Upon discussion with one of my more trusted colleagues, a revision is presented.
The shift to 76mm+30mm appears superior in almost every way to the twin 57mm... except having an additional type of system to support. Oh well. I have seen it argued by many that 30mm is a better boat-killer than 57mm (its use in the LCS surface warfare module would seem to support this), and 76mm is definitely going to be able to leverage many more users supporting the development of advanced rounds. You might actually be able to pester a merchant with it, too.
With any serious after AA fire sort of dead on the vine, I'm now considering deleting the big awesome rotating X-band AESA aft in favor of a very much more modest unit like Variant, Sea Giraffe, TRS-16... Right now I'm keeping the larger unit so that you could handle ESSM illumination, but it's a frigate. I'm willing to lose that backup capability if I have to. It's a question of using a cheaper additional type of system versus having as few things in the supply chain as possible. Thoughts?
Relocation of some VLS brings displacement down to about 7500 tons, which is a more pleasing number. No real capability was lost, which suggests I perhaps had an inflated design previously. A key reconfiguration (made possible by the deletion of the aft 57mm) allowed a substantial reduction in beam while maintaining a 12.5m wide hangar, necessary for twin AW101/CH-148 operation.
I have changed to the vertical-motor propulsor, which allows for zero nonrigid penetration of watertight bulkheads below the DC deck, which is certainly nice.
I nixed the Voith units just in time to discover the pretty cool-looking
Schottel pump-jet propulsor, which I'd dearly love to use for auxiliary propulsion in favor of the usual deployable unit. I don't see why it would be particularly unreliable, although I have concerns about flow noise. Perhaps you could have some sort of cover for the intake grill. The fact that these units don't seem to be in naval use suggests to me they haven't undergone much shock testing, although they don't seem to me like they should be particularly vulnerable. Anyway, I'm considering this change. Discussion and advice are appreciated.
We've lost some SHF satcom bandwidth, which is sort of sad. I could keep large paired units abeam the mast like on on the DZP's, but the fact that
this isn't envisioned as having any real command role means I stayed with the smaller units. Again, thoughts?
PARCA arrays, or similar phased arrays like on the B-2, now serve the critical need for EHF satcom, and are also presumably used for TCDL and CEC. Comms is hard, but I think this should work.
The laser obviously has taken a much more commanding position, again on advice from colleague. Deep magazines are just so damn nice, even if I don't think you could ever realistically cause substantial mechanical damage to a high-end target. With the bitchin' optics available for non-'splodey uses (this is apparently very popular with LaWS on Ponce), the minor optical turrets are deleted.