Littoral Combat Ships (LCS)

strehl

Junior Member
Registered Member
LCS 4 completes ship survivability test and scheduled for "full ship shock trial" in June. Not sure if they mean the same type of underwater explosives test planned for Ford.


USS Coronado Completes Survivability Test
From Program Executive Office Littoral Combat Ships Public Affairs
SAN DIEGO (NNS) -- USS Coronado (LCS 4) successfully completed the Navy's Total Ship Survivability Trial (TSST) off the coast of California, Jan. 28.

During the test event, the crew handled realistic damage simulations, including fire, smoke, electrical failure, flooding, ruptured piping, and structural failure.

The scenarios benefited the crew by offering realistic damage control training in preparation for Coronado's maiden deployment later this year.

"Initial indications are that Coronado's performance met, and in multiple cases exceeded, the survivability requirements for this small surface combatant," said Capt. Tom Anderson, littoral combat ship (LCS) program manager. "I commend the crew for their exceptional performance and dedication while conducting this important test."

The purpose of the TSST is to evaluate the ship's systems and procedures following a simulated conventional weapon hit. The primary areas that are evaluated include the ship's ability to contain and control damage, restore and continue mission capability, and care for personnel casualties. The test is also designed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the survivability features inherent in a ship's design.

"The experience provided the crew, through realistic scenarios, an appreciation for what it would take to operate following battle damage on board an Independence-variant warship," said Cmdr. Troy A. Fendrick, commanding officer of Coronado. "It also provided Sailors, from the deckplate level, the opportunity to provide critical input to the LCS program office, which will result in the improvement of overall ship survivability."

The TSST, along with the Full Ship Shock Trial scheduled June 2016, is a component of the Live-Fire Test and Evaluation program.

Coronado is the second LCS of the Independence-variant built by Austal USA and is homeported in San Diego.

LCS is a modular, reconfigurable ship, with three types of mission packages including surface warfare, mine countermeasures, and anti-submarine warfare. The Program Executive Office Littoral Combat Ships (PEO LCS) is responsible for delivering and sustaining littoral mission capabilities to the fleet. Delivering high-quality warfighting assets while balancing affordability and capability is key to supporting the nation's maritime strategy.
 
"But he also continually stressed ways to cooperate with China, including having more People's Liberation Army Navy participation in more multinational exercises." that's what would perhaps fit the title
Littoral Combat Ship Is 'Dearly Needed' in Pacific, Navy Commander Says
The littoral combat ship Fort Worth has been sidelined at a pier here for several weeks after an in-port accident, an embarrassing setback to a deployment so successful that the cruise had just been extended.

Coming just a few weeks after another LCS, the Milwaukee, broke down off Virginia and had to be towed to port, the incidents have further damaged the reputation of a type of ship struggling to prove itself in the face of constant criticism.

But the Navy's senior commander in the Western Pacific still expresses confidence in the ships.

"LCS is dearly needed out here," Vice Adm. Joseph Aucoin, commander of the Japan-based US Seventh Fleet, told reporters here Monday.

"I think this is an ideal ship for this area. I like the size, the capability, multi-mission [features], there's also room for growth. And it complements so many navies in this region."

The ship's cruise had been a great success, Aucoin noted.

"Up until this incident, Fort Worth did very well," he said. "It made all its scheduled events."

The accident took place Jan. 12 while the Fort Worth was undergoing maintenance at the Changi Naval Base in Singapore. Early reports, according to Navy sources, indicated the ship's port and starboard main propulsion diesel engines were started — ones that turn shafts into a combining gear, allowing operators to shift between diesel and gas turbines to drive the ship. But lubrication oil for the combination gears apparently was not turned on, and the system suffered serious damage.

Details of the damage, however, remain a secret.

"There's a [mishap] investigation going on with Fort Worth to determine what happened," Aucoin said. "I don't want to get into prematurely saying what happened.

"But it sounds like we didn't follow established standard operating procedures with the startup of the diesel engines, and it impacted the combining gears.

