Thursday, October 31, 2013

Seems an odd bit of defence planning...

Navy new destroyer: USS Zumwalt is bigger, badder than any other destroyer ( video) - CSMonitor.com

This sounds odd:
The USS Zumwalt is big: It is 610 feet long, has an 11,000-square foot flight deck, and displaces 14,564 tons of water. That’s about 100 feet longer and 50 times the water displacement of other destroyers, the Military Times reported.

Despite its colossal size, Zumwalt is also stealthy, with concealed antennas and an angular frame that makes it much less detectable to radar than are current warships. It also packs a punch. Its “Advanced Gun System” fires warheads at a range of about 63 miles with impeccable precision, three times farther than current destroyers can fire, CNN reported. Its massive electrical capabilities are also expected to support future laser weapons.

But, as precedent suggests with ships of unprecedented size, there’s a problem: Engineers aren’t quite sure if Zumwalt ships are capable of weathering giant waves, according to Defense News. A single sizable swell that hits the ship’s back end might take the ship down, engineers have said. That’s because these ships sport a new, downward-sloping hull that primes the ship to move stealthily, but not necessarily stably; traditional ships have upward-flaring hulls.

The ships are controversial for more than just their Achilles hull: They are expensive – the most expensive Navy ships ever built, to be exact.
 Not sure that I would want to be on the crew of the first one that gets into very heavy seas.

(The Defence News article in the link is from 2007, so the issue has been discussed for a long time.)

1 comment:

nottrampis said...

and the captain is James Kirk! don't know if his middle name is Tiberius though