Navy Weighs Ship's Design, Along With Its Own Future

[unhappycamper]

The ($700+ million dollar) Littoral Combat Ship, produced by General Dynamics, underway during builder's trials.


Navy Weighs Ship's Design, Along With Its Own Future
By NATHAN HODGE
JULY 11, 2010

WASHINGTON—This summer, the Navy expects to choose between two competing designs for the Littoral Combat Ship, a fast, shore-hugging warship that will take on 21st century missions like chasing pirates and intercepting drug smugglers.

At issue is more than a shipbuilding contract. The contest underscores a broad discussion taking place inside and outside the Navy about the future size and shape of the service's fleet.

U.S. naval power is built in large part around carrier strike groups, a costly armada of nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and escort ships that project American power around the globe. Littoral Combat Ships are pint-size in comparison. They will be roughly the size of a frigate—smaller than a destroyer, larger than a patrol boat—but with more automation.

Fully loaded for combat, they will have about 75 people aboard, about a third a frigate's crew. In often outsize Pentagon terms, the craft will be relatively cheap: roughly half a billion dollars each. A new carrier is projected to cost around $10 billion.

The Navy is choosing between designs offered by Lockheed Martin Corp. and the U.S. unit of Australia's Austal Ltd., which has teamed with General Dynamics Corp. Both models have innovative features. The Lockheed variant, 378 feet long and built at Fincantieri Marine Group LLC's Marinette Marine Corp. shipyard in Marinette, Wis., has a high-speed steel hull that lets it travel at over 40 knots (about 50 miles an hour).



unhappycamper comment: The original Deepwater program had LCS ships coming in around $200 million dollars. The first one cost $500+ million dollars. This trimaran came in at $700+ million dollars.

Both of them are a tad overpriced.

P.S. The USS Gerald R. Ford, first of the Ford class carriers, is going to cost somewhere between $16.5 to $40 billion dollars.

[Turbineguy]

1. Have the pirates

captured $700 million worth of ships yet?

It might be interesting to compare ratios of how much the British spent when they were Number One as compared to their commercial shipping value at the time.

If your Ford Class numbers are correct, the US could double the size of the current Merchant Marine for the cost of one carrier. With the added advantage that commercial ships would pay for themselves instead of cost.

[Blue_Tires]

2. if the pirates ever get their hands on one of those, it's OVER

[FBI_Un_Sub]

3. National Security Class Coast Guard Cutters

that Lockheed Martin and Northrup screwed up.

[unhappycamper]

4. $546 million dollars. n/t

[Octafish]

5. Nothing but the best for protecting my wealth...

...and power.

Not mine, actually, but the owner class. I just pay what I can for their guns.