"We're still determining the extent of the damage and how to fix it," Aucoin said, "but it looks like operator error that led directly to this failure.

"This is a momentary setback," Aucoin added. "I wish it hadn't happened. But we're going to fix it and we're going to continue on track, because it's a great platform to help us in this region."

Aucoin spoke to reporters on the eve of the Singapore Airshow, the region's largest. As expected, most questions revolved around China's actions in and around the South China Sea. Aucoin acknowledged the Chinese were being provocative, particularly with extensive artificial island-building that is inflaming already sore tensions in the region.

But he also continually stressed ways to cooperate with China, including having more People's Liberation Army Navy participation in more multinational exercises.

"I'm stressing the multilateralism that is very important to strengthen our alliances and partnerships in this area, that helps us with the collective security in this region," Aucoin said. "I'm pushing for more multilateral exercises working closely with all the countries in the region, to actually include China."

Pressed by reporters to speak to US intentions regarding freedom of navigation exercises through waters that China is claiming as the result of the artificial islands, Aucoin was adamant. "We're going to fly, sail and operate wherever international law allows.

"We want to make sure this is a global commons that can be used by all countries.

"We would like China to be more transparent about what their intentions are," Aucoin added. "I think that would relieve some of the angst that we're now seeing. We're unsure where they're taking this."

He noted there was risk that at-sea confrontations could grow into serious incidents, and cited work between the US, China and other countries to establish a protocol for such encounters. Called CUES — Code for Unplanned Encounters At Sea — the agreement has been signed by the US and Chinese navies.

But the Chinese have been employing new and ever-larger Coast Guard ships — painted white rather than Navy grey — in carrying out provocative behavior, and many smaller ships, seemingly local fishing or cargo ships, are being manned by Chinese government-organized militia, using aggressive tactics to threaten or even damage other ships.

"We've done a lot with CUES to address combatant-to-combatant [encounters] so there's no miscalculation," Aucoin said. "But I have a greater fear that some of these others, Coast Guard — what we refer to as "white shipping" — cabbage ships [local cargo ships], I'm not sure about their professionalism. I think that having a code of conduct to cover that would be a good thing. That definitely is a concern of mine."

"I'm asking our Coast Guard to become more involved to help us with these types of operations," Aucoin added, because it's not simply grey hulls any more."

Aucoin praised the US Navy's relationship with Singapore, which allows the US to support its LCSs at Changi, and where US P-8A Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft will sometimes operate.

"The occasional operation of a P-8 detachment out of Singapore really helps us collectively with the security in the region," he said.
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details emerging (I put one part in boldface):
Littoral Combat Ship USS Milwaukee Could Leave For Mayport Under Propulsion Restrictions As Soon As Wednesday
The Navy’s newest Littoral Combat Ship is set to leave a Virginia naval base this week following a December engine casualty that left the ship sidelined for two months.

USS Milwaukee (LCS-5) is set to leave Joint Expeditionary Base Little Creek-Fort Story as early as Wednesday under propulsion restrictions for shock trials in Mayport, Fla., several sources told USNI News.

Sources told USNI News the ship would proceed underway under its own power with a set of restrictions on its propulsion plant designed to prevent stress on the gearing system that ties the ships diesel engines together with its gas turbines and routes the output to the ship’s waterjets.

Under the restrictions that will limit Milwaukee’s speed, the ship will arrive at Mayport by the end of the month to conduct shock trials to prove the ship’s systems can operate in combat conditions. The remaining work to make the ship fully operational will be completed in Florida, USNI News understands.

When reached by USNI News on Tuesday, U.S. Surface Forces Pacific (SURFPAC) would not confirm the ship’s status or its impending departure from Virginia.

Milwaukee has been sidelined since Dec. 11 after the ship suffered a propulsion failure
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.

A subsequent investigation found that the high-speed clutch on both of the ship’s combining gears had been damaged following an emergency stop on Dec. 7, according to a February Naval Sea Systems Command memo on the incident obtained by USNI News.

