Quicksand Fans

Kham, how did you miss this one?

http://www.military.com/daily-news/2015/12/13/newest-navy-ship-uss-milwaukee-breaks-down-at-sea.html

Twenty days from commissioning to complete systems failure? And she wasn't even the lead ship of her class. The USS Freedom experienced "several breakdowns" during her mission to the South China Sea- but they called it a success anyway. USS Fort Worth seems to be okay- so far. I hope if she does have a major breakdown, it's not at a critical moment- like, when she's facing off against half a dozen Chinese warships.

Seriously, if you gave me one of those, I'd sell it for scrap and use the money to get the USS Slater combat worthy. Those little Cannon-class Destroyer Escorts were built tough- two completely independent diesel-electric propulsion systems. With today's more efficient diesel engines and electrics, you could build even more speed and endurance into the same hull. Beauty part is, when those big generators aren't running the ship's drive motors, you have a LOT of electricity to play with. So you could upgrade to lasers in place of the AA guns. Or a cloaking device- oh, wait, they tried that once with a Cannon class DE- it didn't work out so well.

You've made no secret of your disdain for the new generation of Navy ships, and I in no way question your reasoning. But how can you take satisfaction from the fact that sailors, American patriots, are stranded on a floating piece of malfunctioning flotsam? What do you find amusing in the vulnerability of our front line of naval defense?

Sounds like a critical software bug. Something shut off both turbines because of a chip light. Fire the programmer. Preferably out of one of the cannons.

It's looking more and more like these ships are just going to be test beds for new tech. Programs been cut from 42 planned vessels to just the 3 already existing. In our navy (and the military in general) I have faith that a piece of equipment or men won't go into a fight if not thoroughly tested and ready.

I pretty much view these things as floating Formula I cars. Too expensive and temperamental to use on the street but by investing a little money in them eventually I'll be able to buy a Mustang with carbon fiber rims.

metal was detected in the lubricating oil triggering a preventative shutdown

Oh, I didn't miss it
I was however focussed on other things, even Sal didn't bother commenting on it initially. Perhaps because digesting SecDef's letter directing the Navy to cap LCS buy at 40 and divert the funds to more Super-Bugs, F-35s (sigh) SM-6 Missiles and the Virginia-class payload module for future Virginia SSNs was worth some analysis, plus, having an epic propulsion failure just after a Port Visit to the RCN in Halifax is a bit of a Burn even for me.


No, its not Plan Salamander (which was more along the lines of "KILL THEM ALL WITH FIRE!!" and he wasn't just referring to these shitboxes. The scumbag cocksuckers who came up with the concept in the first place, and hitched their careers to them , naval warriors of powerpoint who felt that everyone else was just too stupid to understand their magical transformational fairy dust horseshit. Here's the thing: for as long as you can remember, Naval Vessels and their technology have been EVOLUTIONARY, NOT REVOLUTIONARY. Crawl, walk, run. Got it? They thought THAT was oh, so, GAUCHE....

So they come up with this thing, thinking buzzwords actually replace combat capability. That somehow, all that massive water-skiing speed can do anything, that'll show those Iranians in their Bayliners! Forgetting that, It doesn't mean a fuck if you can steam 45 knots. Thats not new. No one I am aware of in over 100 years of naval warfare has managed to outrun a shell. Or a cruise missile, starting with the crude man-piloted ones in WW II. And at the same time, lets also take most of the weapons off. And the crew, too. What you need all those things for anyways? And all those men? Phooey.
...
It only makes you want to kill people and break things. Especially since even cutting the buy, still has hundreds of sailors at risk , when some fucking moron at Foggy Bottom steps on his dick and the Navy has to try and clean up the mess. And guess what? They CANT right now. Doesn't mean they wont try. But does mean a lot of sailors are going to get killed. You s'pose those powerpoint warriors going to answer for that? Or be sitting on a beach somewhere. Ideally in a non-extradition nation.
Oh, one other bit, It STILL doesn't solve the initial problem, of having no combatant available to fill this slot. And the inability to buy and use foreign designs is a fatal flaw in BuShips thinking. WE never thought of it, so QED, it must be useless. Yeah. How'd that line of thought go, in 1942 , say??

