erik_t wrote: * | December 28th, 2020, 4:45 pm |
As a very rough rule of thumb, modern warships are pretty carefully designed for operability and maintainability. Improvements can be nibbled away on the margins, but if one finds oneself sketching out a super badass cruiser of doom that is a dramatic advance on existing ships in nearly every respect, there's probably something you're missing. In this case, the chief shortcoming is the new artist's common mistake of trying to fit ten tons of equipment into a three-ton bucket.
As for cruiser of doom, and why hasn't anyone implemented it yet: it is based around a new class of cannons (that seem to be currently in development) that were originally intended to be a loophole around an intermediate range ballistic missiles treaty.
Here you can find a more comprehensive article about it. It is actually intended to be transported on land via a trailer truck (albeit very large one):
sorry for the potato image, but it seems to be taken from some exposition stand.
Neither China (that have never participated in the treaty), nor Russia (that made Iskander, that actually brought the treaty to its end) posses technologies required to accomplish such an endeavor. Particularly electronics able to withstand extreme g-forces of the shot from such a weapon.
Same goes for it's CIWS, Hyper Velocity Projectiles (for cannons), is another experimental American technology, that was first tested in September of 2020 and managed to shut down cruise missile imitator. Again, nobody but the US seem to have anything similar.
Actually I'm not nearly the first to propose putting Strategic Long Range Cannon on a ship, here
Popular Mechanics speculates about the possibility of battleships armed with this weapon. I just don't like battleships IMHO, they are too much eggs in one basket, just remember Yamato, that Japanese feared to put into battle.
The rear guns and VLS fitting 'just barely' is exactly the issue: with the personnel access, ammunition elevator, reinforcements against shocks (as a gun happends to provide shocks to a ships structure) the amount of space required is about 2 or 3 times the amount of space you currently have. The VLS either has no hatch at the bottom, in which case seawater ingress (in heavy wave conditions) will result in damaged missiles and systems or requires a hatch down there that will require maintenance and is also still a risk in heavy weather. All in all, this will not reduce the required space (the maintenance access might even increase the required space) while offering just the very minor advantage of having a lower infrared signature.... while the infrared signature of the orignal system is only there when firing missiles out of the top, in which case there will be a lot of heat above the deck anyways.
As for the rear guns, the intent was to have horizontal ammo conveyor instead of the vertical lift. The ammunition storage can be put under the helipad, by the sides of the boat hangar. There is no need to bury their ammunition deeply into the ship, provided that the powder is incredibly hard to ignite and most of rounds don't contain explosives (they are "hit to kill").
As for VLS, I didn't mean the hatch at the bottom, but a horizontal flame channel flame channel diverting flame between the hulls:
Lover IR signature wasn't the main goal unlike crew safety. See, most of ships equipped with VLS have them both fore and aft of the superstructure, but for the purpose of at sea rearming Midway has all of its missiles at the back. Thus I'm worried about a situation, where somebody is working on the helipad and there is immediate need to launch a missile. Actually I don't know what is the safe distance for human to be from Mk41 when the missile is launched, that's why I wanted to be as safe as possible. From the videos I've seen the exhaust does look terrifying.
I agree nuclear would not fit the concept, but then you should wonder, if the goal is to have this ship in numbers, does high speed make sense? if you have enough of them to station them around the world, there is no need to have very high speed long range relocations.
There were four reasons for putting ludicrous powerplant on the ship, two logical and two silly:
1.Replenishment time, to the nearest port and back (when Midway is used not as a part of big strike group).
2. Fast deployment in solo mode to support special ops or in case if rapid unexpected escalation.
3.I could't come up with ship's class and name, from standpoint of history, unarmored ship with ludicrously big guns is Battlecruiser (but than it must be fast), and naming was much easier than for cruisers or destroyers, as the US had very few of them.
4.Upon lurking on GE's site I tried to find something with high efficiency and combined cycle, the problem is all their new and more efficient designs are large powerplant turbines, hence I've chosen the smallest air derivative among them. Additionally its power allows the ship to be a fast battlecruiser indeed.
Also, note that the ticonderoga was build on a hull originally designed to take less systems. You add the big gun, high speed (and all the required power for that), 50% more VLS on a hull the same length on a hull shape that will likely result in less displacement. In other words: displacement wise, this hull is in my opinion between 30 and 50% of the displacement I would expect for the weapon systems you are listing. And that is without taking into account the amount of fuel required for an high speed ocean crossing.
As for the displacement: the main hull should have roughly the same displacement as Ticonderoga (similar length, width and draft) + some additional displacement from pontoons. The hull itself can be made from lighter materials, so less dead weight. The
powerplant might be even lighter(one large turbine instead of four smaller), however the electric part gonna be heavy indeed, as well as all the needed fuel. As for VLS, I made a mistake, I wanted the ship to have less missiles than Ticonderoga (actually, for some reason I thought it had way more) as it gonna be capable of rearming at sea, so there is no reason to carry several billion dollars of dead weight. Will update the drawing and the description.
As for electric motors, I actually thought about Zumwalt's 39MW motors (have no idea how much they weight) (4x35.5 MW, not 4x142 MW, that's just silly).