USS Zumwalt DDG-1000 Launched

[Mr Bean]

As much as I would like you to believe the sky is blue, I have little interest trying to persuade you if you insist otherwise.

I have a question for you: is 673 a smaller or larger number than 380?

Ah but the sky is not always blue, during the night it's black, during the day it can be a dozen different shades of blue or red or orange or yellow during a sunrise or set. Weather phenomenon can also change the color as can disasters.

And perhaps you can admit that if the McCampbell had the exact same number of Browning .50cals, 20/25mm Oerlikons and 40mm Bofors it would have the exact same number of gunners as the Atlantic. And because the McCampbell would now have many more crew onboard the number of chiefs would go up. Extra crews means extra mess and un-designated for them to manage also inflating the McCampbells new crew total.

Energiewende your comparing a ship with a engagement range from ballistic missiles to enemy bases hundreds of miles inshore which necessitates many missiles which are not manpower intensive to run because they are large they take up room and mostly can't be worked on. Why not compare a ship of the same role.

Why not say The Enterprise in 1941 with The Enterprise in 1977 or the Ford in 2013 all of which have between 2300-4700 people onboard depending on cursing conditions of peace or war. Look the McCampbell has little in common with the Atlantic, you can't compare a gun cruiser to a missile cruiser the weapon systems are to radical to make any kind of comparison hard.

And if you dig down for individual systems like say gun crews you find despite sixty years difference the numbers are identical. What about the mess hall? Surely 60 years of automation has... nope those are properly identical as well. A ship has X number of full time mess hall staff for every 100 people onboard and that's not changed in a century now. Same number of captans and command staff, but something like a missile system eats into to much of the mass of a ship. It's not automation no more than if I fill a locker fill of bullets I can't say it's automation. That's just storage.

[energiewende]

McCampbell is larger and more capable in every respect. Its specific crew is about half. An automated CIWS mount does not have the same crew as a WWII AA gun mount. A 0.50cal Browning has no dedicated crew at all. There is no argument here, except in your dreams.

Why not say The Enterprise in 1941 with The Enterprise in 1977 or the Ford in 2013 all of which have between 2300-4700 people onboard depending on cursing conditions of peace or war.

Because CVN-6 displaced 1/4 as much as CVN-78 with 1/2 the crew, ie. the specific crew requirement halved.

[Pelranius]

Can't wait to see what happens with the tumbledown hull when it goes out for trials on the high seas.

[Mr Bean]

McCampbell is larger and more capable in every respect. Its specific crew is about half. An automated CIWS mount does not have the same crew as a WWII AA gun mount. A 0.50cal Browning has no dedicated crew at all. There is no argument here, except in your dreams.

I guess this guy is a ROBOT
This training mission must be how the robots learn to shoot guns
Seriously energiewende we've used the same .50cal mounts on our ships for eighty fucking years.

[General Mung Beans]

Looks pretty cool to me. Hopefully there are no terrible glitches in it.

[K. A. Pital]

Hmm...

I know that the spades are the swords of a soldier. I know that the clubs are weapons of war. I know that diamonds mean money for this art. But that's not the shape of my heart.

I'm kind of glad that this expensive and deadly weapon may only exist in a few units.

[Macunaima]

On a side note about the trial run of the new DDG-1000, her commanding officer is no other than James Kirk...! James A. Kirk, but still... I'm sure he will make sure history never forgets the name Zumwalt.

[Simon_Jester]

Although he may wind up sure of it because the ship comically rolls over and sinks, so... maybe not so good.

May the shade of the Vasa stay well away from her.

[Grumman]

Although he may wind up sure of it because the ship comically rolls over and sinks, so... maybe not so good.

If it capsizes, how could you tell?

[Thanas]

May the shade of the Vasa stay well away from her.

C'mon, every major sea power had one of their newest ships sink under stupid circumstances. It is tradition.

(Also, great for archeologists).

[Dr. Trainwreck]

On a side note about the trial run of the new DDG-1000, her commanding officer is no other than James Kirk...! James A. Kirk, but still... I'm sure he will make sure history never forgets the name Zumwalt.

You mean that he will boldly go where no man has gone before, send the junior members of the crew to their deaths, and then die of Space AIDS?

[Irbis]

As much as I would like you to believe the sky is blue, I have little interest trying to persuade you if you insist otherwise.

