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Subject: Crazy idea to replace the battleships.
kirby1    2/10/2007 6:07:43 PM
I've definitly heard the debate between the Navy and the Marines concerning the fate of the Iowa Class Battleships. The Marines love the Sixteen inch guns, the Navy hates the battleships. They claim that its too much money, too much vessel, too much maintenance, and too much trouble. The marines look at the guns currently mounted on the Arliegh Burkes, Ticonderogas, and Zumwalt class boats, and (Just like your exe)says "Looks a little small to me." So heres my crazy, probably not logical idea for a solution. Why not highjack the turrets from the BBs, and mount two of them on a new hull? Something vaguely similar to the Admiral Sheer style pocketbattleships that the Germans deployed during world war two. All she really needs would be her two turrets, some drones for artillery spotting, and possibly a CIWS system for selfdefense. The marines keep thier fire support. The Navy doesn't have some giant WWII relics to maintain. I imagine two of these vessels, one in the pacific, and one in the Atlantic. These two boats are specifically act as an interem design until new systems come along that can sufficiently replace them (IE the electromagnetic railguns that the navy is currently experimenting with.)can replace them.
 
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ens. jack       2/19/2007 3:45:54 PM
you guys ought to check out my idea for a submerging battleship, just add on the idea for retractable stabilizing fins to reduce the necessary hull size.
 
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B.Smitty       2/19/2007 4:54:44 PM

Re: POLAR VLS types (smaller sized or standard MLRS dimensions).

I've always been keen on those, simply because only the DDX/DDG1000 will have the AGS 155. But just how many Zummwalts are we getting? Will we even see 6?

Where do the other ships get good surface attack capability, with some suggesting 5" guns even with PGMs are inadequate?

I still don't trust the whole railgun idea: Arsenal Ship was shot down, some suggest, because all those missiles would make it too expensive.

OK, to date, the US's various gun-fired munitions programs have yet to produce a fieldable, within original budget, cheaply-manufactured PGM (Copperhead got expensive, ERGM and others obviously didn't offer something right, or we'd have them in production, in use, in numbers, and Excalibur only works from 155mm guns).

And considering I don't see that it's going to be easy-street developing gun-fired shells whose electronics & steering mechanisms will withstand railgun launch stresses, I wonder just how expensive those railgun-fired guided shells will be...in the neighborhood of a decent SSM?

 

Re: re-loading VLS arrays at sea.

Has the USN removed the take-down gantry cranes that occupied the corner 3 (4?) cells of a given VLS, designed to assist reloading?

I recall that when the USN first started using VLS systems on Ticos, the gantry was part of the array (off to one corner, and occupying 3 cells, thus a supposed 64 cell array only held 61 munitions).

Was it decided to remove the gantry crane on the grounds it was thought there wouldn't be an abundance of reloads available from resupply ships, and they'd have been expensive anyway, large numbers of them?

Or was it thought the ships just would never need that many rounds?

Or was it proven too difficult to reload them at sea?

 

Seems to me, cells filled with multiple smaller missiles would be the way to go (ESSM quads, B Smitty's theoretical POLAR/MLRS Jr), except when truly big rounds like the ABM Standard and TacToms are needed.

 

On a surface-attack, note, I pulled this pic off Naval-Technology.Com's entry for the F100 Alvaro de Bazan Multi-Purpose Frigate for Spain, concerning just what the MK41 series VLS can handle:

link
 

http://www.naval-technology.com/projects/f100/images/f100_3s.jpg" align="left" border="0" height="225" width="150">

 

Mk 41 Launcher TACMS demonstration firing.
 

(I can't see the TACMS myself, so I'll take their word for it.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Re: unreliability of mechanical missile systems on ships.

Didn't stop us from using them until the more reliable VLS came along.

And I've seen those mechanical reloaders work pretty fast (when they worked), to me, it never seemed a whole lot slower watching a twin-arm rail launcher firing Standards off an early Tico than watching ripple fires off a Burke VLS (is the speed of the launcher the real issue, or is it something in the fire control?). Both of them do have a finite magazine capacity, the only real advantage of the mech system being less overall deck surface area taken up, but the disadvantage being the extra complexities below decks for all the different rounds down there that must be indexed and ran up to the launch rail before firing.

 

As far as other mechanical complexity issues: I notice they dropped the ideas of the more-simpler vertical-launching guns and stuck with tried-and-true turrets with all their traverse and elevation mechanisms and complicated shell feeders.

Consider also the amount of automation (both electronic and mechanical) the future generation of ships will have. Cross your fiingers there won't be an overabundance of mech failures when they're needed to work most.

