Thursday, July 24, 2008

Navy Cancels a Shipbuilding Program

The Navy has canceled the construction of the Zumwalt Class, the successor to the DDG-51 class. This was a $20 billion program, now gone.

It probably didn't help matters that the DDG-1000s were going to be pretty much a butt-ugly ship.

(By the way, Boston Globe, land forces have "cannons." Ships have "guns.")

8 comments:

  1. It looked like a freakin' submarine with warts.

    - Badtux the Snarky Penguin

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  2. How in the hell do they call this thing a destroyer at fourteen thousand tons?

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  3. The thing is indeed larger than most cruisers.

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  4. The Ticonderoga class destroyer is 8k tons, as were the old Spruances. The Arleigh Burke class cruiser is 9600 tons. So yeah, at 14,000 tons that ain't no destroyer... not to mention being butt-ugly :-).

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  5. someone made a tidy profit on this debacle --- can i bet it was a FOD of FOG....

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  6. Am I perverse that the most upsetting thing to me is that huge movement to have the first ship of the class named USS Heinlein is now for naught?

    *sighs*

    There really should be a USS Heinlein. That's all I'm saying.

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  7. At 14K tons, the Zumwalt would have been 5000 tons shy of CV-7 USS Wasp, the WWII aircraft carrier, and about 10,000 tons shy of the Yorktown class WWII aircraft carriers - including the greatest Naval ship of all time, CV-6 Enterprise.

    Badtux, the Ticonderogas are still bigger than the Arleigh Burkes. The Ticos weigh in around 9600 tons, while the Burkes - specifically the larger Flight IIAs - clock in around 9200.

    Still makes you wonder how only 400 tons can separate a "cruiser" from a "destroyer".

    Then again some other navies - such as the British - designate their ships by role, not by tonnage. Therefore, at least in the Royal Navy, it's perfectly normal to have a frigate (such as the Type 22) larger than a destroyer (Type 42).

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  8. Wicked, yeah, I saw I'd swapped the Ticonderoga cruisers and Arleigh Burke destroyers *after* I hit the "post" button. In fairness I was distracted at the time by things going on at work, where I'm pushing for a simple lean implementation that does everything needed and no more that can be implemented literally in weeks, and the big guys want the latest buzzwords that add absolutely nothing to the functionality but look cool. Hmm, how eerily appropriate when looking at a post about a "destroyer" bigger than every cruiser in the U.S. Navy because it has all the latest buzzwords...

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