The Epic Fail that is DDG-1000 Rolls on

[kham]

While its launching was delayed by shutdown theatre this month, expect it in the water sometime soon, in the next week or so likely. From what I can tell, the basic design remains flawed. Here is the original essay from 2008


STUART SLADE ON THE DDG-1000, AUGUST 2008:

At its simplest, nobody has any faith the ships will work; and if they do work, nobody quite knows what they will be working for.

DDG-1000 has been a screwed program right from the start. The people behind it broke every single rule of naval design and consciously did not discuss the ship or her basic theoretical precepts with anybody.

The ship was, you see, a break from the hidebound traditions of the past that tied the navy to obsolete ideas and prevented them from striding forward into the bright days of the future.

Those thirty words have doomed more naval programs than guns, torpedoes and missiles combined. Some of the hide-bound conservative ideas they discarded included floating, moving, shooting, steering etc.

The big problem was that they changed everything in one go. They wanted new weapons, new electronics, new machinery, new crew levels, new hull design. Everything was new, everything was a major break with past practice. Of course, it all ended in tears, there's no way it could have done anything else.

Examples. The ship is supposed to use a radical hull form to reduce its radar cross section. Great, only that hull form uses a wave-piercing bow and a tumblehome shape. Now, let’s look at this more closely. It’s a wave-piercing bow. That means it - uhhhh - pierces waves. In fact the water from the pierced wave floods over the deck, along the main deck, washes over the forward weaponry, hits the bridge and flows down the ship's side. Now, that water weighs quite a bit, several tens of tons in fact, and it is moving at the speed of the wave plus the speed of the ship.

That wave, when it hits the gun mount and bridge front is literally like driving into a brick wall at 60mph. The gun mount shield is made of fiberglass to reduce radar cross section. The wave also generates suction as it passes over the VLS system, sucks the doors open and floods the silos. The missiles don't like that. Spray is one thing (bad enough) but being immersed in several tons of water flowing down is quite another.

Then we have the problem of the water flowing over the deck. It is strong enough to sweep men off their feet. In fact, it’s so dangerous that ships that operate under such conditions have to use submarine rules - nobody on deck. But to work the ship, we need people on deck. Uhhh, problem here?

Now for tumblehome hull form. This means the ship's sides slope inwards from the waterline, not outwards like normal ships do. Now, we take a slice through the ship at the waterline. That's called the ship's waterplane. There's a thing called tons per inch immersion, the weight of water needed to sink the ship one inch. TPI is proportional to waterplane area. As the ship's waterplane area increases it requires more tons to make it sink an inch. As the waterplane decreases it requires fewer tons to make it sink per inch. Now, with a conventional flared hull, as the ship sinks in the water, its waterplane area increases, so it requires a steadily increasing rate of flooding to make the ship sink at a steady rate. If the rate of flooding does not increase, eventually the ship stops sinking. This cheers up the crew immensely.

However, with tumblehome, the waterplane area decreases as the ship sinks into the water. So, the ship will have a steadily-increasing rate of immersion at a steady rate of flooding. In short, for a steady rate of flooding, the ship sinks faster and faster. The ship will not stop sinking. This is immensely depressing.

The problem is the damage goes much further than that. As a ship with a conventional flared hull rolls, the increasing waterplane area gives her added buoyancy on the side that is submerging and gives her a moment that pushes upwards, back against the roll. That stabilizes her and she returns to an even keel. With a tumblehome hull, as the ship rolls, the decreasing waterplane area reduces buoyancy on the side that's going down, giving a moment that pushes downwards in the same direction as a roll. This destabilizes her so she rolls faster and faster until she goes over.

Having dealt with the hull design, we now move to the machinery. The DDG-1000 is supposed to have minimally-manned machinery spaces. This will save manpower etc. etc. etc. There's a problem, all of that automation doesn't work. It’s troublesome, unreliable, extremely expensive and it needs somebody to watch it and make sure it does it's job. In fact, its useless. It gets worse. The purpose of a crew on a warship is not to make it go around and do things. Its to try and patch the holes and put out the fires when other warships do things to it. Repairing damage cannot be automated (did I tell you that DDG-1000 was supposed to have automated damage control systems? Ah, forgot that but it doesn't matter, they didn't work either.) So, having designed a hull that sinks if somebody looks at it crosswise, we now remove the people who were supposed to try and stop it sinking.

Now we come to the electronics. Great idea here. Put all the antennas into a single structure and we can cut RCS. That causes a problem called electronic interference. The systems all shut each other down. And they did. Very efficiently. The radar suite on DDG-1000 was the world's first self-jamming missile system. Oh, they took down the comms and gunnery fire control as well.

Did I also mention that the flow noise from the wave-piercing bow was enough to prevent the sonar working? That was an easy problem to solve. Remove the sonar. Anyway easy way to solve the interference problems, use multi-functional antennas. That sounds good. One day, when they get them working, I'll let you know. MFAs are pretty good when used in their place, but NOT for operating mutually incompatible systems.

