The Navy Thinks This New $7 Billion Ship Is The Answer To All Its Chinese Concerns [View all]

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http://www.businessinsider.com/the-uss-zumwalt-ddg-1000-a-silver-bullet-of-stealth-2012-06

The Navy Thinks This New $7 Billion Ship Is The Answer To All Its Chinese Concerns
Robert Johnson | Jun. 4, 2012, 6:56 AM

Looking a bit like an old Civil War Ironclad, the $7 billion DDG 1000 USS Zumwalt will focus on land attacks, relying heavily on its advanced stealth technology to slip in close to shore before unleashing its massive onboard arsenal.

A new take on the Zumwalt was published today by the Eric Talmadge at the Associated Press who points out that in addition to the ship's wide array of conventional weapons the Zumwalt will eventually carry the Navy's much anticipated "railgun".

The railgun is an electrically powered artillery weapon that launches massive projectiles at high speeds without the use of gunpowder or explosives. Instead, an electric current is run through the artillery shell, the current interacts with the magnetic fields in the rails and pounds the shell from the barrel.

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The Zumwalt was originally estimated to cost about $3.8 billion, but so much technology crammed on board that its cost has nearly doubled, and after the first three are built, production will stop. Including the exhaustive research and development required by each vessel to total cost jumps to $7 billion apiece.