While looking at this , you know the first thing they started panicking over at Boatnerd and other boards? OMG, we could lose the contract! Now, I get that from a shipbuilding end thats not unusual. But the LCS being built in 2 separate yards using 2 completely different (and non-compatable) designs is yet another example of how fucked-up the Navy and Congress were from the get-go on this design. It would be like MacAir building the Eagle, but another outfit, Lockheed say, building another fighter, also called the Eagle, with the same designations, and looking completely different, like only one tail , or three... And none of the parts can be swapped, not even engines or fasteners. Insane eh? Any wonder why hundreds of millions flushed away?

The last review didn't call the timeline "the Terrible Twenties" just because that sounded ominous. Real life aint a fucking movie. If there's a war with a real opponent, the Navy is in big trouble. Think 1938

Edit/addition
Here is Sal's latest post on things. For the record, he has been beating on this piece of shit since 2005.

If I came across as amused rather than astounded and pissed off, I apologize. One of my best buds is a Squid, served aboard the USS Dallas and the USS Spruance, and was flown in to do damage control when the USS Stark got hit. When he finally got to hit the rack for a while, he realized that the previous occupant of the bunk he was sleeping in went home in a box.
My point is that for the money they're spending on "malfunctioning floatsam" that puts our sailors' lives and our security at risk, they could just as easily be producing actual warships, able to survive multiple hits from modern anti-ship missiles, and still able to outrun any warship they can't outfight. The idiocy we're seeing now is the same pattern of incompetence that sent US submarines to war with defective torpedoes in WWII.

I'm sure the Navy has the blueprints for the WWII Battleships, Cruisers, and Destroyers. We know which ones worked, and which ones didn't. Take a WWII Cruiser hull, replace the boilers with two compact nuclear reactors of a proven design, make a few hydrodynamic tweaks like the bulbous bow (perfect site for the sonar dome), upgrade the steel armor with lighter, more effective composite armor, arm it with proven tech like VLS batteries and phased-array radar, etc.
Any new weapons system should be tested first on a proven ship design, completely wrung out, and only then considered for a new class of ships. There are bunch of possibilities; perhaps the 8"/55 caliber Mark 71 gun program (cancelled 1978) could be restarted, and made to work as designed. And I have my own design for a "gun" based on the WWII German 38 cm RaketenWerfer 61, a Kriegsmarine weapon later adapted for the Sturmtiger assault tank. This would use cheap "dumb" ballistic rockets to (relatively) gently lob smart munitions into the "funnel", from any point in which they can make their way to the target. Building guided projectiles that can survive being fired from a 6 inch/155 mm gun is awesome, but why do it if you can do the same job with a gentler rocket boost? Knock the per-round cost down to thousands of dollars instead of tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, make them 90% as effective, and throw twice as many at the enemy. Plus, a 15 inch/380 mm round can use the exact same guidance system, but carry a heckuva lot more punch. And the morale effects of a "big gun" warship on both sides of a conflict are not inconsequential. A quite incidental feature of the RW 61 design is that it vents the hot rocket exhaust out of the inner "barrel" into an outer barrel which vents it out the muzzle end. So every round fired is accompanied by a very large blossom of fire.

Chimerix wrote:You've made no secret of your disdain for the new generation of Navy ships, and I in no way question your reasoning. But how can you take satisfaction from the fact that sailors, American patriots, are stranded on a floating piece of malfunctioning flotsam? What do you find amusing in the vulnerability of our front line of naval defense?

Problem is nuke piles are expensive as hell. They make sense for larger ships like carriers (fuel consumption) and for subs so they can stay underwater for a year straight but to outfit every ship in the Navy with a reactor would be off the charts expensive.
If you have to burn dead dinosaurs there isn't a much better way than a turbine. less maintenance, cleaner, lighter, easier to rebuild, etc. Same goes for the electric motors the turbine feeds.