The gun. Ah yes, the gun. It fires shells, 155mm ones. Guided shells whose electronics can withstand 40,000G. The acceleration in the gun barrel is 100,000G. Oops. Problems.

Then we come to the missiles. They're in new silos, all along the deck edge. Can anybody see the problems with that? Like moment and rolling inertia? The designers couldn't, which proves they know slightly less about the maritime environment than the deer currently eating the bushes outside my office window.

Now, all these problems are occurring at once and the fact that everything in the ship is new means that one can't be fixed until the rest are.

And that is why DDG-1000 got cancelled.

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NOTE: Later in the summer of 2008, the Navy reversed course a second time and decided to construct three DDG-1000s, assuring that the program would survive even if truncated at just three hulls.

Website breaking down the physics of some of the problems. The uber-cool wave cutting bow is going to be a complete disaster. I love how their toy models in lake are "just fine'' yet, the tank testing and actual mathematical computations are telling another story. Jesus H Christ just the weight of water mentioned in one sea state on the foredeck (50 metric tons) will blow the seals on the missile silos there, not to mention what sort of havoc it will play with the gun mount. Not to mention the wave action and free surface on the helo deck. Ah well, they havent boned the pooch on trials that epic since the Thresher, so the skimmers are due.

[Mynock]

But it's so cool and stealthy looking and I can unlock the doors with my Ipad!
They did model it after an iron clad......only makes sense that it would go down in a stiff breeze.

[kham]

Its all well and good to want a lower radar return (the Burke's have some features that reduce their radar reflection, but that's not the primary objective) but when you mission is Power Projection ashore, Air Defence , and Ballistic Missile Defence, you sort of abandon that when you need to light up your detection and fire control radars. So trying to be stealthy is ultimately a load of powerpoint bullshit. And, as as rant to avoid raising blood pressure too much, if you truly want a ship that is invisible to radar, I can think of one: they are called FUCKING NUCLEAR SUBMARINES!!! of course, this thing might qualify as a submarine the moment it encounters bad weather. You look at the size of this monstrosity, and all the stability problems, you begin to realize that this piece of shit should never have got past page one of the notepad.

This is what happens when you let aviation into ship design, and idiotic Flags with a fucking agenda attempting to suspend the laws of physics and stability with feel-good presentations and no one with the balls and sense to punch them in the face and stand over their corpse , preferably while desecrating it to make the point.

The Historical Reference Point for epic fail in similar circumstances -- Vasa

[Mynock]

The other thing that annoys me is they're still burning gas........dafaq guys ever heard of this thing called a nuclear reactor?

[kham]

Cost is the flag they always seem to wave on that play, although when they wasting north of a billion on this shitbox I suppose it's all relative. There is an article written in DoD speak , which is about as readable as the ACA -- link here I havent read through it yet but it seems to be written like it's trying to explain the history of USN nuclear propulsion at first to 4-year olds -- make what you will of THAT.....

Reactors make more sense when you consider that future naval systems are meant to include DE weapons (high-powered beam lasers - no kidding) and KE weapons such as Electromagnetic Rail Guns -- both of which would benefit from a steady large supply of electricity. And the ability to make sustained high-speed transits to areas ignoring refueling.

[nachtjaeger]

I did a few design sketches a few years back for just this sort of future warship. It was designed specifically as a semi-submersible. Running stealthy you ballast her down until the deck is just above water level; otherwise you have a dry deck and plenty of freeboard. Main armament was autoloading turrets firing "dumb" (and cheap) rockets to boost terminally guided munitions into the "funnel." Also had a large VLS with the same watertight doors as on SSBNs. Had a drone hangar on the aft deck to provide for over-the-horizon fire control- the drones would locate and "paint" targets for the main battery. Nuclear-electric propulsion, of course, and composite-over-steel armor to make her as tough as a WWII battleship.

[kham]

The moment you start talking about ballasting down, on a surface ship, you are well on the way to becoming a submarine. Intentionally or not. Also, ships have what is known as reserve buoyancy -- take some of that away and you become more at risk to suffering fatal flooding from any damage. This is one reason submarines are so paranoid about damage control--they don't have much of it. SSBN-type muzzle doors might be better for keeping water out, but thats for a submarine. They are not designed for rapid fire or rapid reloading that AAW or ASuW would want.

[Mynock]

Reactors make more sense when you consider that future naval systems are meant to include DE weapons (high-powered beam lasers - no kidding) and KE weapons such as Electromagnetic Rail Guns -- both of which would benefit from a steady large supply of electricity. And the ability to make sustained high-speed transits to areas ignoring refueling.

The article makes a note about them putting lasers AND a rail gun on these in the future, that's why I was surprised it wasn't nuclear. Also yea having enough gas in the tank for the life of the ship is a hell of a good idea.