Shipbucket

I was reading up on F125, and then I felt bad that I could only deploy a single 11m-class system. No more -- the side doors are now large enough for 11m boats or whatever (although just sliiiiightly too small for a 40' container). In order to enlarge these doors so much, I relocated the UNREP station (now with a collapsable kingpost) to the hangar roof. It is served by the same pallet elevator that handles the small VLS and Chemring decoy launchers, and it's moderately more visible from the bridge wings. Win-win, I think.

Some extremely notional internal layouts are also presented.



internal schematic

Might I make a suggestion? With the CGN, move the RHIB station down one level, and put it closer to the hangar, in roughly the place where the big side doors are in the destroyer. Launching a RHIB from that height must not be very comfortable, and this will free up structure close to the bridge and the radar systems.

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Would you please not eat my gun...

Perhaps. I was sticking with the current location to appease the God of Commonality, but I'll compare the RHIB location to some in-service ships.

In any case, for the purposes of design insight, this is envisioned as a rescue boat and really nothing more. The 11m RHIB in the stern would serve as the ship's primary boat. I've actually waffled on only using a 5m boat in the midships position, but 7m is generally the standard.

Artistic revisions, mostly.



I compared the location of the ship's boat to that on LPD-17, and this installation is substantially lower. Structurally this is not a flush-deck hull, and the RHIB is above the compartment where the strength deck moves up one level, and so I'm particularly reluctant to cut into the side shell at this location.

The fusion idea is definitely magical. I like how Lockheed thinks they can do what every other scientist on the planet has failed to do in regards to commercially viable fusion power thats self sustaining.

I really like your design. I think it would also work just fine with a high output 4th gen nuke plant, like the one I use in my FF(X) concept. You could go with a PWR as the USN prefers, or go with a liquid metal cooled design.

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"All your base are belong to us"

Various missile defense applications like to phrase their radar capability in terms of improvement over SPY-1D(V), with +30DB (23' array) and +45DB (30' array) being commonly-discussed options. I have no data on the weight of such arrays and might be hopelessly optimistic, but I wanted to see if I could cram a 30' trainable array onto a variant of this hullform. It would be neat to have some sort of hemispherical coverage from arrays of this size, but it's really not obvious to me why we ought to pay for that. ABM is generally a very directional concern, and a trainable installation ought to have no problem achieving >300deg of azimuthal coverage.

The AGS was removed in favor of a high-capability ABM missile fit, in this case notionally shown as 12 KEI (I have a special fondness for this system, having been present for a test-fire of its first stage back in the late 2000s). This is a 7.5m stretch amidships on the basic DDG hullform, a change I've backfitted to the AMDR-S CG hull. The AAW capability is limited to AMDR-X, which isn't fabulous but ought to be at least as good as what the Zumwalts will carry in service. This is emphatically not intended as a multi-use combatant, but is very heavily focused on ABM. A hangar for a single helo (up to AW-101) is fitted right aft. All 96 Mk 57 cells, the solid-state laser, all countermeasures, all three 50mm EAPS turrets, and the miniature VLS remain for dealing with other targets.

Note the ~40x450" KEI cells might also find use for a particularly grunty form of CPGS.



The conventional DDG/CG variant is not dramatically changed. A retractable kingpost within the hangar bay is now the primary UNREP facility; the high-deck translation from roll was undesirable with the previous installation. Anti-torpedo torpedos are now fitted, based on Friedman's suggestions of recent (late 2000s) Penn State research on 8x120" class weapons. These, or a variant thereof, might also serve as a useful classification weapon, a cheap and cheerful low-capability system to be fired at bottomed targets that wish to play dead.



I have been researching what might be reasonably achieved with a conformal low-frequency sonar array, to replace the relatively long-in-the-tooth SQS-53C transducer on the CG variant. Forward performance is not likely to change much, but interrogation abeam might be improved substantially, perhaps even with a smaller-scale dome shape.

I keep wanting to create a big bad Kirov-sized monster equivalent of this drawing, and I keep not being able to justify it intellectually. Woo maturity!

I feel for you, man, I would already have gone for the Battlecruiser of the Future look myself, had I half the drawing and ship design skills you've shown here.
Now consider that you start with a compact fusion plant that allows you to shave a lot of displacement at equal mobility and capabilities, and look at what you already have on board in terms of sensors and weapons. What is there left that a Kirov could do better? How many baseline Kirovs is your CG worth already? And what is there to gain by scaling the design up 100%? A huge missile farm? A half-deck helicopter-carrying DDH à la Shirane/Moskva?
I for one wouldn't say no to seeing your take on a larger multi-purpose design using the same technology, and watching it slowly swerve across the board from Kirov to Tarawa and back again, but I guess that's not the topic here

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Soviet Century/Cold War 2020 Alternate Universe: Soviet and other Cold War designs 1990-2020.
My Worklist

Commentators elsewhere found fault with the mission of the SPY+45 variant and suggested those arrays ought to just live on LPD-17 variants, and I can't totally disagree. In particular, it's impossible to pack enough SATCOM on this hull to support capital-R Regional ABM surveillance/discrimination tasking. In any case, the cruiser variant's 20' AMDR is something like +20dB over SPY-1, and that's more than capable for fleet escort ABM duties.

