DDG-1000 News

[JRT]

Ah, yes, the Arsenal Ship. Didn't that "evolve" into the 1000? Some evolution...

I think that the arsenal ship concept evolved into something other than a surface ship, something very much better.

[bfng3569]

That 3rd person risks dying dying fast, unless it's at a considerable distance... in which case you need a much bigger flashlight. But then this will probably make "bad guy" run away.

This war is a heck of a dance...

it's kinda of what they are doing now though, stand off sensors and data links, one platform providing targeting for another etc

[gunnut]

Or that they are too lazy or too buys to update the website.....

I believe AGS is alive and well but LRLAP is dead. It might get replaced by the HVP.

Seriously, how difficult is it to design and produce a dumb version of LRLAP? Make a round that's exactly the same dimension, balance and weight. Fire it repeatedly. Chart it. You know, like in the old days before computers. I know it's not glorious, but dumb artillery shells still have a place on the battlefield.

[thebard]

Seriously, how difficult is it to design and produce a dumb version of LRLAP? Make a round that's exactly the same dimension, balance and weight. Fire it repeatedly. Chart it. You know, like in the old days before computers. I know it's not glorious, but dumb artillery shells still have a place on the battlefield.

I think it makes more sense to just put an existing conventional gun on there. The LRLAP is rocket-assisted, fin guided projectile designed for 100+ mile range, so it has no real ballistic characteristics. I doubt that a 'dumb' version (rocket assisted, 100 mile, unguided) would have acceptable accuracy.

[gunnut]

I think it makes more sense to just put an existing conventional gun on there. The LRLAP is rocket-assisted, fin guided projectile designed for 100+ mile range, so it has no real ballistic characteristics. I doubt that a 'dumb' version (rocket assisted, 100 mile, unguided) would have acceptable accuracy.

I don't mean a rocket assisted dumb projectile that can go 100 miles. I mean a dumb projectile that might go 20 miles with acceptable accuracy, comparable to the current 5" gun and army's 155mm gun. At least we can put some ordinance down range than to have 2 6" tubes that can't be seen.

Or like you said, remove the AGS mounting and replace it with an existing MK 45 that can hide in the current housing.

[JRT]

The AGS guns are a portion of the complex AGS system.

A non-half-ass solution to changing gun systems would be very far from trivial, certainly not cheap, and NGFS seems to be far down the list of priorities.

[thebard]

[QUOTE=JRT;1046961]The AGS guns are a portion of the complex AGS system.


Do you know how much, if any of the AGS systems is installed on the 3 ships? I think none of them are sporting a gun barrel, unless I am mistaken. I think there are a few LRLAP rounds in inventory, maybe I'm mistaken about that too.

[JCT]

Do you know how much, if any of the AGS systems is installed on the 3 ships? I think none of them are sporting a gun barrel, unless I am mistaken. I think there are a few LRLAP rounds in inventory, maybe I'm mistaken about that too.

I believe that the guns themselves are on the first two ships and would imagine that they would be installed on the third. If nothing else, they were paid for and to change now would cause extra $$. If you left it out, it could negatively affect buoyancy, there's a lot of the gun system buried deep. Anytime you make a change to a contract, it's big bucks to make a change.

[gunnut]

The AGS guns are a portion of the complex AGS system.

A non-half-ass solution to changing gun systems would be very far from trivial, certainly not cheap, and NGFS seems to be far down the list of priorities.

I believe that the guns themselves are on the first two ships and would imagine that they would be installed on the third. If nothing else, they were paid for and to change now would cause extra $$. If you left it out, it could negatively affect buoyancy, there's a lot of the gun system buried deep. Anytime you make a change to a contract, it's big bucks to make a change.

Hence my question of why not develop a traditional artillery round that weighs the same, has roughly the same balance, the exact same dimension, as the LRLAP? Plug them into the system and let 'er rip. Sure, it's not glamorous, but at least the 6" guns will have ammo to shoot.

[JRT]

Hence my question of why not develop a traditional artillery round that weighs the same, has roughly the same balance, the exact same dimension, as the LRLAP? Plug them into the system and let 'er rip. Sure, it's not glamorous, but at least the 6" guns will have ammo to shoot.

Or maybe adapt it by adding a different discarding sabot for the 6.1 inch gun onto a new 5-inch round guided hyper velocity round that they seem to want to buy for the Arleigh Burkes and Ticos.

