US Navy DDG 1000 Zumwalt Class

TerraN_EmpirE

Tyrant King
The Navy has options it's just a matter of actually having the balls to choose from them.
They were first looking at modifying the Excalibur round. Canceled.
New hyper sonic artillery is now an option.
And of all the existing ships in the Fleet the Zumwalt class in the one class with enough electrical power available to actually operate Rail guns. The BAE systems Rail gun needs about 25 Megawatts of electrical power The Zumwalt has 78 megawatts of electrical power available well older ships like the Burke only have about 9 megawatts. down side it needs time to move from lab to fleet

Sometimes it seems like some Cabal inside the Navy is trying to sabotage the class.
A report in 2008 by the then Deputy secretary of the Navy for ship Programs and Vice Adm Berry McCullough Claimed that Zumwalt Coundn't perform Area Air defense or BMD. However the contractor came in and pointed out the error in this as 1) The BMD role was assigned to the Burke class and not required by the UNS for Zumwalt class. Zumwalts were supposed to serve as Naval fire support a capability lost by the Afore mentioned gun issue where in the Navy and budget for the ammo of the AGS was terminated.
and 2) there is no actual reason why they wouldn't do the job any way. The Mk 57 VLS system can accommodate the Missiles needed and with upgrades the ship could do the job.
 

kwaigonegin

Colonel
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$800k per bullet? The Pentagon better start demanding Boeing, Raytheon etc. to fill Harpoons and Tomahawks with gold and silver so they can justify these bullets to be the much 'cheaper' alternative.

I have a HUGE issue with extreme cost overruns. It's becoming so common these days it's pretty much status quo. People these days so easily justify cost overruns that they simply go unquestioned. Anyone courageous enough to bring it up is often label unpatriotic, hates the military etc. Truth is extreme cost overruns in the long run hurt our boys and girls out in the field and actually makes the the military weaker.
 
The Navy has options it's just a matter of actually having the balls to choose from them.
...
The Mk 57 VLS system can accommodate the Missiles needed and with upgrades the ship could do the job.
I think you're kidding yourself with
vaporware

what's happened since
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(Source ; Raytheon Co. ; issued Aug. 25, 2003
?

give me some 'ultimately' 'undoubtedly' 'will' LOL
 

TerraN_EmpirE

Tyrant King
$800k per bullet? The Pentagon better start demanding Boeing, Raytheon etc. to fill Harpoons and Tomahawks with gold and silver so they can justify these bullets to be the much 'cheaper' alternative.
First there is already Gold and Silver in those. Gold and Silver are widely used in electronics. Both Commercial and Military
Second you have to understand what was happening.
First when it comes to military buys the more you buy the less per. Because you are paying for R&D and production. So the First units will always cost more than the last. The Problems are First the NAVY wasn't buying just a artillery piece like the Army's It was trying to buy a state of the art Battle Ship. The AGS was supposed to offer the Range and fire support to replace the Iowa class Battleships guns. A capacity not available to the USN since the Battleships became museums. So it became more specialized, Then factor in that the Navy's order of Zumwalts Each ship was supposed to carry 920 rounds for the AGS with 32 of the ships built in the first flight and the potential for a continuing line plus rounds being built for reserves the Unit price would have dropped fairly fast. I mean the main reason the Navy didn't have this issue for the old battle ships was the Rounds were all in inventory from World war 2 and Korea, They had built up a surplus and just used the existing rounds until they started running low. Well with a new gun system you don't have that surplus. This isn't unique to the Navy All the services have this issue with really new or really really old equipment.
In the Case of the Zumwalt the Navy gutted the order so much that it became untenable. Unlike the Seawolf class that suffered a similar order slash though The Navy didn't then turn around and harvest tech and systems into a second class of ship that cost less and was smaller ( IE Virginia class). Sea Wolf also has a Unique main armament the 660mm Torpedo Tubes vs the Standard 533mm. But in that case the 660 can still fire the 533mm torpedos and it's larger size came about for launch of UGV. In the AGS case though the gun system just can't be made to fire existing ammo.
I think you're kidding yourself with
vaporware
what's happened since
First they actually built the ships and spent a good deal of money on the investment. also opened the Future Surface Combatant. But for you that's all LoLz.
Having the 3 Zumwalts sitting as Dry dock Queens is not a tenable position or future for the Navy Surface fleet.
 
