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| All Ahead Slow on Littoral Combat Ship | ||
| 2009-05-23 | ||
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| Posted by:Steve White |
| #3 Sorry Moose, you can't even buy an unarmed WWII PT boat hull for $1M. The $ doesn't buy what it once did. However there is nothing Littoral in LCS. But there are interesting ships out there for the close fight like the Visby, or going smaller, the Skjold or the US Stiletto concept (~$5M unarmed). |
| Posted by: ed 2009-05-23 22:18 |
| #2 I like the idea of an LCS that costs under $10M a copy. And that is a "mother ship". Its subordinate craft should be under $1M each. Anything more than that is cost prohibitive. We need to accept the idea that in a shooting naval war, sailors are going to die, and any ship the size or smaller than a destroyer always has been, and always will be, expendable. For this reason, they must trade armor for speed, high tech gizmos for firepower, and survivability for sheer numbers. A tramp cargo ship that can launch several dozen cheap, expendable attack aircraft may be the next generation aircraft carrier. It is not meant to force project for decades, but to wipe out an enemy fleet all at once, before it is sunk. The LCS mission, for all intents and purposes, is to patrol the coastlines of the South China Sea, almost 9000 miles worth. Assuming half of those are friendly, that still means you need a heck of a lot of LCS to do that work. Quality is trumped by quantity in such a situation, as we learned in the Pacific War in WWII. |
| Posted by: Anonymoose 2009-05-23 17:37 |
| #1 Read, MOTHER SHIPS. Sub-read, MULTI-ASSET ARSENAL/FIRE SHIPS [naval] + HIGH-ALTITUDE DIRIGIBLES [air/near space-based CATAMARANS]. |
| Posted by: JosephMendiola 2009-05-23 00:22 |