fitz

I've been holding my breath up until now because... well, I find the whole concept silly in the extreme - but I believe there are things to be learned even with silly concepts. And you just struck on one of them.

This design suffers from backwards thinking and antiquated ideas. Instead of deciding on a mission, a set of requirements and then looking at various alternatives to find the best solution to those requirements the author has designed a ship based on an emotional attachment for a bygone era and now has to come up with something for it to do. That's bass ackwards and guarantee's an end product that will be a bloated white whale.

That complaint aside, lets get to the practical problems of the ship as presented.

What first strikes me is how antiquated it looks. The layout seems to pay litle notice to the fact that 70 years have gone by since the height of the battleship era.

Why does the superstructure look like something out of the1930's instead of something designed in an era when electronics dominate ship design?

Why the fore and aft main battery arrangement? Is there some intention to get into a gun battle with other battleships?

Why arrange the secondary battery on the beam? In the good ol' days the secondary gun battery was arranged to provide 360-degree coverage against attack from aircraft and destroyers. Today one would want a maximum broadside for attacking land targets.

And one last one - Why have optical range finders on the main battery turrets?!?!?!?!?

It seems to me a ship designed for modern requirements is going to have a large block superstructure similar to that of DDG-1000 with fixed phased array radars for surface search, volume search, fire control and aircraft control - not the tiny towers of the 1930's.

There is no great advantage to spreading the main battery mounts forward and aft, and no reason to if the primary reason for having them is attacking land targets. Indeed, there would be a great many advantages to mounting them forward. Blast interference problems could be mitigated and it would allow for a more ideal placement of the aviation facilities closer to amidships. DDG-1000 again sets the example here with her guns concentrated forward to allow for much improved aviation facilities over the losing rival design which had conventional fore/aft gun placement.

The next issue of course would be how many major caliber guns one actually needs. Since we don't have any requirements to meet this is a tough one - usually to give an answer one has to know what the question is. Why two twins? Why not one twin? Or one triple? Or two singles? Each solution has its merits and its problems.

Under the circumstances I think we can set aside discussions of caliber.

What about that secondary battery. Past experience has shown us that while battleships and those big phallic guns get 99.999998% of the attention, smaller caliber guns do the lions share of the work. If memory serves (and it is probably off a hair or more) at Iwo Jima for example battleships fired something like 9,000 main battery rounds while 180,000 5-inch rounds were fired in the same battle. 90% of all naval gunfire support in Korea was provided by 5-inch guns.

If the role of this ships guns is to provide NSFS then we will need more secondary guns than main battery guns. To be most useful they should be on the centerline, not sided on the beams - or at the very least side-by-side with clear arcs at high firing elevations. In other words, the layout here is all wrong - again it looks like a throwback to obsolete notions of a bygone era. The choice of secondary gun should be pretty obvious - AGS. No reason to reinvent the wheel here.

Now we have a serious shortage of centerline space (what else is new) which means this ship should be adopting the newer peripheral VLS, not the old Mk 41 nests. The layout of the VLS here is terribly inefficient at any rate.

That's all for now.