Shipbucket

Welcome to the next challenge. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to design a 1970s, early 80s era warship armed with the Typhon series of missiles:

The Typhon LR, a long-range ramjet missile, and the medium-range Typhon MR, a Standard Missile sized weapon.



These missiles were originally coupled with the AN/SPG-59 radar system, and would have provided near AEGIS-like capability to the USN. The radar came in two sets, a 3400 element type radar for destroyer sized ships, and a 10000 element array for cruiser sized ships.
These systems were power hungry enough that nuclear power was pretty much needed to feed them. Studies mentioned power demands of ten megawatts. Even for nuke ships this was a big load.
The idea as ultimately envisioned was that the AN/SPG-59 would be on standby, and a long-range 2d radar would provide eary warning, at which point the AN/SPG-59 would be activated, allowing for 3d tracking and missile guidance.



The AN/SPG-59 radar system was ultimately cancelled due to mounting technical difficulties and cost overruns.

Now, the challenge is to ARM your ship with the Typhon missile system. The AN/SPG-59 is optional. Remember that you pretty much have to build a nuke ship, especially if you're using the larger array. The smaller array might be powered by a set of dedicated generators... But you'll still need to provide room for those sets.
In theory a good long-range 3D radar and enough illuminators should be able to allow your ship to at least use the Typhon missiles for their intended purpose, which was long-range air defense and saturation-attack defense.

The Typhon LR was envisioned to be fired from the Mk 10 GMLS, and the Typhon MR from the Mk 13 GMLS.
Take the below-deck size of these launchers into account when building your ship!

A nice folder filled to the brim with more information (Courtesy of erik_t):
https://sta.sh/21azyfbyohaa
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1e4lrp ... Gdyhmv3b3v

Now, as said, this is a 1970s era ship. All equipment other than the radar systems (You're free to think up a plausible radar system for the ship!) should be period compliant.

This challenge will run until friday the 21th of december, so don't rush yourselves.

Judging:
Drawings will be judged on 3 categories, with 10 points available in each category, for a total of 30 available points:

- Adherence to SB style - does your drawing follow the SB style rules as defined in the Style Guide?
- Drawing quality - how well-executed is your drawing?
- Design realism/feasibility - is your design realistic? Does it make sense given the parameters we have defined?

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Challenge rules:

- One entry per person.
- Multiple versions of your entry are allowed, provided they show the same ship's evolution over time.
- Multiple views of your drawing are encouraged but not required.
- Text blocks with stats, history, etc are allowed but not required.
- No Springsharp. If a ship is obviously unrealistic this will be reflected in it's score in the judging categories.
- Posts that are off topic in this thread will be deleted.

I will need a few judges for this competition. If you're interested, please let me know. Obviously only for non-participating members, and people who haven't judged in the previous Cold War DD Challenge.

Good luck!

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Would you please not eat my gun...

Thanks for this interesting challenge, I like how the rules are not strict and the radar is completely up to us. I wanna know a couple of things.

Can we rebrand Typhon so as to fit the universe the ship is built?

Are there strict service-entry date limits? I know the system was test fired in 1961, but don't know if it's plausible to have it operational before 1970.
Also good luck to everyone taking part!

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w o r k l i s t :
Hatsuyuki-class Escort Ships . . . <3

You can rebrand the system if you want to fit it into your own universe, as long as you use the systems as described in the links.

There are no strict in-service dates, but a service date before 1970 is... optimistic, which is why it's a seventies/early eighties challenge. This gives people about a decade and a half to base their ships in.

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Would you please not eat my gun...

An interesting concept idea, but the link to erik_t's folder needs user name and password

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Thank you Kim for the crest

"Never fear to try on something new. Remember that the Titanic was built by professionals, and the Ark by an amateur"

Hopefully fixed.

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Would you please not eat my gun...

I have more questions

What will be the judging criteria for this challenge? Will you recruit judges? Also I assume RIM-50B is out of the scope of this challenges?

I've been seeing some things flying around in the SB discord, this will get interesting soon I bet.

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w o r k l i s t :
Hatsuyuki-class Escort Ships . . . <3

I'm drawing, not judging, but here's how I'm interpreting things

3T missile ships were limited in at least the following ways.

• Vulnerable to saturation in track-keeping: radar and CIC could not search for and track so very many targets before the ship started to miss or lose tracks. Everything was done by hand and mental system integration.
• Vulnerable to saturation in time: A limited number of missiles could be in the air at once.
• Vulnerable to saturation in magazine: Long-range missiles were quite large, and magazines were limited.
• Vulnerable to saturation in disposition: missile ranges were relatively short, so many missile ships might be required to defend the carrier from all directions and/or couldn't "stand off" in the direction of the likely threat.

Typhon sought to mitigate these as follows.

On the weapon side, Typhon (both LR and MR) were to be track-via-missile. The 3Ts were either beam-riding, pure-pursuit, or a combination of the two. This meant they had to fly energy-inefficient paths (thus, poor range for their size) or had to be very large (Talos). Typhon's approach basically reproduced the modern idea: up-and-over, command the missile into a terminal guidance "basket". This meant the Terrier-sized LR missile could achieve Talos range, and the Tartar-sized MR could meet or exceed Terrier range. This mostly solved #3 and #4: small missiles could have longer range, so fewer ships could carry more missiles.

