What about Navy's Stealth Destroyer - the Zumwalt

Discussion in 'Boat Design' started by El_Guero, Oct 29, 2013.

  1. tom28571
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    tom28571 Senior Member

    I am not a fan of the Zumwalt but that shows a lack of knowledge of how complex systems work. Even taking a WW2 destroyer out for trials had gobs of problems that took time and effort to sort out. If my Gearing Class destroyer was a complex amalgam of complex parts, Zumwalt looks to be an order of magnitude more so.

    I agree that such a vessel may not be the best bang for our dollar but we better make it pay for its keep anyway. Ike warned us about the military industrial complex and ever since, including Vietnam, we have been swatting at 10 cent flies with $10,000 dollar swatters, with a few exceptions.
     
  2. mydauphin
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    mydauphin Senior Member

    Two times order of magnitude. And a 20 year weapon that any country in the world can have can disable it. Anyway, like the f35, a ship in search of a mission, just keep writing checks.
     
  3. brian eiland
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    brian eiland Senior Member

    And this next group wants to increase defense spending even further.:eek:
     
  4. sharpii2
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    sharpii2 Senior Member

    You make it sound so, so easy.

    So this is what you're saying:

    An enemy launches an ICBM hundreds if not thousands of miles away.

    Your little semi-submerged ship simply launches an anti-missile which has to:

    1.) home in on the enemy missile,
    2.) catch up to its track, then
    3.) travel fast enough to over take it.

    All this has to happen in less than two to five minutes after the actual launch of the enemy ICBM. Otherwise, there would be no catching up to it. Remember, its final velocity is going to be around 17,000 mph.

    First of all, this missile is going to have to be huge in order to have enough fuel, range and maneuverability to do its job.

    Then its going to have to have its own tracking gear, as it will get little help from its launch vessel. Maybe it can get some help from friendly satellites, but it is going to have to interface with them very well.

    Finally, this all assumes the enemy is going to launch just one missile.

    What if it launches a dozen or so at maybe half a dozen targets?
     
  5. Squidly-Diddly
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    Squidly-Diddly Senior Member

    Billions for one (suppposedly) stealth unit that tops out at 35mph (but loses its stealth when doing so).

    I'm just not seeing how this is gonna work, especially with all this emphasis in the new buzz word "littoral combat".

    Even in Blue Water.

    To counter something that big and slow, and rare, just blanket the ocean area in question with little fishing boats with radios, or 1700s vintage skyrockets for that matter.

    The Japanese did that with radio picket boats, which is why the Doolittle Raid had to launch early.
     
  6. brian eiland
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    brian eiland Senior Member


    http://fas.org/rlg/garwin-aps.htm

     
  7. Ilan Voyager
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    Ilan Voyager Senior Member

    It's a lemon. It has always plagued with the same problems which have not been solved.
    Curiously there plenty of similar motorizations made by Kamewa and others which work now without problems That let me think that the designers and builders of the system are simply beginners, after an attribution of the market for some obscure reasons. Not so obscure, simply money and gang collusions in the style of Halliburton and others.
    Ike was right. And now the military industrial complex in collusion with the political is bleeding the country. The USA alone spends almost 45% of the world military expenses, with equipment insanely expensive and uselessly complex.
     
  8. Waterwitch
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    Waterwitch Senior Member

    The ship will be in San Diego under it's own power. It appears to be sharing the same known problem and component as with the British type 45 destroyers. Raw sea cooling water intrusion mixing with the lube oil for the electric drive motors. One would think GE will be able to sort it out.
     
  9. fallguy
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    fallguy Senior Member

    navy has a tough gig now

    Interesting the DoD dropped the orders of the Zum from 32 ships to 3. Surely at a price pop of 4.3B, "what difference does it make" if you spend 13B or 130B? Were they ever really planning to spend 130B on a fleet of these? Huge amounts of money for something that a small fleet of drones can knock out with relative ease. Perhaps these were drawn up prior to realizing how damaging drones can be... On a boater's paradise website, it is hard to pit the AF against the Navy, but one wonders if reality just bit hard or if the 32 was BS from day 1.
     
  10. sharpii2
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    sharpii2 Senior Member

    It was the Germans, in WWII, who had the super weapons. They had the super long rang artillery (one very large gun, known as ''Big Bertha"), very large tanks, and certainly the world's fastest fighter plane (the me 262).

    But who beat them? Even before nukes came on line?

    We did. And often with somewhat incremental stuff: propeller driven fighters, medium tanks, four engine bombers, and of course, jeeps and bazookas.

    Most of this stuff was developed before the war, but greatly improved during it.

    The secret was we could make lots and lots of them.

    I know two interesting stories about German super weapons.

    I'll start with the me 262.

    It had two terrible weaknesses:

    1.) its engines had a TBO of just 20 hours. And after its TBO, it was only good for about 12.

    2.) its engines could not be fire-walled. If they were fire-walled, the turbine blades would over heat an crystallize. For you, the present pilot, that was not a bad thing. But for the next pilot, the plane was a death trap. The engines would fail on take off. It happened to one squadron leader who crashed just outside the airfield. He was burned almost beyond recognition when they pulled him out of the wreck. His survival was a miracle, as medical treatment in Germany, during that time in the war, was almost non-existent. A more telling reason he survived was the only officer at the scene had left his side arm in the barracks.

    The huge Tiger Tanks have a story of their own, told to me by my grandfather.

    A bunch of them ran out of fuel on a French field. The crews naively stayed inside. A squadron of p-47 dropped napalm on them, turning them all into roasters.

    IMHO, super-weapons are useful for intimidation only. Once that fails, you have to crank out the more reliable, numerous, and cheaper prosaic stuff.

    You cannot win any war without the acceptance of casualties. And, more often than not, huge numbers of them. The fact that most of these casualties will survive, but with considerable loss of function, drives the social cost of war all that much higher, even if we win.

    I can imagine a somewhat more equal enemy, such as a reincarnated Soviet Union (under Putin, perhaps), targeting first our ''A'' list weapons, then proceeding to beat us in numbers (as the cost of the 'A' list weapons deprived us of an adequate amount of the more prosaic stuff), until one side or the other decides it's time to use the red phone, and put an end to hostilities, before they go nuclear. Usually the new boundaries are drawn based land held, just before the phone call. Hence, the North Koreans were able to keep half of Korea, and Castro was able to keep all of Cuba.
     
  11. brian eiland
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    brian eiland Senior Member

    I was having a little discussion with an old friend just the other day about some of our INCREDIBLE wasteful spending on military items, ...and more specifically about this new Zumwalt ship. I had to go back and find a few of the postings I had made about the subject.

    Can you imagine the amount of money we could save for other items that need attention in our national budget, IF we exercised some more reasonable thought when it comes to military spending????
     

  12. fallguy
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    fallguy Senior Member

    the Germans had too many fronts

    turns out attacking everyone is a crap military strategy
     
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