That's KINDA what japan wants to do, but probably sans nuclear reactor.
They want a ~180-220 VLS cell destroyer, and they want to develop a small caliber rail gun for CIWS and HGV/HCM/BMD intercepts that presumably would be fitted to their large VLS cell destroyer if they can get it to fit with the power generation capabilities they have installed. But the railgun idea is likely a mid-life upgrade, not something they'll have ready anytime soon.
I think the principle of putting all your eggs in one basket comes into play.
The more expensive longer range ballistic missile interceptors are too expensive to really stock an arsenal ship and if you did it would represent the VAST majority of your ballistic missile interceptors all in one place.
If we had 1000s and 1000s of SM-3 and SM-6s sitting around, sure, but at the moment we procure ~50-60 SM-3's a year (and only about 10 are SM-3 IIA), and around 125 SM-6's a year.
It's simply not enough production, we can barely fill the missile tubes of the deployed DDGs as it is, let alone some theoretical arsenal ship with potentially hundreds of interceptors.
Sadly, The production scale is going to need to be addressed regardless of creating a ship designed for missile spam. The war in Ukraine exposed this fact. Get rekt neolib GWOT era peacenicks.
Food for thought, imagine how fucked Ukraine would be right now if Bernie sanders had won in 2016 and completely dismantled military procurement.
>we can barely fill the missile tubes of the deployed DDGs as it is
.. in war you're supposed to have multiple cargo ships doing nothing but carrying you fresh reloads of missiles
It's not a question of logistics and transporting missiles, right now it's a question of manufacturing enough missiles.
Production problem as opposed to logistical problem.
You don't know how VLS cells work, you can't "reload" at sea, to replace the cells requires an overhead crane system and they played around with having a crane installed on the ship to do it at-sea, but it was deemed to complicated and difficult so it was scraped and they just do it all when they're in port now.
So yeah, the US VLS cells lack any capability of at-sea reloading.
Like I said, it has been talked about, but it's just not particularly safe due to the movement of the ships, even normal movement of palletized materiel from one ship to another can be dangerous, let alone 25-foot long missiles that have to be hoisted above the deck by crane and lowered into place.
In keeping with distributed assets.
Since those things would be massive targets, it might make more sense to have smaller unarmored LCS sized drone ships with a similar flattop that houses maybe 30/40 VLS. Have them operate with destroyer support, akin to a carrier group, and to keep costs even more low, it just slaves off of all the networked destroyers sensor arrays, something the Air Force is essentially doing with its new net centric warfare anyway.
The US's DDG(X) just uses a middle insert section that fits more VLS cells, theoretically you could make a DDG(X) with hundreds of VLS cells if you added enough DPMs (destroyer payload modules).
That's KINDA what japan wants to do, but probably sans nuclear reactor.
They want a ~180-220 VLS cell destroyer, and they want to develop a small caliber rail gun for CIWS and HGV/HCM/BMD intercepts that presumably would be fitted to their large VLS cell destroyer if they can get it to fit with the power generation capabilities they have installed. But the railgun idea is likely a mid-life upgrade, not something they'll have ready anytime soon.
why not just build a arsenal ship?
slap the biggest sensors and radar on 2 or 3 ships per fleet that has 10-20 arsenal ships
I think the principle of putting all your eggs in one basket comes into play.
The more expensive longer range ballistic missile interceptors are too expensive to really stock an arsenal ship and if you did it would represent the VAST majority of your ballistic missile interceptors all in one place.
If we had 1000s and 1000s of SM-3 and SM-6s sitting around, sure, but at the moment we procure ~50-60 SM-3's a year (and only about 10 are SM-3 IIA), and around 125 SM-6's a year.
It's simply not enough production, we can barely fill the missile tubes of the deployed DDGs as it is, let alone some theoretical arsenal ship with potentially hundreds of interceptors.
Sadly, The production scale is going to need to be addressed regardless of creating a ship designed for missile spam. The war in Ukraine exposed this fact. Get rekt neolib GWOT era peacenicks.
Food for thought, imagine how fucked Ukraine would be right now if Bernie sanders had won in 2016 and completely dismantled military procurement.
>we can barely fill the missile tubes of the deployed DDGs as it is
.. in war you're supposed to have multiple cargo ships doing nothing but carrying you fresh reloads of missiles
It's not a question of logistics and transporting missiles, right now it's a question of manufacturing enough missiles.
Production problem as opposed to logistical problem.
You don't know how VLS cells work, you can't "reload" at sea, to replace the cells requires an overhead crane system and they played around with having a crane installed on the ship to do it at-sea, but it was deemed to complicated and difficult so it was scraped and they just do it all when they're in port now.
So yeah, the US VLS cells lack any capability of at-sea reloading.
so.. build a sea tender with crane?
Like I said, it has been talked about, but it's just not particularly safe due to the movement of the ships, even normal movement of palletized materiel from one ship to another can be dangerous, let alone 25-foot long missiles that have to be hoisted above the deck by crane and lowered into place.
In keeping with distributed assets.
Since those things would be massive targets, it might make more sense to have smaller unarmored LCS sized drone ships with a similar flattop that houses maybe 30/40 VLS. Have them operate with destroyer support, akin to a carrier group, and to keep costs even more low, it just slaves off of all the networked destroyers sensor arrays, something the Air Force is essentially doing with its new net centric warfare anyway.
Why not build those as floating, smaller, mostly autonomous designs that can be remotely controlled?
>Loyal Wingman Naval Edition
LUSVs baby
P R O L I F E R A T E
sovlless
You want a type 055B then?
>this but with 240 VLS cells
where are we supposed to fit the cells? is it going to tow a floating pod?
The US's DDG(X) just uses a middle insert section that fits more VLS cells, theoretically you could make a DDG(X) with hundreds of VLS cells if you added enough DPMs (destroyer payload modules).
Try CSGN or Kirov