Looking for a Kingfisher kit and have some questions

All warships have voids between the inner and outer hulls , as do all " double hull " merchant vessels .
I've been into many of the voids , too many , on the Theodore Roosevelt to do inspections with shipyard personnel after we completed shock trials .

The fact that I now see that only the last couple of feet of the hull isn't represented reinforces the supposition that Revell produced the model that way to sit nicely on a shelf . .. It's really weird having that much hull and no screws .
I don't know why they did it that way but it can't be the lack of info available at the time .

https://www.modellversium.de/galerie/5-schiffe-ww2/14293-uss-missouri-revell.html
 
The kit I built didn't have screws but just a rutter and the hull lacked an apparent armor belt but the Iowa's did have armor belts and a while they weren't true blisters they did have void spaces, I know this for two reason one I've seen inside that void space volunteering on a museum ship, and two there's a good YouTube channel for the Battle Ship New Jersey in which the historian and curator goes over the ship and the rest of the Iowas in great detail.

Idk the reason for the kit missing the lower half but wether or not the reasoning was secrecy or lack of effort is both interesting to me
also thinking on this alittle more, being 2022 we have access to photos regularly, but prehapes these photos weren't publicly available I know on naval bases there signs every where saying no photography same at government contact dry docks.

So maybe alot of the reference photos and photos we have today weren't released to the public when they were taken. Food for thought I wouldn't say ships were floating about an no one knew what was going on below the water but prehapes alot of what we know now was released to the public later and wasn't common knowledge back then.

Idk trying to think about it from all angles.
 
All warships have voids between the inner and outer hulls , as do all " double hull " merchant vessels .
I've been into many of the voids , too many , on the Theodore Roosevelt to do inspections with shipyard personnel after we completed shock trials .

The fact that I now see that only the last couple of feet of the hull isn't represented reinforces the supposition that Revell produced the model that way to sit nicely on a shelf . .. It's really weird having that much hull and no screws .
I don't know why they did it that way but it can't be the lack of info available at the time .

https://www.modellversium.de/galerie/5-schiffe-ww2/14293-uss-missouri-revell.html
I'm assuming though we may have had this Convo before an my memory was bad you were a HT or hull tech
 
Machinist Mate
There are only 3 rates for nuke power . MM , ET and EM

I bet I can find newspaper photos from 1945 of the Iowa in drydock in San Francisco .
Regardless , you'd think Revell would attach some propellers of known design anyways - not like they would be challenged about accuracy .
Pretty farfetched that Revell was super concerned with fidelity in their plastic kits .

I just took the dogs for their drive around the neighborhood and was thinking that small-boys like destroyers might not have any voids of significance for flooding protection other than ballast volumes .
I'll need to look into that .
Who cares about small-boys anyway , lol .
 
Unsurprisingly the contents of that book are not available on the web .
I'm not buying a 30 dollar book on Revell .
Does it say on page 16 that they produced the kit of the Missouri that way because they didn't know better or is page 16 covering the transition from " full hull " to waterline offerings ?
If it's the later , why do you say that Revell didn't know what was below the waterline in 1953 ?
Where is your source for that ?
No need to get snarky about it. momo. Here's the relevant passage:
The first problem for Gretz, Bulone, and the three or four other men who constituted the design and engineering department was finding accurate information about the Missouri. "The military wouldn't give us the time of day," recalled Bulone. Security attitudes held-over (sic) from World War II and reinforced by the Cold War blocked even the most mundane information. So Revell went to Jane's international warship reference books and other books and magazines, where they collected photographs. Using these, they made three-view drawings. The underwater configuration remained classified; so they gave the model a basic shape below the waterline. [emphasis mine]" - Thomas Graham, "Remembering Revell Models" (2002), p. 16

The point is that many modelers today look at a kit that is nearly 70 years old and wonder why it has the simple, flat bottom below the waterline. And there is a legend that it was designed that way specifically because it was intended as a toy and that kids would push and pull it across the living room floor. The truth is more prosaic; the engineers couldn't get more details, so they kept it simple.