Still playing around with trivial details. Readjustments in the helo hangar allow for nice, simple, cheap sliding doors for the side bays, which facilitate UNREP view from the bridge. Lifeboats are changed to Mk 8 50-sailor units in deployable bays taken from US Patent 7681515 (US Navy), for a crew of 300 on the DDG variant ( (N-1)*50 ). Other adjustments include permanently deployed powered X/S-band radar repeaters (bow, stern, and two flanking the casualty radar set) both for port use and maybe even for regular steaming. It's easy to imagine these repeaters operating at lower power output, randomized pulse-by-pulse, to deny knowledge about the ship's wartime RCS to adversary emitters. I suppose one would still carry a half-dozen unpowered reflectors for emergency/casualty use, because they are cheap and small and who cares.

Though we ship Zumwalt's EO/IR setup, whatever it is, as well as SAQ née AAQ-37 DAS from F-35, I reintroduce a MX-10MS optics mount high on the foremast mostly for pure horizon maximization.

I'm still playing with/researching conformal active LF sonar sets to replace SQS-53C on the CG variant, as well as what a Mk57-max'd SM-3 might look like. To be sure, it would be substantially more energetic than SM-3 Block II...



As it happens, brief Springsharping suggests that we're basically exactly Zumwalt displacement. One might read this in many ways:

• OH NOES A DESTROYER IS ON THE ORDER OF 15,000 TONS
• Well our radar is supreme and we have tons of aviation even if we lost an AGS
• Eurofrigs are 7500 tons so this is not shocking (hell, our casualty air search set is a LCS-class system)
• Consider 96 Mk 57 cells versus 96 Mk 41 cells, and such
• Nuclear surface units were historically always a little heavier than conventionally-powered ones

Whatevz.

There's a Kirov-sized SPY+40ish dB "variant" that I'm still playing around with

I finally went after the notional conformal LF sonar on the CG. This is a handwaved attempt at an array built up of identical, interchangeable conformal tiles of 0.5x1m (sort of handwaved from Thales' PFAS). This should have a projected area of maybe 120% that of SQS-53 directly ahead, increasing to more like 200% on the beams. For additional fun and profit, I've hung shark-fins of these arrays underneath the DDG. This will have zero LF coverage ahead and astern, but it's still capability that wasn't there before.

Disposition of liferafts and torpedo launchers is improved.

Further rethink eliminates the SPS-75 atop the aft block and replaces it on all variants with a 7' antenna for WSC-6 (small UHF satcom domes giving approximately hemispherical coverage on the corners of this). The field of view for the 7' dish is nearly hemispherical, although 4' dishes are kept forward for the small part of the sky blocked by the forward mast. The secondary OE-538 moves forward; VMB-3512 VHF/UHF whips replace it aft. SPS-67 replaces the fixed surface search sets; the Furuno nav units move down to the pilothouse level. This allows for rationalization of the AMDR-X installation, which (absent better data) I presume to be built of APG-81-derived tiles. Small versions of such appear aft, replacing the SPS-75 for casualty operation. Above the starboard of these arrays, an emergency conn is introduced. One envisions some sort of portable VHF/UHF system right aft for emergency use.

It has definitely crossed my mind that I might seek to replace the forward 50mm mount and two 4' WSC-6 dishes with a single 7' unit, but at teh moment I'm wanting to keep the 360deg 50mm coverage.

I now better understand modern DIRCM systems, and these are corrected to something plausible. UV warners are placed on either side of an enclosed laser turret, above which is mounted MX-10S or similar. Gatekeeper disappears, seen as redundant between sweeping MX-10S and the DAS atop the mast.

Nice touch, not least in keeping the legacy bulb shape unchanged. The additional flank array is the black protrusion just aft of the bulb? Might be a stupid suggestion, but can't you shape and position protruding planar arrays so they double as passive stabilizers?
Second stupid idea: isn't there space on the bridge to position the 50m and the 7' satcom side by side? Maybe with a small sponson over one edge of the bridge, if it doesn't obscure the main array? If you have an up-to-date plan view of the bridge, you can figure out easily if it makes sense or not.
Can I ask where those are on the ship? I guess the MX-10S is on the arm on the front face of the foremast below the DAS, but no luck finding the rest.

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Soviet Century/Cold War 2020 Alternate Universe: Soviet and other Cold War designs 1990-2020.
My Worklist