US Navy DDG 1000 Zumwalt Class

17 OCT 2016...Chesapeake Bay ....US Navy aircraft, P-8 Posiden,E-2D Hawkeye, C-2 Greyhound, F-35 Lightning II & a SH-60 SeaHawk overfly USS Zumwalt(DDG 1000) As the ship departs Baltimore via the Chesapeake Bay en-route to her new homeport of San Diego CA.(US Navy Photos/released)
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Awesome photos. Thanks for sharing!
 
here's what NavyTimes had to say:
Stealth destroyer Zumwalt sets off on voyage to new homeport
With less than a week in the fleet, the Navy’s deadliest destroyer left Norfolk on Thursday for its eventual homeport.

The voyage to san Diego is expected to take two months, because the crew has a lot of work to do on the way.

“She will arrive here sometime in December,” said Cmdr. John Perkins, spokesman for the Naval Surface Force Pacific. “The ship will do planned testing, certification and other operations and will conduct various port visits before transiting the Panama Canal to the Pacific."

Zumwalt entered Norfolk on Sept. 15 where she prepared for commissioning — a new coat of paint on both sides of the ship, which occupied the crew in the weeks leading up to her commissioning on Oct. 15 in Baltimore, Md. as part of the fleet week celebration.

Zumwalt was originally slated to operate from Norfolk to spend more time training at sea, officials told Navy Times when the ship arrived last month. But those plans were scuttled after a mechanical problem that needed fixing.

“At issue was a seawater leak in the propulsion motor drive lube oil auxiliary system for one of the ship’s shafts,” Perkins said. “The faulty equipment that led to the leakage has been replaced.”

Though the ship is slated to make both US and foreign port visits before arriving in San Diego, officials declined to say what those might be for security purposes.

The lead ship of a new class of electric-drive destroyers, the three Zumwalt-class ships, at 600-feet long, are larger than today’s Ticonderoga-class cruisers, yet manned with a compliment of 140 sailors — fewer than were aboard the much smaller Perry-class frigates.

The stealth ships ride low in the water and are designed for surface warfare, anti-aircraft warfare, and naval gunfire land attack roles.

Originally planned as a class of 32 ships, development difficulties and cost overruns led to Congress slashing the class down to just three hulls.Officials are now calling the class transitional and a test bed for technology for future ships.
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FORBIN

Lieutenant General
Registered Member
About stealth, Zumwalt is very with a signature 50 times inferior to previous US DDG, do a ship of 15 m long

The first stealth is the La Fayette class, recentstealth frigates or destroyers have a radar signature than a ship which do 20 - 30 m long.
 
Dec 23, 2014
heck,
It has been long noted by critics of the DDG-1000 program that placing all of these ambitious new technologies aboard one tightly integrated platform in one great transformational leap for military mankind has the effect of integrating all of their various technical and programmatic risks as well -- in my view, magnifying the total project risk of the effort well beyond the total risks had the R&D for each system proceeded independently. (Synergistic effects can work against you as well as for you, especially when it comes to managing project risks.)

The 155mm AGS is a gun system which will never see use outside of the DDG-1000 platform; and unless the Zumwalt Class supporters in industry and in the US Northeast are successful in bypassing the Navy and selling more Zumwalts directly to the Congress, there will only be three of these ships, and only six operational AGS gun mounts -- a far cry from the 64 mounts that would have been deployed had 32 Zumwalts been procured instead of three.

As things stand today, the greatest utility the 155mm AGS system has for the US Navy is to provide justification for claiming that the USMC's interim requirements for fire support have been covered.

Once AGS has been declared to have reached IOC, then the Navy leadership will certify that the interim requirements for fire support have been met, and will give no more attention to pursuing further advancements in conventional naval gun technology.

Once that piece of paper has been signed, then it won't matter to the Navy leadership if another 155mm LRLAP round is ever fired again for any purpose whatsoever -- more so if the Zumwalt design as an integrated platform fails to live up to expectations in some major way and the three ships are then quietly set aside to guard their respective piers.
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do you know what percentage of it (and of the article itself) could be true? just asking ... (from the middle of Europe)
and now New Warship’s Big Guns Have No Bullets
Barely two weeks after the US Navy commissioned its newest and most futuristic warship, armed with two huge guns that can hit targets 80 miles away, the service is moving to cancel the projectiles for the guns, citing excessive costs that run up to $800,000 per round or more.

The Long Range Land-Attack Projectile (LRLAP) is a guided precision munition that is key to the DDG 1000 Zumwalt-class’s mission as a land-attack destroyer, able to hit targets with such accuracy that, in the words of manufacturer Lockheed Martin, can “defeat targets in the urban canyons of coastal cities with minimal collateral damage.”

The LRLAP is the only munition designed to be fired from the DDG 1000’s Advanced Gun System (AGS), a 155mm/62-caliber gun with an automated magazine and handling system. Each of the three Zumwalts will carry two of the guns – the largest weapons to be designed for and fitted on a warship since World War II.

But the LRLAP’s unit price has jumped steadily as the numbers of Zumwalt-class destroyers were cut. From a total of 28 ships, to seven, and finally to three, the class shrank and costs did not.

