Are you insane westwords???  Have you ever been on a DDG (Flight I, II, or IIA)???  You're talking about a monstrosity.  Out of curiosity, if we make it a flush decker and put a new gun mount on top of the aft portion, then where exactly are these V-22s or helos going to land?  I suppose we'll have the flight deck moved to be on top of the pilot house up forward?  Or maybe the ship can tow a floating island behind it for those facilities?  If you haven't noticed, on the CG's, the flight deck is a couple of decks above the 5 inch mount so that it poses less of an obstructino to an incoming helo.  Perhaps you aren't aware (because from your post it seems to me you've read a lot of unclas web articles put out by people who don't know what they're talknig about) but when a helo lands on a small ship, it doesn't just go to a dead hover high above the flight deck and come straight down: it comes in off the quarter relatively low, halts its forward motion right as it's crossing over the flgiht deck and touches down as fast as possible.  As for wire guided Mk 48s...  1st of all those are a sub-fired torpedo (surface ships use the Mk 46 and Mk 50 these days, never did use the Mk 48), second of all the last thing the navy needs is more over the side torpedoes: what it really needs on its ships is VLA's with a loner range.

 

Finally, what is your obsession with guns?  Guns are not a particularly capable AA weapon, whether they be rapid fire 5 inch guns or multi-barrelled machine guns like the CIWS.  Guns are kept around because 1) they're useful against cheap, clsoe range, soft targets and 2) missiles don't work so well at point blank range.  The fact that the 5 inch has an AA capability does not mean it is especially capable against most threats or that it is prefferable to missiles.

 

Have you also considered that there simply isn't much room left in the 51 class hull for these upgrades?  The IIA upgrade alone took away substantial work space and also deprived the ship of its towed array (making it less capable in its ASW role) just to get thehangar and the RAST system on there.  It also significantly increased the tonage.  I don't even want to think about what your upgrades would do to the draft of the ship.  ShinyTop is dead on.  Your proposed upgrades really would make this ship an abomination (even if they were feasible given the amount of hull space).  Keep in mind that the Spruance hull was specifically designed to have additional space to allow for the use of the same hull for a future class (and even then they had to add a crap load of additional superstructure to cram everything in).

 

I don't care how long someone has had on this board.  When you're talking about naval weapons and ship design, you damn well better either build ships or at least work on 'um before you start saying "gee, it's be real nice if..."  Otherwise, the discussion is no different than a bunch of kids getting together to talk about playing dungeons and dragons.

I believe the point of the discussion is that the DDX, DD21 or Zumwalts in any of their reincarnations is just too expensive as each would cost many multiples of a DDG51. So the question is how do we avoid block obselescence and find a design that allows to build enough ships. Okay we are probably should growi the DDG51s to 11-12,000 tons.and perhaps they should be the Ticondroga replacements as we did with the Spruances to make the Ticonderogas and we should just continue to build DDG 51 Flight XXX.and updating electronics and weapons and forget about some of the esoteric technologies for now. 

I know the USN is kamakaziphobic so a ship should be bult that needs 25 people to fight and maintain it and have a 150 person damage control party to make it survivable. A smaller crew saves an awful lot of a ship's lifetime costs.