On the ship side, track-via-missile was (ideally) going to be handled by SPG-59. This system could be an all-in-one track and guidance system which could handle the CIC saturation problem. It was a lot like how we see SPY-1/Aegis today, except much less competent as a search system (power-hungry and using C-band, relatively inappropriate for search). You would not see a Burke-like ship with SPG-59 as the exclusive AAW radar; some dedicated air search radar (usually the SPS-43 P-band family) was always indicated. SPG-59 was fixed externally, and did not need to elevate and train to track object-by-object with individual dishes. SPG-59, if it worked, would solve #1 and #2: a single system could keep track of many targets and engage many of them simultaneously.

I will discuss SPG-59 in a later comment.

Typhon did not exclusively depend on SPG-59. There were proposals to use the MR (not sure on LR) missile with a one-target-per-director fire control system. Each individual director (they're rendered in the drawings of the time sort of like the fire control domes for the British Sea Dart) would presumably track a single target, and communicate with its missile to perform TVM. I do not think timesharing of directors was ever indicated. This approach would solve #3 and #4, but not #1 and #2.

SPG-59, as mentioned, was nuts. Basically, it did everything SPY-1 does, but with a mechanical computer. What follows is my own understanding of the system -- incomplete and uncertain, but there's a lot of stuff you'll read on the internet which I think is definitely wrong.

The strange, spherical dome on top is the transmitter. It is basically filled with waveguide-fed horns, all along the spherical surface of the dome. The dome radiates in any direction. Each of the waveguides is fed by an in-line amplifier, fed in tune from a computing sphere deep within the ship. This sphere is the Luneburg lens. This Luneburg lens takes a signal from a single emitter horn (which acts like a planar wave, i.e. a long-range pencil beam). Along the opposite side of the lens, hundreds of opposing horns take in the mechanically-calculated phase offset. These hundreds of opposing horns feed the waveguides which feed the amps which feed the topside horns.

So the ship fire control computer might say "I need to project a beam along X direction". It would feed the specifically-designated computing horn, which would pump EM radiation into the computing sphere. The computing sphere would take in the energy along the set of -X-direction horns, and use those computed signals to pump the amps and ultimately project the beam from the transmitting sphere.

The topside sphere was only a transmitter -- the (usually three) lower spheres were corresponding receivers for SPG-59.

It was huge, heavy, wildly complex, and nuts. It didn't work for crap!!!, but we're relaxing that in this challenge!

Designed systems were 3,400-element (i.e., horn-waveguide-amp-horn) and 10,000 element. In principle, I don't see why there couldn't be an intermediate size (dome diameter should scale roughly with the square root of the number of elements). My sources indicate more like 5MW required for the 3,400 element unit to operate at maximum power. I'm not sure exactly how power usage scaled with number of elements: probably more than the square root and less than linearly with the number of elements.

Miho's comments about power are a little overboard -- very large conventional ships could have the fuel capacity to feed this system by burning dinos. A Des Moines conversion, at least, was studied, and that certainly wouldn't be nuclear-powered. In ~10,000 ton ships, SPG-59 use could affect range by as much as 20% or so. It did take a colossal amount of power compared to a cruising ship.

SPG-59 was seen as a scary radiation hazard both for topside interference and for direct threat to the crew. Contemporary drawings from the USN go so far as to show completely enclosed bridge wings, and required manned gun mounts to be aft (with a forward radar). To what extent this would have been important in practice is unclear.

Happy drawing

One more post in a row (going for the trifecta!): here's what I'm exploring at the moment. I emphasize this is a working concept drawing, not something in any way completed whatsoever!

Nuclear ships are very picky about weight and balance, since they have relatively little flexibility to move stuff around (this is why Truxtun was a duplicate of Bainbridge as much as possible). So let's see what we can do with a Long Beach, trading the disaster of SCANFAR for the disaster of SPG-59!

Keep everything where it is, mostly. Keep Mk 10s forward (deepen the forward one to 60 rounds, ala Belknap, for ASROC). Add SQS-26 forward (this was a big deal back then). Otherwise, keep the bow the same as much as possible.

Aft, ditch Talos (no need anymore). Fit a DASH hangar, flanked on either side with Mk 42 and Mk 13 for Typhon MR. Forward and aft, fit single-target Typhon illuminators for use when SPG-59 is powered down, damaged, inoperative, or blanked by ship structure.

Forward of the aft block, fit SPS-43 for squadron-level long-range air search. A large broadband discone carries the primary SPS-10 atop it, as well as TACAN and such.

The primary superstructure loses SCANFAR in favor of a ~5000-element SPG-59. All of the computing hardware and such goes in the base of the superstructure (we have volume aft, where the Talos mag was, for displaced spaces). We ship only a pair of receiving domes for this, mounted en echelon atop the superstructure. This should suffice for hemispheric reception. Kitty-corner these, we go with two SPS-40 for all-around search and track, leveraging the synchronization and data-combination techniques that would have gone into SPS-22 for CVA-58 (which basically had three SPS-6 arranged around the deck edge, with signals combined in CIC). Alternatives here would maybe be SPS-12 or SPS-39. Wrap the primary ESM around the SPG-59 transmitter tower as on CVN-65.



The result is better than Long Beach in every way. Superior ASW, 120x LR + 80x MR missiles, and feels like it shouldn't get too cramped. And it doesn't seem totally outlandish as a modification of the base class. We'll see what else might manifest as I explore the concept further

I shamelessly cribbed from a former challenge, and have updated the OP. I'll have to.
Announcement also added to OP.
Just what's in the OP, so no fictional variants. In the timeframe described Typhon would have been in service for no more than 15 years anyway.
Looking forward to it.

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Would you please not eat my gun...