“We were going to buy thousands of these rounds,” said a Navy official familiar with the program. “But quantities of ships killed the affordable round.”

Ironically, both the LRLAP and the AGS have had good reputations among the ten major technology development areas that make up the DDG 1000.

The Navy official noted there were no significant performance issues with the systems.

“Not that I’ve ever heard. Everything seems to have been performing correctly. I never saw any test results that showed we had problems,” the official said. “We don’t have an issue with the gun, and no issue with that ship carrying the gun. We have an issue on the price point.

“There is no blame on any individual,” the official added. “The round was working, the way forward was logical. It’s just that the cost with a three-ship buy became a very high cost.”

Even at $800,000 a copy, the LRLAP’s price could go higher. “That’s probably low,” the Navy official said. “That’s what the acquisition community wanted to get it down to.” The official added that there was no sense the contractor was “overcharging or anything.”

The decision to accept the LRLAP cancellation is part of the Program Objective Memorandum 2018 (POM18) effort, the Pentagon’s annual budget process. Although the Navy made a presentation to the Office of the Secretary of Defense on Nov. 2, the decision has yet to be signed off on.

For the record, the Navy would not comment directly on the effort to kill LRLAP.

“The Navy continuously monitors the gun and ammunition industry capability and capacities,” Capt. Thurraya Kent, spokesperson for the service’s acquisition directorate, said Nov. 4 in an e-mail. “To address evolving threats and mission requirements, the Navy is evaluating industry projectile solutions (including conventional and hyper-velocity projectiles) that can also meet the DDG 1000 deployment schedule and could potentially be used as an alternative to LRLAP for DDG 1000.”

Officials at Lockheed Martin could not be reached in time to comment for this story.

While LRLAP may be cancelled, the Navy intends to find another munition for the gun system.

“We are looking at multiple different rounds for that gun,” the Navy official said, adding that “three or four different rounds” have been looked at, including the Army’s Excalibur munition from Raytheon, and the Hyper Velocity Projectile (HVP), a project under development by the Office of Naval Research and BAE Systems.

“There are multiple companies that have looked at alternatives to get the cost down and use that delivery system,” the Navy official said.

But the likelihood is that there will be no LRLAP replacement before the Zumwalt enters operational service. While the ship was commissioned Oct. 15 in Baltimore, Maryland, another 18 months of shipyard work lies ahead in San Diego to complete installation of the ship’s combat system. After that, the Navy will run an extensive series of Combat Systems Ship Qualifications Trials (CSSQT) in 2018 to fully prove out the ship’s sensors and weapons.

Current plans call for the guns to be fired during CSSQT and, the Navy official said, “the intention is to shoot the guns.” The 2015 budget provided $113 million to buy 150 LRLAP rounds and associated items, and those rounds will be used for the tests.

No funds for LRLAP acquisition were included in the 2016 or 2017 budgets. The latter included $51 million in 2018 for the program, but it’s not clear whether or not that money will be requested.

While software changes will certainly be needed to incorporate other munitions into the AGS, adapting the handling system for a different round could be complex. The automated magazines, designed to hold 300 LRLAPs, are sized for that particular weapon and it’s unlikely another munition would have exactly the same dimensions.

Other rounds under development for the 127mm guns arming all other US destroyers and cruisers could be adapted to the AGS, but would likely need a sabot arrangement to adapt the smaller shell to the 155mm weapon.

While the Navy is stressing that high costs are directly behind the decision to eliminate LRLAP, it is not clear if there are deeper issues at play. The AGS/LRLAP combination was originally developed to provide Marines with a “persistent, precision fire support” capability, able to strike targets far inland with a high degree of accuracy.

But as the Zumwalt moved from shipyard to sea and to the fleet, the Navy has notably downplayed that attribute, and while the technical achievement of the cutting-edge DDG 1000 has been widely trumpeted this year, its ability to directly support Marines ashore has not.

There was no requirement for the AGS to strike seagoing targets, and the system does not have the programming to do so. But the big guns could be adapted to target ships if necessary, the Navy official said.

“We would have to do the software modifications to make that work.”
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FORBIN

Lieutenant General
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Dec 23, 2014
and now New Warship’s Big Guns Have No Bullets

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The LRLAP is the only munition designed to be fired from the DDG 1000’s Advanced Gun System (AGS), a 155mm/62-caliber gun
I don' t think for me exist one other munition with a less long range

My post #547

I catch infos reading one good article for this boy which have do very good trials,
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Guns 155 mm do 9.6 m long 600 rds in automatic mods for each guns plus 320 in a different magazine in general have about 100 LRAP shells, 2.2 m long cost 400000 dollars ten times more expensive than a normal shell but have a range of 120 km. And the guns have MRSI capacity up 3 shells on a target simult.
Planned onef of the two guns replaced by an rail gun seems studies almost finished possible for 2020, range 160 km, very accurate shell of 10 kg, 9000 km/h advantage more small more big qty, much less expensive 25000 dollars only and more safe for explosive

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