As to Revell's waterline models, they were first issued nearly 20 years later, when Revell brought out its "International Scale" series in the early 70s. Those kits offered the option to finish the model as a waterline model or a full-hull model with a display stand. The series includes a scaled down version of Revell's Pennsylvania/Arizona kit, the Intrepid/Franklin, as well as the Prinz Eugen, Blucher, Ark Royal and Ashanti, Massachusetts, and Graf Zeppelin, and maybe some others I'm forgetting.
 
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I don't see where the snark is , I was asking why you said what you said .
So why no screws ? It looks ridiculous without propellers .
 
They added bilge keels and supplied it rudders so I don't know why not screws -- they thought maybe she had paddle wheels down there or something ?
There's your snark ;) , you're welcome .
 
They added bilge keels and supplied it rudders so I don't know why not screws -- they thought maybe she had paddle wheels down there or something ?
There's your snark ;) , you're welcome .
So you mentioned you were around for some shock trials, I've always been curious is there crew on board when the big bang happens? Also they are the first big gamble on the ship builders a billion dollar engineering project which could potentially fail if they failed and the hull cracks wide open during the test
 
Ha ha , well , we don't expect major hull failures .
They pick one ship from each class to do it to and we were it .

Yes , we are fully crewed and both reactor plants are up , but we are at a dead stop . Ships company , no airwing .
I was down in 2 plant for shocks 2-4 . It was 4 detonations of equal magnitude but they move it closer to the ship each time .
You really couldn't even feel the first one .
Everything broke that was going to break on the 3rd one .
We only had a couple of welds pop loose on some steam drains .
It was quite unsettling watching the main steam piping moving around though . You then realize why all those pipes are hanging from spring assemblies , since they never move at all under normal circumstances .

I had a good friend in Ordnance and he said on the 3rd shock all kinds of crap like lights was falling off the island ,
He's somewhere behind that line of deck equipment in this photo , hard to see but they have a line of plane tractors in front of them :

cho4a1p.jpg

What looks like a torpedo trail is the control line from the Apache snapping up in the water .

The USNS Apache :

3FFSDNu.jpg
 
Ha ha , well , we don't expect major hull failures .
They pick one ship from each class to do it to and we were it .

Yes , we are fully crewed and both reactor plants are up , but we are at a dead stop . Ships company , no airwing .
I was down in 2 plant for shocks 2-4 . It was 4 detonations of equal magnitude but they move it closer to the ship each time .
You really couldn't even feel the first one .
Everything broke that was going to break on the 3rd one .
We only had a couple of welds pop loose on some steam drains .
It was quite unsettling watching the main steam piping moving around though . You then realize why all those pipes are hanging from spring assemblies , since they never move at all under normal circumstances .

I had a good friend in Ordnance and he said on the 3rd shock all kinds of crap like lights was falling off the island ,
He's somewhere behind that line of deck equipment in this photo , hard to see but they have a line of plane tractors in front of them :

View attachment 93884

What looks like a torpedo trail is the control line from the Apache snapping up in the water .

The USNS Apache :

View attachment 93885
That's pretty cool, so if the third was a rough one you never mentioned the fourth blast. I imagine the reactors are a go to see if the blast wave SCRAMs them? I could be wrong on that acronym but I'm pretty sure that the reason they stopped putting reactors in cruisers and didn't try them in other ships of the line like fore example a battleship was because an impact on a surface warfare vessel would shut the reactors down and battleship turrets require a lot of electricity amongst the many other systems, so reactors made better power plants for ships less likely to be directly engaged in surface combat or at least that was my understanding of what they taught us in great mistakes illnois
 
Nuke propulsion plants are expensive , that's the main reason for their minimal use is smaller ships . That and they're heavy .
The US wasn't building any more battleships when nuke power became viable so that's why none were built .
Carriers are very likely to be engaged in combat -- we're the number one target !
We had more than a few nuke cruisers that served for a very long time : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear-powered_cruisers_of_the_United_States_Navy

Shock trials was definitely aimed at testing the integrity of reactor plant operation .
The control rods are held in place and moved in and out of the core by electric motors that have " claws " that engage the threaded shaft at the upper end of the control rod . The rods are continuously under spring pressure so when the claws are released the rods are slammed into the core via the force of the springs .( That's a " scram " . From , " Super Critical Reactor Axe Man ".
The first reactor utilized manually raised and lowered control rod that could be dropped by severing the rope used to lift it .)

