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A New Class of Ship — 'Expeditionary Support'

WASHINGTON — There are different kinds of submarines, of destroyers and amphibious ships, of patrol and support ships. The US Navy’s unique designation system defines all of them, starting with a root type, like SS for submarine, adding an N for nuclear, adding a G for guided missiles or a B for ballistic missiles.
Now there’s a new root designator — E for expeditionary support.
Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, working with Adm. Jon Greenert, chief of naval operations, signed off on the E plan and changed the designations of three kinds of ships to the new category:

• JHSV joint high-speed vessels will become EPF, for expeditionary fast transport.
• MLP mobile landing platforms are now ESD, expeditionary transfer docks.
• And AFSB afloat forward staging bases — currently included as MLPs — will become ESB, for expeditionary base mobile.

The changes, announced Thursday by Mabus’ office, are in line with an effort begun by the secretary in 2013 to streamline some of the Navy’s ship designations, which some feel have become too disparate. The topic has been debated within the Navy’s command structure, where some argue the designators should reflect an acquisition program, while others think more traditional terms should apply.
E is not a new designation, but has been used as a prefix — sometimes unofficially — to denote a vessel in experimental use. The Paul F. Foster, for example, is a former Spruance-class destroyer, hull number DD 964, that was reclassed in 2005 as experimental destroyer EDD 964. She remains in use as the self-defense test ship.
Mabus kicked off the redesignations in January when he announced the next LCS littoral combat ships would become FF frigates.
According to Navy sources, earlier iterations of a new JHSV designation included APF for fast auxiliary transport; AKF for fast auxiliary cargo ship; or LPF for amphibious fast transport. MLPs could have become LSV or LVD for vehicle landing ship. The discussion about AFSB designators included MCS for mine countermeasures support ship, or AFSD, for multipurpose replenishment dock.
The Navy’s system, which has been in place since July 1920, is unique among the world’s navies, which tend to assign pennant numbers with or without letters that identify a ship’s role. While pennant numbers can change and are not necessarily sequential — not unlike the numbers players wear on a sports team — the US system is more specific.
Current base designators in use by the US Navy include A for auxiliary, C for aircraft carriers or cruisers, D for destroyers, F for frigates, L for amphibious ships, P for patrol types and S for submarines. Suffixes include G for guided missile and P for personnel transport. While NATO navies use just a single letter, all US designators contain at least two letters, and often more. Some US suffixes are meaningless, simply repeating a letter to produce a two-letter designation. Examples are BB for battleship, DD for destroyers and SS for submarines.
One misconception is that the letters are an acronym. In fact, they’re symbols and do not necessarily translate to a direct meaning. For example, CVN, the designator for a nuclear aircraft carrier, comes from C for carrier, V for heavier-than-air aircraft, and N for nuclear.

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Jura said:

only now I realized I hadn't seen the Zumwalt from top so I quickly searched the Internet, the steepest angle (picture, not a chart of course) I found:

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Air Force Brat said:

Love the on Deck crew quarters, kinda in keeping with the Civil War motif, of the "Monitor"?

prolly have a little campfire with a coffeepot ahead of the "main gun"? LOL

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Bidders for the U.S. Air Force’s new bomber have produced elaborate designs of their competing offerings, according to a congressional assessment.
Northrop Grumman Corp. and its rival, a partnership of Lockheed Martin Corp. and Boeing Co., submitted “two robust designs” at “an unusually high level of detail and development for a system in which the prime contractor has not been selected, according to senior program officials,” the Congressional Research Service said in a report dated Wednesday.
The research service gleaned the information from a briefing that Air Force officials gave to about a dozen defense analysts on Tuesday, providing the most detailed assessment to date of the highly secret program. It may have been an effort to shape the thinking of widely quoted defense analysts before the award is announced. Jeremiah Gertler of the CRS was among those briefed.
The Long Range Strike Bomber will be the eventual successor to the aging B-1 and B-52. Air Force spokesman Edward Gulick said the briefing shouldn’t be seen as a signal the Air Force award of the bomber is imminent.

Air Force officials at the briefing said the award for the bomber contract is expected in October, although one of them added, “I’ve been saying ‘a couple of months’ for five or six months now,’” Gertler wrote in the assessment published Wednesday. Frank Kendall, the Pentagon’s top weapons buyer, will be responsible for selecting the contest winner, according to the report.