I have a question for you: is 673 a smaller or larger number than 380?

So, according to you, USS Iowa with her entire crew on shore leave must have even smaller crew of 1 (janitor), yes?

Let me restate what was already said in simple terms: small peace time crew with pretty much all corners cut to save money does not equal comfortable operating crew. You're comparing apples and oranges, compare Zumwalt on wartime footing, then we can talk.

Also, another point:

Pretty much all ships run on unix based operating systems, along with almost all servers and industrial, research and defence supercomputers.

Wrong. Wast majority of computers on ship are embedded industrial systems. These run on whatever embedded OS producer orders - things like RISC OS, LynxOS, ThreadX, or (surprise!) Windows CE. None of them are based on Unix, at best some are unix-likes, but with different kernels and architectures. Why would they be? These are not desktops.

Also, coincidentally, I talked to a mariner two weeks ago. There are normal computers on ship - turns out with small crews and long shifts there is little opportunity to talk to other human on most of the day so virtually anyone brings laptop filled with hundreds of pirated movies to kill time - and these are mostly filled with bells and whistles, expensive machines with newest Windows, not linux.

[Simon_Jester]

May the shade of the Vasa stay well away from her.

C'mon, every major sea power had one of their newest ships sink under stupid circumstances. It is tradition.

(Also, great for archeologists).

Yes. Vasa was just the first that came to mind as a worrying parallel to Zumwalt.

[Thanas]

I wasn't seriously advocating she sinks, you know.

[Simon_Jester]

Ah, and here I thought you were sticking up for the Swedes.

In all seriousness, the ship sinking under adverse conditions is actually a serious concern with her hullform. She's designed by people far more capable of accurately knowing how a ship behaves in rough seas than the 1600s-era Swedes, but on the other hand she represents a much greater departure from the traditions of ship design.

[Zaune]

I couldn't comment on her capabilities, but good Lord, that is the ugliest boat I've ever seen!

[RogueIce]

That's okay, Captain Kirk would never let it sink.

Unless a rogue Klingon Russian Captain kills his son. Then all bets are off.

[Irbis]

Wasn't TNG Enterprise like 5th one because Kirk was using them up like tissue paper?

[Borgholio]

Wasn't TNG Enterprise like 5th one because Kirk was using them up like tissue paper?

Nah, Kirk only personally wrecked two of them.

[Eternal_Freedom]

The second one was being decomissioned anyway...so was the first as a matter of fact.

Silliness aside, the ship looks damned peculiar and a tad ugly, but if it does the job then it's ok I guess.

[Borgholio]

I don't mind the look really. It's a stealth ship. The first stealth aircraft looked very weird. It took a few generations before stealth aircraft looked more conventional.

[Thanas]

Ah, and here I thought you were sticking up for the Swedes.

Nah, I was making a joke about how it was time for the USA to take one for the archeologists. Every other nation has obliged us....

[Simon_Jester]

I don't mind the look really. It's a stealth ship. The first stealth aircraft looked very weird. It took a few generations before stealth aircraft looked more conventional.

Ships are different, and ships may never look "conventional" while still being adequately stealthy. That's actually part of the problem with DDG-1000's design.

It was designed the way engineers would build a stealth aircraft- first figure out the shape that makes it hardest to spot, then figure out how to make it able to move in its intended environment.

This more or less works for an airplane, which is basically a big can with wings attached. As long as you can make the can-shape and wing-shape stealthy, the plane will fly... sort of.

But for a ship, you can't do this. The position of every object and system on the ship affects the ship's ability to maintain its balance, remain upright, and move across the sea. Many of these systems are heavy and/or interfere with each other's operation. Moreover, the total number of objects and systems that must be placed on a ship is much larger, because the ship weighs hundreds of times more.

Therefore, if you try to arbitrarily decide what shape the ship will have, then ignorantly insist that all the needed systems be shoehorned into that shape somehow, you're going to get a poorly performing ship.

[Eternal_Freedom]

I really gave up caring about looks for ships built after 1960 or so. No modern warship can compete with the old dreadnoughts for worryingly glamorous power.

[Crazedwraith]

I really gave up caring about looks for ships built after 1960 or so. No modern warship can compete with the old dreadnoughts for worryingly glamorous power.

Pfft. That's still far too modern. If it's not painted in Nelson Chequer it is an eyesore.