They can't be shaken loose , and the test proved it .

I trained on a one of a kind plant up in upstate NY named MARF , S7G .
It didn't use hafnium control rods but gadolinium tubes that controlled reactivity by controlling the height of the water within the tube .
It was a freak . I could go further into the core physics but it would require a lot of explaining .

That prototype is long gone . She was close to being spent when I was training on her back in 86- 87 .
I was looking over the Kesselring site using Google maps not long ago and the containment building is gone . No surprise .
It was probably decommissioned back in the early 90's , if it even made it that far .
 
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Nuke propulsion plants are expensive , that's the main reason for their minimal use is smaller ships . That and they're heavy .
The US wasn't building any more battleships when nuke power became viable so that's why none were built .
Carriers are very likely to be engaged in combat -- we're the number one target !
We had more than a few nuke cruisers that served for a very long time : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear-powered_cruisers_of_the_United_States_Navy

Shock trials was definitely aimed at testing the integrity of reactor plant operation .
The control rods are held in place and moved in and out of the core by electric motors that have " claws " that engage the threaded shaft at the upper end of the control rod . The rods are continuously under spring pressure so when the claws are released the rods are slammed into the core via the force of the springs .( That's a " scram " . From , " Super Critical Reactor Axe Man ".
The first reactor utilized manually raised and lowered control rod that could be dropped by severing the rope used to lift it .)

They can't be shaken loose , and the test proved it .

I trained on a one of a kind plant up in upstate NY named MARF , S7G .
It didn't use hafnium control rods but gadolinium tubes that controlled reactivity by controlling the height of the water within the tube .
It was a freak . I could go further into the core physics but it would require a lot of explaining .

That prototype is long gone . She was close to being spent when I was training on her back in 86- 87 .
I was looking over the Kesselring site using Google maps not long ago and the containment building is gone . No surprise .
It was probably decommissioned back in the early 90's , if it even made it that far .
this was what I was talking about I know it's not a nuke explaining the reasoning and its an opinion of this guy but what's your take on it
 
Well , I agree with his assessment that it would be impractical to retrofit a nuke plant into an Iowa .
For more reasons than he lists .
The Nimitz class are refueled , they refueled my ship about a decade or more ago ( ? ) and they are armored .
You need to go thru the armored hanger deck and then thru the armored lid of the RAR ( reactor auxiliary room ) then into the armored roof of the reactor compartment .
Granted , the armor and deck arrangement isn't similar to the Iowa so cutting thru the armor on that ship would be another barrier for a retrofit but not impossible . Beyond impractical and ungodly expensive but not impossible .

Even if you could somehow just replace the oil-fired boilers with a reactor ( you couldn't , there's not enough space for all the ancillary equipment to support the reactor itself and the steam generators ( boilers ) must be located in the shielded reactor compartment along with the reactor ) , it wouldn't work because those main engine turbines on the Iowa use superheated steam and nuke plants can only produce wet steam .
Oil fired plants send their wet steam thru another oil-fired reboiler to boost the temp/ pressure up . Nuke primary coolant operates around 500F or the fuel cladding degrades and the fuel elements begin to fail mechanically , contaminating the primary system and far worse begins to happen .
This 500F water is what is fed to the steam generators to produce steam , so that steam is in the mid to high 400F range , not the 850-900F it gets from the couple of thousand degree oil flame in the superheating reboiler .
So you'd need to replace the main turbines and the turbine generators that supply electric power to the rest of the ship .
You'd need to replace absolutely everything , including completely reorienting bulkheads and framing and then re-ballast the ship .
Probably be more expensive than a new Ford class .

And no , Navy nuke plants are not delicate . We proved it .
They're expensive to build and operate .

I agree that you probably wouldn't want a ship engaged in littoral operations and exposed to heavy shore batteries since it's high probability of destruction would create an environmental disaster , but not because it couldn't take the pounding .

Battleships are obsolete so it's a moot point .

BTW , I forgot to answer your question about the 4th shock .
It felt about the same as the 3rd one , at least down in the plant .
We were expecting it to feel more significant since the 2nd to 3rd event was a very noticeable difference .
I don't know what distances from the ship each was though .