To just deal with the gun thing first Nacht, the short answer is that it cant be done. At least not in sizes above 5"
And the reason for that is, the same reason they almost killed the Iowa back in the 80s; they don't have anyone left in the gun club who knows what they would be doing. The retard there baffled the CO with bullshit, and nearly fucking killed the lot of them, because he thought that just making a bigger boom was oh-so-kewl. Jesus H Christ on snowshoes. The investigation most read doesn't get into the details. Since it would be awkward explaining that they came a lot closer to having what happened to HMS Hood happen to Iowa than they admit, and plus, they knew almost immediately that there was no bullshit or foul play involved. THAT was all just ass-covering bullshit aided and abetted by JAG

5-inch is a fine gun, good for bombardment missions, especially with the ROF in modern pieces. Remember, it's just a shade under a 155mm field piece. With a lot higher velocity. The problem, and not a new one, is ammo supply and targets in range to engage. Even the BBs right off Normandy were out of range quickly of the advancing forces. The Navy used to relegate that mission to TacAir, typically A-6 and A-7. Oh wait. The killed the A-6. Just the Hornet now. Which is a very very range limited bird. Not that anyone never brought that up, back say in , oh, 1980. The Strike-configured version of the F-14 could have easily filled that role, but , oops, killed THAT too. And damn, now aint it a bitch that a long-range fleet defence fighter is needed. AGAIN. If only someone could design one....
And as far as plans go? You would be surprised at how many are just GONE. Or forgotten , well, because. It's a tech thing. if its all SHINY and new and uber-cool, well , it just MUST be awesome. I want five!! EEEEEELLLLEVEVENNETYYYY!!!!!~!

Write this down: anyone starts telling you about drones? Punch them in the throat. They start pretending drones can do ANY sort of ACM or BARCAP mission, kick them in the balls, then beat them until they beg to die. Robots aren't the answer. Robots as EXPENDABLE decoys or recon platforms are a great idea. But you cannot replace a highly trained aviator with a bunch of software and some douchebag covered in cheetos dust. You have to get rid of the techno-wonks and listen to the actual operators. AGAIN. Christ, the shopping list would frighten King Solomon when he had a big gold mine. And the bad part is, We NEED all this shit. A medium-sized combatant, in the FF class. Another DD design would be good. An actual Cruiser design. More NEW carriers, not SLEPing old ones. A new Fleet Defence Fighter (call Grumman retirees, maybe some are left) A new long-range Strike Aircraft (the A-6F would still be around if they hadn't poached all the money for the failed A-12) That would also fill the tanker role. A new SSBN design to start replacing the Ohios in the mid-to-late 2020s. More Virginia-class SSNs, or a follow-on class. More P-8 MPA. A replacement for the E-2. You have to be thinking about this right now, because by the mid 2020s if no action taken, well. The polite version is "it's bad"
Sal has written about this over at Proceedings , as have a bunch of others. What is really infuriating about the whole balls-up impending disaster, is that the guys who wrote about this stuff, and laid out the problems and what to do , did THAT in the 1990s They were operating on the premise that the people running things were not complete fucking retards and working to destroy the Republic. And for the guys finally getting through the haze now, can you imagine the rage?? And STILL you have imbeciles; there was some asshole, who was going on about the LCS, about how its evolving, new, etc. OK . Lets be clear on something. 2005. Thats when this abortion started to slither out and Sal and guys like him were writing and talking about it. Sal was still a freaking Lt, O-3 at the time, for god's sakes. 10 years in is NOT "give it another chance" , thats the point where those involved should be breaking rocks at Leavenworth

Mynock wrote:Problem is nuke piles are expensive as hell. They make sense for larger ships like carriers (fuel consumption) and for subs so they can stay underwater for a year straight but to outfit every ship in the Navy with a reactor would be off the charts expensive.
If you have to burn dead dinosaurs there isn't a much better way than a turbine. less maintenance, cleaner, lighter, easier to rebuild, etc. Same goes for the electric motors the turbine feeds.

Exactly correct. The Virginia-class CGN's were awesome ships, big, powerful, and could steam with the Carriers indefinitely. But when it came time to refit them, the sticker shock was extreme. That's why a great ship class was scrapped while it basically still had a new ship smell on it. They just cost too much money to operate.