Last week, I was tooling around Google and came across an article from the May 2015 issue of Proceedings, regarding an old concept: The Arsenal Ship. I wanted to get back to this, since it was one of my first projects here on the Bucket, and I never finished it. The article featured some new ideas as well, which I incorporated into it.
https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedi ... ccess-wall
I find the design interesting, and incorporated (At the suggestion of Acelanceloet and others) systems not mentioned in the article. By incorporating the mast design from Ace's FMLAC, the ship is capable of using at least ESSM for point defense, as well as RAM.
The line marked above the water line is an estimated point on where the ship would sit in the water while ballasted. The idea from the article is that the ship, when on it's patrol pattern, would ballast down to present a smaller profile (laid out in the article.)
The ship is based as much on the article as it is on older concept art, and as such I did stray from those existing images from a couple decades ago. She is not going to win beauty pageants, but she would probably project power in a massive way.
Discussing in Discord, I postulated that the ship, being functionally a remote magazine for AEGIS warships and the local Strike Commander, would have minimal crew (this is a concept from the original arsenal ship as well), probably on blue and gold rotations, with each crew spending 6-9 months aboard while deployed, and changing over in a friendly port near the theater of operations.
![[ img ]](https://i.imgur.com/wS5pkuw.png)