Shipbucket

There is also the matter that you are putting a lot of high explosives, fuel, and their ignition sources below an rolling shutter that is armoured. In other words: if it goes up, the damage would be much more then if it could just blow up to the top.

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The only reason an ICBM have the armored shutter, is to protect the ICBM from any nearby explosion (aka. within 1 km)

have you seen any navy ships that have an armored shutter? There are non, if the explosion is big enough to damage something, the ship it self would be damaged, and thus the weapon would be damaged anyway.

you also slow down the response time for a missile launch, those seconds are important, the faster you can attack/defend, these longer you survive

Columbamike,
I work in a steel mill where we use 4-50hp motors for bridging to move 300 ton lift capacity cranes weighing about 320 ton. They are moving top speed between 5 and 7 mph. I added 100hp as a just in case, it also will have excellent braking capacity with VFD and Regen Unit.
Most of my ideas for moving the armored cover come from working on overhead cranes.
As for the working space I am concerned with that, you are right about the room it just looked possible from all the Mk41 drawings and dimensions I've looked at.
But one thing I wondered about is that with the early Virginia launch tubes they are mounted outside the pressure hull. Maybe all that accessibility for maintenance isn't really needed?

JSB
I initially wanted to do just that, build a armored box to house all those missiles in but I thought maybe this could be done with less expense.
By removing the gun house and all the rotating machinery you should have the room, but maybe not. I guess I'll try drawing on a larger scale and see.

As for the armored cover, if you get a hit on any ships magazine with VLS or a BB's it's going to blow up and the ship is going to sink, the whole idea is to prevent or minimizing that from happening. I think of the British Battlecruisers at Jutland, the Hood, and the Arizona.
As for response time I don't think Tomahawks are launched within a moments notice. The must have their route programmed.
To move the armored cover 100' in 10 seconds is only 7mph. If this was for anything other than strike I would agree that may be too long of a time span.

Thanks all of you for your insight and comments.

That's all well and good for motors that are mounted in a nice, static, salt-free environment like a steel mill. But what happens if one or more of these motors go down due to stresses caused by the ship's roll and pitch, build-up of salt crystals, parts wearing out, enemy action, or any number of other things that can and do happen aboard ships? Can the cover be pulled back by two or even just one operational engine? There is ALWAYS redundancies aboard warships for such contingencies. There's also an important principle in ship design that this idea violates: KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid).

In any case, if I wanted to armor a large block of VLS, I'd break up the hatch area into a larger number of smaller hatches. These would likely be faster to actuate, and a failure in a single mechanism would not render the entire cell block unavailable. Something on the scale of a SLBM hatch seems more reasonable.

Eeo
Not sure what you mean by a nice, static, salt-free environment like a steel mill? Have you ever been in a steel mill?
As an Electricians Mate in the navy I've seen many motors on deck exposed to the weather. These motors are sealed against the environment. In fact some motors are made to operate completely submerged.
In the mill our motors are exposed to all kinds of nasty stuff, like oil, coolant, lyme, high heat and cold.
On our cranes the highest temp I recorded was 157 deg. while changing a brake coil.
Redundancy is built into all weapons systems, it would have at least two power sources and the motors, gear boxes, and wheels would all be under armor. It's also the reason I added 100hp more than what we use on our melt shop cranes.

erik_t

The reason that I came up with this is that I was horrified to think of 90+ tomahawks sitting in a minimally armored box. All I could think of was the Hood, I didn't like the idea of seeing that happen with the Iowa's. So remembering a video I saw on a minuteman launch I decided to put the tomahawks in the barbett and place a movable armored cover over it.
I agree that cutting out the barbett and installing an armored box would be most likely the best, but I was looking for a more inexpensive way.
It could be that in the end the armored box would be more economical, but it was an idea I wanted to flesh out.

is just for that... then you can just drop the armored lid... modern VLS is designed that if an explosion happen in one of the missile, while it's still in the silo, it will only damage that silo, all the explosive force, will go out of the top of that silo... the force from an explosion will always take the easiest way, so if you have an armored lid on top, the explosion will take a different rout... into the ship instead of out.


Se for example the German Frigate F-219 Sachsen, when one of the missile exploded during an Naval exercise on the coast of Norway, the only damage they had, was damage to one of the silo and some burnt paint...

They went into Naval base in Norway for an inspection, an there was no damage to rest of the VLS and missiles, but since it's peace time, they just went back home and had it refurbished. (ho would be comfortable, with knowing those missile experienced an high amount of shock!)

There is an nice video of it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8TaIP- ... INewsVideo

picture after the missile explosion, and as you can see, only on silo got damaged, that what a modern VLS do:

heuhen

Wow! I never knew. I knew they designed that into the Mk-57's but I didn't know that about the Mk-41's.
Oh well another rabbit hole chased, but I learned something.
Thanks for the info

It is worth pointing out that solid rocket propellant is not, strictly speaking, explosive. It is obviously a very potent gas generator, but it burns away at a consistent and designed rate.