Bomber Details
The initial bomber will be manned, “with unmanned operations possible several years after initial operational capability” in the mid-2020s, according to the assessment. The bomber would be qualified to carry nuclear weapons “two years or so after” the initial operational capability, Gertler wrote.
Air Force officials said both of the competing designs “use substantial amounts of existing subsystems,” reducing technological risk “and presumably, shortening the time required for” the engineering and development phase once a contract is awarded, Gertler said.
“They see the most challenging part” of the bomber program “as integration of technologies’ in the development phase, Gertler wrote.

Distributed Network
‘‘Air Force officials took great pains to emphasize’’ the bomber is ‘‘part of a family of systems, with the implication that it is the node of a larger, distributed, network of sensors and communications, not all of which may have been publicly disclosed,’’ he wrote.

The radar-evading stealth qualities of both aircraft ‘‘have been investigated in detail against current and anticipated threats and current designs are complete down to the level of, for example, individual access panels,’’ he wrote.
‘‘No mention was made of speed, although the combination of long-range, large payload and costs constraints’’ of $500 million per plane in 2010 dollars for basic construction ‘‘strongly suggest’’ that the bomber ‘‘will be subsonic,’’ he said.

Attendees at the briefing, which was reported earlier by Defense News, also included Loren Thompson of the Lexington Institute; Andrew Hunter of the Center For Strategic and International Studies; Richard Aboulafia of the Teal Group; Mark Lorell of the Rand Corp.; Rebecca Grant, an independent aerospace consultant; Moshe Schwartz, an acquisition analyst with the CRS; and James McAleese of McAleese & Associates.

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The LRS-B or successor to the B-2 bomber is currently in progress. Some additional details were recently revealed.

Both concepts compete for the next generation of US Air Force bomber were subjected to extensive testing and are, in Washington, to a much more advanced stage of maturity than expected. Both versions of the future bomber long range would be already gone a long wind tunnel, but none of it has yet stolen. Both devices would benefit from an advanced stealth, through the use of materials that do not yet exist at the time of design and manufacture of the fleet of B-2.

Until the US Air Force had left much the program under the seal of secrecy when it considered the two competing proposals, one from Northrop Grumman and the other from a consortium of Boeing and Lockheed Martin. The latest additions to the specifications were made in May 2013, from aircraft manufacturers have focused on the development and testing of the systems associated with each version of the device. According to sources, both devices offer significantly differ not only in their engines, but also their communication and electronic warfare systems. Anyway, the bomber would be "controllable option" although "this is not a current short-term priorities."

The award should be made shortly, which should then lead to slowed production in small series. According to an official US Air Force, both designs in contention would be flying wing type.

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The US Navy’s beefed-up unmanned surveillance helicopter, the Northrop Grumman MQ-8C Fire Scout, is on the hunt for a new maritime radar and perhaps even miniaturised missiles, rockets and torpedoes further down the road.

Naval Air Systems Command expects to post a request for proposals for the maritime radar in the week of September 14, and the programme manager for navy and marine corps multi-mission tactical unmanned air systems, Capt Jeff Dodge, expects a strong response from radar providers judging from an industry day held in July.

The radar will enable the Bell 407-based MQ-8C to search and track potential threats across a wide expanse at sea with far greater range and precision than possible through the current sensor suite.

A portion of the early-model Schweizer 330-based Northrop MQ-8B Fire Scout fleet has already been modified to carry the Telephonics AN/ZPY-4 wide-area maritime radar, and Dodge told Flightglobal in a recent interview he expects to competitively select a radar supplier for the MQ-8C by early next year.

It is expected to be a relatively quick integration effort, since the bulk of the mission systems integration work has already been done on the B-model Fire Scout.

“Our survey shows quite a number of existing radars that would fit our requirements,” Dodge says. “They’re out there today, and have the type of maritime capability we’re looking for and would fit on the MQ-8C. We’re looking to pull this off pretty quick.”

It was hoped the RFP would be released by the end of August, but an update on the US government’s contracting website places the release date in mid-September. ...

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Jura said:

AFB, there're two guns in the bow of the Zumwalt, so you meant fore of the Turret 1, right?

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FORBIN said:

Future Bomber news it going
Models are ready, a new RAM coating better as the B-2

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Air Force Brat said:

Yes Sir, I did, so a Sailor might get a cup of coffee on his way to the Focastle. or set around the campfire, and let the salt air bring a natural healing cleans, after all, salt does kill bacteria, and anything else that soaks in it long enough, why you need the coffee?

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Jura said:

AFB, I think you're lucky it's not
US Navy DDG 1000 Zumwalt Class
thread here LOL

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