[JRT]

Advanced Gun System was holding back the Navy’s new stealth destroyer

by David B. Larter
19 April 2018
Defense News

Development issues with the Navy’s Advanced Gun System, destined to be one of the main armaments of DDG-1000, prompted the Navy to change Zumwalt into a ship killer, the Navy’s top requirements officers said Tuesday.

The Navy announced in February in budget justification documents that it intended to integrate Raytheon’s SM-6 missile and was changing the mission from a land-attack platform to a ship killer.

In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee’s seapower subcommittee, Vice Adm. Bill Merz told senators that the slow development of the AGS prompted the change.

The AGS, in conjunction with the Long-Range Land Attack Projectile, was supposed to fire a round more than 80 nautical miles. The Navy canceled the projectile after truncating the total Zumwalt-class buy to three ships pushed the cost per round up to more than $800,000 per round. Furthermore, the system was also failing to achieve the range it wanted out of the system, Merz said.

“Even at the high cost, we still weren’t really getting what we had asked for,” he said. “So what we’ve elected to do is to separate the gun effort from the ship effort because we really got to the point where now we’re holding up the ship.”

Merz said the ship was ready to start its life with the fleet and that the larger MK 57 vertical-launch system canisters will allow for more advanced weapons to be developed and fired from the ship.

“It does have 80 vertical launch cells. Those are the larger variety cell, so that opens up opportunities for advanced development on our weapons side also. Our combat system is very good as are inherent ship capabilities.

“We think the ship is very well-built, ready to join the fleet. We’re very excited to get her and we’ll continue to develop the rounds for the gun in parallel.”

Mission Change & Gun System Blues

The Navy has moved ahead with a plan to add SM-6 on to Zumwalt, which allows the Navy to engage surface targets and extremely long ranges among other missions.

In August, the Navy shot down a medium-range ballistic missile target with the SM-6, which uses a fragmenting explosion near its target as the kill mechanism.

This is different from the SM-3 Block IIA in development that hits its target directly. SM-6 can also be used to hit surface targets at sea and on land from hundreds of miles away.

Beefing up the ship-killing armament even further will be the new and improved maritime version of the Tomahawk, which could be loaded into the MK-57 VLS.

For the Maritime Tomahawk, Raytheon is integrating a new seeker into its tried-and-true strike missile for long-range ship-on-ship engagements. The land-attack version has a range of more than 1,350 nautical miles.

But the sticking point for the Navy in the development of the Zumwalt-class has been the gun.

In January, Zumwalt’s former commanding officer, Capt. James Kirk, said the Navy was in a holding pattern on the guns. While the service is keeping an eye on a couple key technologies that could fill in the gap left by LRLAP, “there is not a plan right now for a specific materiel solution for the replacement round,” Kirk told reporters at the Surface Navy Association symposium.

“We continue to monitor industry’s development and technical maturation. An example of that is the Hyper Velocity Projectile,” he said, referring to a high speed guided munition made by BAE Systems and originally developed for use in electromagnetic rail guns.


“We’re monitoring that technical maturation to see do we get there to get the kind of ranges and capabilities we want, that’s the right bang for the buck, cost to capability, for the Navy. We’re monitoring that, but we have not made a decision for that yet.”

The Navy got in its present pickle with the 155mm/62-caliber gun with automated magazine and handling system because the service cut the buy from 28 ships, to seven, and finally to three.

The AGS, the largest U.S. naval gun system since World War II, was developed specifically for the Zumwalt class, as was the LRLAP round it was intended to shoot. There was no backup plan so when the buy went from 28 to thee, the costs stayed static, driving the price of the rounds through the roof.

“We were going to buy thousands of these rounds,” said a Navy official familiar with the program told Defense News at the time. “But quantities of ships killed the affordable round.”

...

[JRT]

Do you know how much, if any of the AGS systems is installed on the 3 ships? I think none of them are sporting a gun barrel, unless I am mistaken. I think there are a few LRLAP rounds in inventory, maybe I'm mistaken about that too.

I really don't know.

[JRT]

Zumwalt Close to Losing Gun, But Open to EW and Directed Energy

by Paul McLeary
November 28, 2018 at 6:30 PM
Breaking Defense
https://breakingdefense.com/2018/11/...rected-energy/

WASHINGTON: The once-revolutionary prospects of the Navy’s Zumwalt-class destroyer continue to be whittled away. Having lost some of its touted stealth capabilities and suffered a series of engine and electrical problems, now it’s likely to ditch its long-troubled gun.