Fun Fact : We carried a spare , 1 MW , reactor coolant pump motor in the hangar bay along with it's massive handling gantry .
We always thought that was pretty funny .
Replacing a primary coolant pump motor could only be done in a very capable shipyard , most likely Newport News .

It's like we were going to be sailing around after nuclear Armageddon and one of our coolant pumps goes down and there's no place to go to replace it so we're just going to do it ourselves .
Ignoring the radiological nightmare that would be cutting into the reactor compartment , we didn't possess the equipment to cut thru the hangar deck and lid of the reactor compartment .

Pretty sure we'd just run on 2 loops ( there's all kinds of restrictions due to core physics / fuel burn ) or just shut the plant down .

It would be like GM selling you a second transmission for your car when you bought it .
They put it in the trunk , give you a screwdriver and a wrench along with it .
You can swap it out on the side of the road all by yourself .

I always wondered if they deleted that BS from later Nimitz carriers or all of them still have them .
That gantry and motor aren't light and they take up valuable space in the hangar bay too .
It's Effing stupid , but I'm sure Newport News made a lot of extra coin on the deal .

I wish I could have been there for a refuel .
Maybe beneath the non-skid of the hangar floor there are fasteners that hold the armor decking in place so no cutting is required .
They were designed to be refueled so that would be logical , so maybe there is access areas above each coolant pump motor ,,, but what kinda equipment is necessary to lift and maneuver the armor deck IDK .
LOL , man , and then the reactor compartment ... not happening .
Between the hangar deck and the RAR is the main deck . There's a LOT of chit on that deck .
It's not something ship's company would even be able to attempt -- even if it didn't require cutting armor deck plate and there were .... OMG , the more I think about it .
Nope.
2 years in the shipyard with 100's of additional specialized shipyard personnel and massive amounts of additional tools equipment ...

:D you know how the Navy has written procedure for absolutely everything .There's probably some insane procedure using that gantry crane for the motor to lift the armor deck sections out of the way , starting at the hangar deck , then main deck , then the reactor compartment with all the shielding ( insane ) -- then hoist out the non-working motor , then lower and attach the new one .
LOL .
2 plant would be the easier since the aft mess deck is above the reactor auxiliary room and it's a wide open space , but 1 plant has all kinds of bulkheaded areas above it .

Anyways , I haven't given that insanity any thought since I left that ship 31 years ago , but yeah , it's ridiculous to carry that motor around . We knew it back then and now I remember all the reasons it was so stupid .
 
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Well , I agree with his assessment that it would be impractical to retrofit a nuke plant into an Iowa .
For more reasons than he lists .
The Nimitz class are refueled , they refueled my ship about a decade or more ago ( ? ) and they are armored .
You need to go thru the armored hanger deck and then thru the armored lid of the RAR ( reactor auxiliary room ) then into the armored roof of the reactor compartment .
Granted , the armor and deck arrangement isn't similar to the Iowa so cutting thru the armor on that ship would be another barrier for a retrofit but not impossible . Beyond impractical and ungodly expensive but not impossible .

Even if you could somehow just replace the oil-fired boilers with a reactor ( you couldn't , there's not enough space for all the ancillary equipment to support the reactor itself and the steam generators ( boilers ) must be located in the shielded reactor compartment along with the reactor ) , it wouldn't work because those main engine turbines on the Iowa use superheated steam and nuke plants can only produce wet steam .
Oil fired plants send their wet steam thru another oil-fired reboiler to boost the temp/ pressure up . Nuke primary coolant operates around 500F or the fuel cladding degrades and the fuel elements begin to fail mechanically , contaminating the primary system and far worse begins to happen .
This 500F water is what is fed to the steam generators to produce steam , so that steam is in the mid to high 400F range , not the 850-900F it gets from the couple of thousand degree oil flame in the superheating reboiler .
So you'd need to replace the main turbines and the turbine generators that supply electric power to the rest of the ship .
You'd need to replace absolutely everything , including completely reorienting bulkheads and framing and then re-ballast the ship .
Probably be more expensive than a new Ford class .

And no , Navy nuke plants are not delicate . We proved it .
They're expensive to build and operate .