...
Having the 3 Zumwalts sitting as Dry dock Queens is not a tenable position or future for the Navy Surface fleet.
exactly, untenable as not deploying LCSs ... oh wait Nov 15, 2017
DOiPED4XkAEVjJi.jpg
 

TerraN_EmpirE

Tyrant King
Oh yes lets just use the Vintage Stuff and keep trying to plug in more new tech as the lights flicker the breakers trip and the computers fail to boot.
Future US Navy weapons will need lots of power. That’s a huge engineering challenge.
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  2 days ago
WASHINGTON ― The U.S. Navy is convinced that the next generation of ships will
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, electromagnetic
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and other power-hungry weapons and sensors to take on peer competitors in the coming decades.

However, integrating futuristic technologies onto existing platforms, even on some of the newer ships with plenty of excess power capacity, will still be an incredibly difficult engineering challenge, experts say.

Capt. Mark Vandroff, the current commanding officer of the Carderock Division of the Naval Surface Warfare Center and the former Arleigh Burke-class destroyer program manager who worked on the DDG Flight III, told the audience at last week’s American Society of Naval Engineers symposium that adding extra electric-power capacity in ships currently in design was a good idea, but that the weapons and systems of tomorrow will pose a significant challenge to naval engineers when it comes time to back-fit them to existing platforms.

“Electrical architecture on ships is hard,” Vandroff said.

Vandroff considered adding a several-megawatt system to a ship with plenty of power to spare, comparing it with simultaneously turning on everything in a house.

“When you turn everything on in your house that you can think of, you don’t make a significant change to the load for [the power company],” Vandroff explained. “On a ship, if you have single loads that are [a] major part of the ship’s total load, [it can be a challenge]. This is something we had to look at for DDG Flight III where the air and missile defense radar was going to be a major percentage of the total electric load ― greater than anything that we had experienced in the previous ships in the class. That’s a real technical challenge.

“We worked long and hard at that in order to get ourselves to a place with Flight III where we were confident that when you turned things on and off the way you wanted to in combat, you weren’t going to light any of your switchboards on fire. That was not a back-of-the-envelope problem, that was a lot of folks in the Navy technical community ... doing a lot of work to make sure we could get to that place, and eventually we did.”

In order to get AMDR, or SPY-6, installed on the DDG design, Vandroff and the team at the DDG-51 program had to redesign nearly half the ship — about 45 percent all told. Even on ships with the extra electric-power capacity, major modifications might be necessary, he warned.

“We’re going to say that in the future we are going to be flexible, we are going to have a lot of extra power,” Vandroff said. “That will not automatically solve the problem going forward. If you have a big enough load that comes along for a war-fighting application or any other application you might want, it is going to take technical work and potential future modification in order to get there.”

Even the powerhouse Zumwalt class will struggle with new systems that take up a large percentage of the ship’s power load, Vandroff said.

“Take DDG-1000 ― potentially has 80-odd megawatts of power. If you have a 5- or 6-megawatt load that goes on or off, that is a big enough percentage of total load that it’s going to be accounted for. Electrical architecture in the future is still an area that is going to require a lot of effort and a lot of tailoring, whatever your platform is, to accommodate those large loads,” he said.

In 2016, when the Navy was planning to install a rail gun on an expeditionary fast transport vessel as a demonstration, service officials viewed the electric-power puzzle as the reason the service has not moved more aggressively to field rail gun on the Zumwalt class.

Then-director of surface warfare Rear Adm. Pete Fanta told Defense News that he wanted to move ahead with a rail gun demonstration on the JHSV because of issues with the load.

“I would rather get an operational unit out there faster than do a demonstration that just does a demonstration,” Fanta said, “primarily because it will slow the engineering work that I have to do to get that power transference that I need to get multiple repeatable shots that I can now install in a ship.”
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dtulsa

Junior Member
The whole zummie was built around a gun not the gun built around the ship to deploy a actual round for is totally impossible it would have to be totally rebuilt
 
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