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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.
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.
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
Its a freakin awful book. Any hacker of any stripe out to have howled in the hilarity of the whole thing. Good grief. The whole Chinese hacker screamed, "This is Unix! I know this!" The whole book was awful on the same level. It didn't have to be. That the authors claimed to have researched the book was...unbelievable.
Do you know why the road less traveled by is littered with the bones of the unwary?
It's 600 feet long, so it would only cost $3000 at Subway. Unless you add guac. Guac is extra.
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?
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
the rod hit it might just put a small hole
You have a point about the ship maneuvering but you've completely underestimated the kinetic energy involved in a projectile that fell from orbit.
Projectiles just don't fall from orbit you know. They are already just falling, and falling, and falling some more. In order to get them out of orbit, you have to apply some kind of force to them and get them to reenter the atmosphere... Where they will be falling at terminal velocity for the most part...
Problem is that kinetic energy is related to mass and velocity squared so you want to maximize the speed, which is eventually not going to vary with changes in projectile size and the terminal velocity of an object starts to get slower.... Of course all this is dependent on the projectile shape...
So they launch $2.5 billion of missiles to destroy one $4.4 billion ship?
Only if they paid US retail prices for their missiles. I'm imagining the Chinese can build an anti-ship missile for under $1M, especially a low-tech version that will be used by the thousand.
So yeah spending $1B to take down a $4B asset is a no-brainer, especially since you only have to take down 2 or 3 to change the course of any theoretical war.
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.
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.
"If it hits something armored like a gun turret, ammunition magazine, or some heavy machinery. But normal decks and equipment and the hull won't offer that much resistance so you are not going to get the energy release you are imagining."
Just below those decks and hulls there is water, a lot of it, that would gladly take all that energy and transform it into a big boom.
A rod from space would sink that boat even without touching it.
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.
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