much heavier than typical Destroyers 50% more displacement than a typical Missile Cruiser like the Ticonderoga class at 9,000 tons. Under, the admittedly defunct Washington Naval Treaty ships over 10,000 tons were actually Battleships.
And of course everything is controlled by computers to reduce the number of people that have to be paid to run it.
Typical political bullshit - favoring re-election over winning wars. Let's make a destroyer with a skeleton crew, where the loss of one person likely means the total loss of a job function. And, let's make it so dependent upon computers that a simple EMP will render this $4.4 billion monstrosity a floating piece of sea junk.
But, look at the bright side! It'll be incredibly expensive, and a huge benefit to my constituents!
None Other than James Kirk. From TFA:
"We are absolutely fired up to see Zumwalt get underway. For the crew and all those involved in designing, building, and readying this fantastic ship, this is a huge milestone," the ship's skipper, Navy Capt. James Kirk, said before the ship departed.
You do know there is more than ONE per ship, most have 4 to 8 of them depending on the size, carriers have upwards of 24. Trivial to mount 50 of them on one ship and hundreds if not thousands on a carrier.
I see you know absolutely nothing about warfare, please elaborate more on your theories.
Well then you will need over a million of them as it's quite easy to outfit even a small missile frigate with 100-200 of those gun systems and millions of bullets.
At that point, I utterly win as your cost of making millions will crush your resources, and all I need to do is launch a few large missiles against your city centers. Game over and your swarm is the joke of the world.
OR do what the russians do... wait for your swarm and simply launch a single nuke and airburst it causing an EMP that drops them ALL to useless. because small and cheap will NOT be nuclear emp proof and deadly. so you again are completely defeated with a single weapon fired.
Somebody forgot to tell the empire!
http://www.starwars.com/databa...
With the amount of high tech automation going in, does this mean we'll see yet another meaning to BSOD?
Yet another white elephant by the military-industrial complex that robs this world of resources and lives.
The USN built a bunch of surface ships with electric propulsion after WW1. These included the New Mexico class battleships along with the Lexington and Saratoga (originally intended as battle cruisers, but completed as aircraft carriers).
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
Disclaminer, I work in the Us Navy, all comments my own, etc. I posted a few other as AC above.
The Phalanx (as well as GoalKeeper and the AK-630) requires a certain amount of engagement time to register a kill. As engagement can't occur before you get within max range, then the engagement time is:
max range / speed of missile
If we assume 2.5km max range (actual max distance is different for all 3 system above)
Harpoon = 550mph (Mach 1-ish), so 2.5/(550*1.6)*3600 = ~10 seconds
SS-N-22 = 1650mph (Mach 3-ish), so it's going to be ~3.33 seconds
This is per missile per system. If you have 2 CIWS's, you can only engage 2 missiles at once. The total time to successfully engage a missile is:
Time to come into range + Time to detect + time to develop track + time to ID as missile + Time to get CIWS on target + time to develop firing solution + engagement time + detection of successful engagement.
Since CIWS is usually the last line of defense, we can assume some of that chain of events is done (up to IDing a missile. "CIWS on target" can also be done if there was NOT a previously engaged target). This assumption is invalid if the detection or track system is maxxed out or electronic warfare is causing other delays and problems.
This balance of variables is what limits the engagement system. There are other things that can happen that lengthen the time needed to engage (swerving missiles, if you don't successfully engage just once in the time required the explosion tends to affects the system, etc.)
Everything you said is correct.
I myself was thinking more of a swarm of 2000.
basically it would be just an attack platform,
very few are manned
simple propulsion.
Fire at target, then, form a picket line for strategic defense
those that fire are defense cannon fodder.
transport them via barge or ro-ro or submersion vessel platform
interesting concept hu?
if you see me, smile and say hello.
The rods are elongated to minimize friction and increase penetrative power: they're bunker-busters. They get their power from running into something that's not a fluid. A short fall from space wouldn't even heat the outside much, so the thermal energy would be tiny compared to the kinetic. This is something that has a cross-sectional area of about .3 meters, and it's hitting the water at over 300 m/s. Yes, the water is going to absorb most of that energy eventually, but not instantly. The whole point is that it's not intended to stop quickly even when going through concrete or solid rock. Ships are by definition less dense than water, so this would likely make a small, neat hole straight through the ship and a column of cavitation down to the abyss. Spectacular, but conventional explosives would be of far more utility, and they're generally easier to aim.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
The Phalanx weapon system certainly has the ability to target and hit bird-sized objects, but in early testing that sensitivity turned out to be a liability. The first time they turned it on for live fire testing it immediately began blowing away seagulls and other birds just as fast as it could.
The Navy wasn't pleased - wasting all that expensive ammunition on wildlife, not to mention the danger such a weapon would pose in a fleet. So they had General Dynamics retune the system to ignore small bird-sized targets. They tuned the algorithm to only ignore birds, but if an enemy swarm looks and acts enough like birds the Phalanx won't do anything to stop them. And if the enemy "birds" are armed with RPGs or the like they could be a serious threat to any ship.
The PRIMARY duty of the Federal Government is national defense. Medical research, Spaceflight, food stamps, national parks, "obamacare", "obamaphones", and yes even Social security are NOT constitutional duties of the Federal Government; they're nice-to-haves, add-ons, optional. For most of US History, the majority of the federal government went to national defense.
President Obama has doubled the national debt in his seven years in office so we now spent $402,435,356,075.49 in 2015 in interest payments on the national debt. That's more than 10 times the NHS budget you cited. We throw away $400Billion per year on interest payments that get us NOTHING; That's more than 20x NASA's current annual budget. You wonder why we do not have a moon colony and a Mars colony, and High-speed rail interlinking all our cities? We throw away $400+ Billion per year on interest on the national debt.
The projectile is designed to penetrate bunkers. It is elongated and thin in order to minimize friction (in air) and maximize penetration into rock or reinforced concrete; the ones I've read about had about .3 m^2 cross-sectional area. The water will have a larger drag coefficient than air, but not enough to stop this projectile instantly, or even all that quickly. I didn't crunch through the drag equation, but I'm pretty sure that for something traveling at Mach 10 on impact, that means it will not be in the vicinity of the ship for long enough to do anything more than punch a hole through it. This would be a complete waste of ordinance.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Um, no.
A bullet will always be cheaper then a gun.
Thats really funny. And sad
Um, no.
A bullet will always be cheaper then a gun.
There is no gun in this analogy
A bullet designed to stop other bullets will cost more than just a regular bullet.
They'd be remotely piloted, or have enough AI to drive themselves.
What, you though "drone technology" was only useful for flying things?