“During this transit, the ship was running in CODAG (both gas turbines and main propulsion diesel engines with all four waterjets in operation) at full power,” read the memo.
“This is referred to as Propulsion State 9.”

During the full-power run a fuel valve failure led both of the Rolls Royce MT30 gas turbines to shutdown at the same time,
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and confirmed to USNI News by several sources. If operating correctly, the clutches should have disengaged the gearing from the MT30s and allowed the ship to proceed on its twin Colt-Pielstick diesel engines.

Instead the high speed clutches were ground severely for approximately two-and-a-half seconds spraying chunks of the clutch plates and contaminating the lube oil system of the propulsion plant, sources told USNI News.

Four days after the emergency stop, the lube oil systems in both Milwaukee’s combining gears lost pressure and the ship was unable to proceed on its own power.

The Navy and shipbuilder Lockheed Martin consider a flaw in the ship’s software as the prime culprit for why the clutches didn’t immediately disengage from the MT30s, sources told USNI News.

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, Lockheed Martin’s vice president of Littoral Ships & Systems Joe North told reporters the company and the Navy were focusing on the logic statements from the ship’s systems to tease out what the software told the combining gear hardware to do and how those can be prepared.

Following the Milwaukee incident, NAVSEA’s engineering directorate recommended last week the other USS Freedom (LCS-1) and USS Fort Worth (LCS-3) not to use Propulsion State 9 until it evaluated the control systems and combining gear designs. Lockheed Martin
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.

Fort Worth is currently sidelined in Singapore following a casualty to its own combining gears due to
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in January.

The Navy said it was “unlikely” the cause of the combining gear damage in Milwaukee and Fort Worth were related.
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Confirmation...
not sure what you mean, and officially the root causes of the two incidents haven't been identified yet (correct me if I missed anything); at the time
Jan 24, 2016
... I would've thought there should've been some check against "running the dry gears" when "lube oil was not supplied", and I leave it at that
I read in Internet the root causes might be the faulty software, so I tried to subtly point to something which I'll now say:

nowadays a ship shouldn't be crippled because of the lack of oil: this should be software-detected and running the engine(s) should be then software-prevented (just my opinion, I've never been to a modern warship though :)

(this relates to the LCS-3; the report of a possible software glitch at the LCS-5 appeared later:
Feb 8, 2016
... and this popped up at DefenseNews yesterday:
LCS Milwaukee Breakdown Likely Due To Software Issue

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Brumby

Major
not sure what you mean, and officially the root causes of the two incidents haven't been identified yet (correct me if I missed anything); at the time
Jan 24, 2016

I read in Internet the root causes might be the faulty software, so I tried to subtly point to something which I'll now say:

nowadays a ship shouldn't be crippled because of the lack of oil: this should be software-detected and running the engine(s) should be then software-prevented (just my opinion, I've never been to a modern warship though :)

(this relates to the LCS-3; the report of a possible software glitch at the LCS-5 appeared later:
Feb 8, 2016
If it is software related, the problem is technically systemic rather than not.
 
(new combat system)
USS Freedom Modernization Boosts Reliability, Increases Combat Capability
When the Littoral Combat Ship USS Freedom (LCS-1) goes out for sea trials this weekend after a drydocking selected restricted availability last year, the ship will feature a more advanced combat system than her sister ships.

During the drydocking period in the summer and fall of 2015, the combat system was ripped out and replaced with new hardware and more advanced software. Additional communications equipment will be added to the ship and the network was upgraded, creating a more reliable and cost-effective system for the sailors to operate, the LCS Crew 111 officials told USNI News.

Operations Officer Lt. Cmdr. Michael Welgan said that “basically the whole engineering architecture and the whole combat systems electronic architecture has been stripped and redone. So the combat system suite is actually more advanced than (LCSs) 3 and 5 now. It’s gotten a lot of good improvements” on both the hardware and software side, he said.

Welgan said redundancies were added to the ship to increase reliability. Dual paths were created so the combat system could bypass any faults that may occur, he said. And a second antenna for satellite communications will be added to the ship soon to both eliminate blind spots and to have a backup in case one goes down.