 

Back to the actual munitions: just how much explosive does a 155mm shell carry?

What's planned for the LRLAP for the AGS?

IIRC, Hellfire's warhead is about 10kg, same neighborhood for NetFire's PAM (LAM was reduced to about kg, but I'm pretty sure it's recently been removed from
 
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doggtag       2/19/2007 5:30:15 PM

you guys ought to check out my idea for a submerging battleship, just add on the idea for retractable stabilizing fins to reduce the necessary hull size.


We're not gonna slap you for that one. ;-)

In the Macross/Robotech series, they actually had submarine aircraft carriers (or rather, submersible enough to get the whole ship underwater).
The idea being, aliens didn't have any sonar that could operate from space or high altitude, so the humans could take subcarriers full of those transatmospheric fighter/robots anywhere around the globe without being seen.
But of course, big and generally noisy as they were, any Earth passive sonars could track them quite easily.
(pretty sure the destroyed hull of the one found along an evaporated sea was named Spaceship Carrier Persius.)
 
Several years ago (early 1990s?), Popular Science or Mechanics had a brief description of a Typhoon-sized nuke sub that had a hangar room enough for a wing of (4-6?) Harriers...
 
For more submarine battleships, check out Blue Submarine #6 (manga, anime).
 
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YelliChink       2/19/2007 6:21:57 PM
The destructive power of 16" shells is so overrated. A 16" shell packed just about the same punch as a 2000lb dumb bomb. What BB Iowa can do can be out-done by a single B-52 if indiscriminating carpet bombing is the mission. From all over WW2 experience, accurate fire support from those DD, DE, DM and APD are more essential to the marines or grunts on the beaches than those big guns. The big guns of battleships didn't take out the bunkers on Omaha beach, they were taken out by directed 5" gun from a destroyer. The impressive firepower put on 2 sq mile Iwo Jima didn't destroy most IJA positions, will of fight and ability to fight. Once the marines were on shore, they found themselves fighting in close range with Japanese who were very well concealed in carved-in underground bunkers.16" shells were literally useless due to the fact that they are just too powerful in these conditions. SDB and GBU-28 also proved themselves to be potent weapons to defeat underground bunkers if the target is known.
 
What really is meaningful to massive shore bombardment is to clear enemy minefield, interdiction, obstructive structures or lightly protected positions on the beach to allow assaulting seabees to clear the path for following landing forces, marines or army. In this respect, the bigger is indeed better.
 
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flamingknives       2/20/2007 3:14:12 PM
'Scuse me, but I've been reading about this POLAR missile here, and I tried to find on the web. 

AFAICT, it's a made-up fantasy weapon, with little or no basis in reality. Anyone have anything better?
 
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Herald1234       2/20/2007 3:31:57 PM

'Scuse me, but I've been reading about this POLAR missile here, and I tried to find on the web. 

AFAICT, it's a made-up fantasy weapon, with little or no basis in reality. Anyone have anything better?

h*tp://www.armada.ch/02-1/complete.pdf

Read page five onward. POLAR is/was a LockMart proposed ATACM naval variant.

Herald
 
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B.Smitty       2/20/2007 3:38:19 PM
Actually POLAR was a Naval GMLRS variant, not ATACMS.  There was a separate Naval ATACMS proposal.
 
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Nanheyangrouchuan       2/20/2007 3:41:11 PM
What about just refitting old BBs as UCAV/UUV battle carriers?  Such a UCAV carrier could take punishment from the PLAN/AF while dishing out small UCAVs and missiles while CVNs hung further back with manned aircraft.

Basically, these refitted BBs would exist for the sole purpose of green water engagement with the PLAN/AF.  Most likely they'd end up at the bottom after a while, they can take much more of a beating than a CVN and dish out alot of punishment.
But the 16"ers should be removed as part of a refit, or just leave one turret with "smart shells".

Flank the Taiwan invasion with just one and alot damage will be done before the crew has to scuttle her and race off in a speed boat.
 
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doggtag    on POLAR   2/20/2007 4:22:02 PM
Precision, Over-the-horizon, Land Attack Rocket.
A Lockheed Martin proposal in 1999 was made for a Precision Over-The-Horizon Land Attack Rocket (POLAR) which would be a GMLRS with an increased range of 200km (124 miles).
 
For a while, Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control website actually had a pamphlet/document up on the POLAR...
I tried typing POLAR in their search engine, but the link headline that comes up says the "no longer available" thing.
 
Effectively, one could say the AGS was instrumental in killing this program.
 
 
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doggtag    on POLAR, part 2   2/21/2007 8:22:07 AM
Found this finally:
It's only two pages.
 
 
 
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