The Advanced Gun System on the Zumwalt never lived up to its billing. When the Navy decided the Zumwalt design had grown too expensive and it would restart production of the tried-and-true Arleigh Burke class instead, slashing of the Zumwalt class from 32 ships to just three pushed up the price of the planned projectile to almost $1 million a round. But there’s another issue: It was never able to shoot as far as the Navy wanted it to.

“We just cannot get the thing to fly as far as we want,” Vice Adm. William Merz, deputy chief of naval operations for warfare systems, told the Senate Armed Services Seapower subcommittee on Tuesday.

The ship “is a very capable platform with or without that gun,” Merz assured the senators. “We will be developing either the round that goes with that gun or what we are going to do with that space if we decide to remove that gun in the future. The ship is doing fine, on track to be operational in 2021 in the fleet.”

As initially planned, the Zumwalt class would have been equipped with two 155mm guns built by BAE Systems which would fire Lockheed Martin’s Long-Range Land-Attack Projectile. The projectile was eventually found to be too costly, so it was canceled.

But the ship will sail on anyway. “We determined that the best future for that ship is to get it out there with the capability that it has and separate out the Advanced Gun System, leaving everything else in place,” Merz said.

The Navy decided last year that the entire mission for the ship would change, scrapping plans to have it operate in the littoral (coastal) environment lobbing missiles inland and supporting ground troops, instead making it into a ship-killer.

Each of the three planned Zumwalt-class ships features 80 Mk 54 Vertical Launch System cells capable of firing

... the Tomahawk Land Attack Missile, which is being modified to hit ships at sea;
... the anti-air Evolved Sea Sparrow Missile (ESSM);
... or Standard Missile family — including the SM-3 for ballistic missile defense and the multi-purpose SM-6, capable of hitting aircraft, both cruise and ballistic missiles, or even ships;
... Future upgrades might add the new Long-Range Anti-Ship Missile as well.

Merz said that “those VLS cells are larger than any other surface ship VLS cells, so that opens up an aperture of more weapons options for that ship.”

Asked by Sen. Angus King of Maine whether the Zumwalt class might be able to play other roles in the future Navy, such as hosting directed energy weapons, Merz had some good news, predicting that the ship has enough space, weight, power and communications ability to allow the Navy “to expand this ship over time. She is going to be a candidate for any advanced weapon system that we develop.”

In the longer run, the Navy is looking at an all-new destroyer or cruiser design built around the massive electrical requirements of future laser weapons, railguns, and other power-hungry systems such as radars.

While the original Zumwalt (DDG 1000) continues to undergo combat system tests en route to its 2021 entry into the fleet, the second Zumwalt-class ship, the USS Michael Monsoor ( DDG 1001) continues to grind through sea trials out of Bath Iron Works in Maine. But even there, things haven’t gone as planned. The ship suffered a massive engine failure that required the replacement of one of its $20 million Rolls Royce MT30 gas turbines. It also suffered electrical malfunctions last December that required it again to return to port for repairs.

USS Lyndon B. Johnson (DDG 1002), the third and last ship in the vanishingly small class, is under construction.

The Navy might not build as many Zumwalt-class ships as originally planned, but its nascent frigate program — designed to make up for the failures of the Littoral Combat Ship program — is on track, Navy leaders said. (To show how serious the Navy is about missiles, while they haven’t yet chosen the winning frigate design, a Vertical Launch System is mandatory — a capability that was lacking on LCS).

And overall, despite public discussion of delays, the plan for a 355-ship Navy remains in place, the Navy leaders told the SASC.. The Navy is planning to release a new Force Structure Assessment next year, and 355 hulls will remain the floor for what the service will budget and plan for.

“We have seen nothing from the combatant commands to date, or from Secretary Mattis’ National Defense Strategy, that will give us any indication we’ll be coming off that 355-ship in composition or in total numbers,” Merz said.

...

[jlvfr]

"equired the replacement of one of its $20 million Rolls Royce MT30 gas turbines"

wOW! That must have been one heck of a crash!

I guess they could replace the guns with the standard 127? Certainly have the room for it, and would some spare. Or fit one and plop a 57mm or a CIWS on the other slot (Phalanx or SeaRAM), because I notice it has nothing like that...

[thebard]

The admirals always paint a rosy picture, right up to the moment they decide to cancel a program. Very sad. We could have 12 LCS, 8 FFG(X), or about 6-7 Burkes for the cost of these 3 'destroyers'.