The LCS’s reliance on an open architecture design and the use of commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware was key to the technology refresh effort. Combat Systems Officer Lt. Adam Beauchene said the ship has a centralized network called the Total Ship Computing Environment (TSCE), which already gave the LCS an advantage over legacy systems in that the COTS servers reduced cost and made it easier to get a replacement if one broke. During the drydocking period, about two and a half racks of servers were taken out and replaced with just a single server – more powerful, and only about three or four inches thick. Beauchene said that server upgrade alone took thousands of pounds off the ship.

Joe North, Lockheed Martin Vice President of Littoral Ships and Systems, told USNI News that the tech refresh was originally planned for 2012 but was pushed back due to Freedom’s deployment to Singapore. The combat system hardware that was on Freedom was purchased in the 2004 or 2005 timeframe, he said, and needed to be updated with newer, more efficient technology – exemplified by the server replacement. North said Freedom also got an updated version of the COMBATSS-21 software – a derivative of the Aegis Combat System – that puts it in line with the newer LCSs coming out of the Marinette Marine shipyard in Wisconsin.

Also during the maintenance and modernization period, the flight deck was repaved with new nonskid, industrial work was done to spruce up the ship, and the mission bay doors were altered to improve operations, Commanding Officer Cmdr. Michael Brasseur said. Previously, the doors would open to launch small boats or unmanned vehicles, but they dragged in the water, both putting stress on the doors and making it harder for the ship to reach top speeds. A new dutch door concept allows the bottom-most part to stay closed instead of dragging in the water.

“What’s been really phenomenal for our crew is we came in when the ship was wide open. All the tanks were open, everything was open because there was a lot of work being done,” Brasseur said, noting that the crew took command of the ship on Sept. 11, 2015, in the middle of the drydocking period.
“And we got to know the ship on a very kind of organic level, in a very personal way. I’ve been in every single space on this ship, and then when you put it back together and get it ready to go to sea it’s a deeper level of knowledge.”

The crew plans to take Freedom out on Friday for a two-day sea trial with the surface warfare mission package, providing an opportunity for the ship’s crew, the surface warfare mission package crew and the aviation detachment to practice together at sea for the first time. Later underways will help the team build proficiency and certify prior to their deployment, the details of which are not yet finalized. Under the LCS deployment construct, LCS crews stay together but are not tied to a particular ship. Three crews would support two ships, one of which would be deployed at any given time.
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dtulsa

Junior Member
According to inside the navy the lcs is getting a advanced version of the harpoon later this year sounds good to me now all they need is the ESSM and we might have a decent frigate after all
 

Jeff Head

General
Registered Member
According to inside the navy the lcs is getting a advanced version of the harpoon later this year sounds good to me now all they need is the ESSM and we might have a decent frigate after all
Amen to that.

The newer Harpoons will be great.

I can only hope to see ther ESSM. but have not heard that they are doing that definitively...only the SeaRAM.

SeaRAM is great for self defense in non-saturation scenarios...ESSM would give them a decent layered defense and a chance to provide some area coverage for vessels they might escort.

But, I will definitely take the Harpoons and the SeaRAM along with other upgrades to sensors and systems they are getting. Basically the COMBATSS-21 is a mini-AEGIS system which will couple the sensors they do have and weapons into a decent combat/battle management system.
 

dtulsa

Junior Member
Amen to that.

The newer Harpoons will be great.

I can only hope to see ther ESSM. but have not heard that they are doing that definitively...only the SeaRAM.

SeaRAM is great for self defense in non-saturation scenarios...ESSM would give them a decent layered defense and a chance to provide some area coverage for vessels they might escort.

But, I will definitely take the Harpoons and the SeaRAM along with other upgrades to sensors and systems they are getting. Basically the COMBATSS-21 is a mini-AEGIS system which will couple the sensors they do have and weapons into a decent combat/battle management system.
Me to
 
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