Scientists say Navy ships need power boost

[unhappycamper]

Scientists say Navy ships need power boost
By Philip Ewing - Staff writer
Posted : Thursday Aug 14, 2008 6:05:18 EDT

The surface warships of tomorrow may have strange new shapes or be made of advanced new materials, but more important will be the amount of power they can generate, Navy scientists said Wednesday.

“Energy, energy, energy,” said Cmdr. Anthony Nickens, a ships program coordinator with the Office of Naval Research. The power-hungry weapons and sensors of future warships will need much more juice than today’s plants can provide. But the turbines, drive shafts and propellers in conventionally powered warships now use about 90 percent of the ships’ power, Nickens said.

That means engineers don’t have much room to add advanced high-energy weapons — including rail guns and lasers — to the conventionally powered ships now in service. Designers need to rethink new warship classes from the keel up, Nickens said, and figure out how to push the ships through the water at the same time they’re providing more electricity to the accessories.

Nickens spoke at ONR’s annual Science and Technology conference in Washington, along with Rich Carlin, head of Sea Warfare Development for ONR, in a session Wednesday dedicated to novel warship designs and technologies. Such innovation isn’t just desirable for its own sake, he said, but as the Navy spends more time fighting close to shore, ships will need better defenses as terror groups or irregular forces get hold of destructive anti-ship missiles.

Of late, the Navy has placed more emphasis on the missile threat from nonstate forces, as epitomized by the 2006 attack in which the terror group Hezbollah damaged an Israeli gunboat with a C-802 cruise missile. Navy acquisitions officials cited that attack, along with the general importance of air defense, as a reason for canceling five planned Zumwalt-class destroyers in favor of restarting production of older Arleigh Burke-class destroyers.


Rest of article at: http://www.navytimes.com/news/2008/08/navy_shippower_081308p/



uhc comment: No, the reason the LCS program was canceled is because these destroyers cost over $5,300,000,000 a pop. If you include development costs, each one of these bad boys cost over $10,000,000,000+ (that's 10 billion) a pop.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=259&topic_id=16688
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=259&topic_id=16557
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=259&topic_id=16518
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=259&topic_id=16469

[Captain Hilts]

1. LCS: $10bn a pop for a vulnerable vessel. No thanks. nt

[benEzra]

2. They'll be going to electric drive, sort of like a series hybrid car without the regen,

or like a diesel-electric locomotive. That way the prime mover is generating electricity all the time (in huge amounts), and if you need a high current pulse to fire a weapon, you can divert some of those megajoules/second from the drive motors temporarily to run a railgun or laser diode array.

Ironically, that's something of a back-to-the-future approach, since the U.S. Navy battleships of the early 20th century were electric drive:


USS New Mexico, turbine-electric drive (1943 configuration)

[Angleae]

3. You are confusing LCS and DDG-1000

They are two completely different programs. Your $5.3 billion ship is DDG-1000/aka DD(X)/aka Zumwalt. LCS is a little more than 1/10th that cost ($550 mil/unit + development).