The New London Day is reporting today that Ft. Fumble is considering scrapping plans to replace the Ohio class ballistic missile boats and, instead, modifying the Virginia class of attack submarines.
I'm kind of skeptical about that. The Trident SLBM reportedly has a launch weight of 65 tons (compared to the old Polaris missiles, which weighed about 15 tons). The Ohio class boats have a beam of 42 feet, the Virginias have a beam of 34 feet. The Trident D5 has a length of just under 45 feet. It's hard to get a decent figure on the thickness of the turtledeck over the missile tubes, but five to eight feet may be about right.
Unless the Navy develops a new and shorter SLBM, then the designers are kind of stuck with a overall height of 48 to 50 feet for the missile compartment. A turtledeck 16 feet high over a Virginia hull is going to be, well, ugly. One of the older guidelines for ship design is that if a ship looks ugly, it probably will sail ugly. I'd imagine that a turtledeck that high would suggest that such a boat would have stability issues.
But I'm no naval architect, so what the hell do I know.
But if the Navy then has to develop a new SLBM for a shorter missile tube, then the cost-savings from using the Virginia hullform will evaporate.
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Wednesday, July 20, 2011
8 comments:
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Given their success with the Littoral Combat Ship, you may be just the naval architect they need.
ReplyDeleteNow what you could do would be to dust of the structural plans for the Seawolf, which has a 40 foot hull diameter, design a missile compartment with the turtle-back 2 feet higher than the Ohio's, and fill up the rest of it withe the Virginia's running gear.
ReplyDeleteFVH
Or the notion might be that cruise missiles could substitute for ballistic missiles, so modifying the Virginia to carry lots and lots of cruise missiles might be just the ticket. Of course, the main thing issue with that, is that ballistic missiles are, duh, ballistic. That is, a Trident can be fired from the mid-Atlantic and hit Siberia. Whereas if you want to hit Siberia with cruise missiles, your sub has to be... err... sorta close to Siberia. Which is strategically limiting, to say the least.
ReplyDelete- Badtux the Ballstic Penguin
Is the Ohio class so long in the tooth that it needs to be replaced? Or is this a fish got swim, birds gotta fly, we need a new class (or a strategic redesign for GWOT!!) for the greater glory of empire building...?
ReplyDeleteGod, will it ever happen that Johnnie is told that his heart's desire won't be under the Christmas tree 'cuz a trillion dollars is just too much?
Stewart, the oldest Ohio boats are over 30 years old. The newest is maybe 15. It is well past the time that the designers should have been working on replacements and they should have already begun laying down the first one. But the first one won't be ready to go to sea until 2030, maybe.
ReplyDeleteWe had 41 Polaris boats. 18 Ohio boats. We'll be lucky if enough of the next class of SSBNs are built to keep three at sea.
Do we really even need missile subs anymore? I'm thinking our massive nuclear arsenal, deployed on everyone's doorstep, might be what is spurring everyone else into making their own A-bombs. Yes, the bombs we used in Japan did prove useful, but that was 60 years ago, and the world has changed.
ReplyDeleteI don't think the nuclear genie can be put back into the bottle. Nuclear weapons are too useful to deter other nations. They are too useful for puny-ass nations who want to punch above their weight.
ReplyDeleteWithout nukes, nobody would give a fuck about North Korea.
Yep. Genies. Bottles. What she said. Nuclear-tipped cruise missiles like the Virginia class carry are not substitutes for ICBM's, because they require you to be fairly close to the target nation, while an ICBM can be fired from half the world away. So you have a half dozen subs with ICBM's at sea at any given time, each of which is in a different hemisphere, each of which has a dozen or so missiles, and they can hit *any* country, meaning that regardless of what country wants to get loosy-goosy with their nukes, they gotta fear those nukes coming from nowhere to blow their shit to hell and back. But if you're talking Virginias with cruise missiles, someone like Pakistan or North Korea can get all loosy goosy with their nukes with a pretty good chance that no Virginia is close enough to them to fire cruise missiles at them (especially true if someone *else* half the world away is being a jerk at the moment).
ReplyDeleteCredible deterrence is the only thing that's kept nukes from being used since 1945. Doing away with that in a world where you got rogue states like Pakistan and North Korea doing their best to sell "Make Your Own Nukes!" kits to every swinging dick on the planet is... worrying.
- Badtux the MAD Penguin