I agree that you probably wouldn't want a ship engaged in littoral operations and exposed to heavy shore batteries since it's high probability of destruction would create an environmental disaster , but not because it couldn't take the pounding .

Battleships are obsolete so it's a moot point .

BTW , I forgot to answer your question about the 4th shock .
It felt about the same as the 3rd one , at least down in the plant .
We were expecting it to feel more significant since the 2nd to 3rd event was a very noticeable difference .
I don't know what distances from the ship each was though .

Fun Fact : We carried a spare , 1 MW , reactor coolant pump motor in the hangar bay along with it's massive handling gantry .
We always thought that was pretty funny .
Replacing a primary coolant pump motor could only be done in a very capable shipyard , most likely Newport News .

It's like we were going to be sailing around after nuclear Armageddon and one of our coolant pumps goes down and there's no place to go to replace it so we're just going to do it ourselves .
Ignoring the radiological nightmare that would be cutting into the reactor compartment , we didn't possess the equipment to cut thru the hangar deck and lid of the reactor compartment .

Pretty sure we'd just run on 2 loops ( there's all kinds of restrictions due to core physics / fuel burn ) or just shut the plant down .

It would be like GM selling you a second transmission for your car when you bought it .
They put it in the trunk , give you a screwdriver and a wrench along with it .
You can swap it out on the side of the road all by yourself .

I always wondered if they deleted that BS from later Nimitz carriers or all of them still have them .
That gantry and motor aren't light and they take up valuable space in the hangar bay too .
It's Effing stupid , but I'm sure Newport News made a lot of extra coin on the deal .

I wish I could have been there for a refuel .
Maybe beneath the non-skid of the hangar floor there are fasteners that hold the armor decking in place so no cutting is required .
They were designed to be refueled so that would be logical , so maybe there is access areas above each coolant pump motor ,,, but what kinda equipment is necessary to lift and maneuver the armor deck IDK .
LOL , man , and then the reactor compartment ... not happening .
Between the hangar deck and the RAR is the main deck . There's a LOT of chit on that deck .
It's not something ship's company would even be able to attempt -- even if it didn't require cutting armor deck plate and there were .... OMG , the more I think about it .
Nope.
2 years in the shipyard with 100's of additional specialized shipyard personnel and massive amounts of additional tools equipment ...

:D you know how the Navy has written procedure for absolutely everything .There's probably some insane procedure using that gantry crane for the motor to lift the armor deck sections out of the way , starting at the hangar deck , then main deck , then the reactor compartment with all the shielding ( insane ) -- then hoist out the non-working motor , then lower and attach the new one .
LOL .
2 plant would be the easier since the aft mess deck is above the reactor auxiliary room and it's a wide open space , but 1 plant has all kinds of bulkheaded areas above it .

Anyways , I haven't given that insanity any thought since I left that ship 31 years ago , but yeah , it's ridiculous to carry that motor around . We knew it back then and now I remember all the reasons it was so stupid .
Man I could sit here and chat ship systems and navy logic all day with you but I'm not sure the rest of the people on here would find it as entertaining as I just did reading that. A while back me and you had a discussion about those new litoral combat ships the freedom and the independence classes, I believe someone was building a model of one and I called them a huge government piece of trash, you asked me why and at the time I could only list a few reasons but if your interested I can now provide tons of resources on how they were tragically horrible ships along with Dumwalt sorry Zumwalt destroyers (not to degrade the honor of the ships namesake).

The only modernized ships that have been somewhat successful has been the Same Antonio class LPDs and the most recent versions of the LHA which isn't finished yet since they put the well deck back into the design
 
This is your thread so we can talk Navy here all you want .

I really haven't kept up with those littoral combat ships .
I heard they refunded them ? just to keep them in the fleet ? Because initially I heard they were going to decommission them even though they were practically brand new .

The San Antonio class is a good design .
The problem the Navy has is the congressional mandate to always have 11 fleet carriers . It ties up a big chunk of the budget .
They've been trying to get away from that requirement for a long time now .
That's another thing about nuke boats - they're super expensive to decommission . The money being spent to decommission the Enterprise could buy several more ships .
That's one reason they extended the service life of the Nimitz .
The Ford is finally operational . Took long enough !!

So what all went wrong with the littoral combat ships . I heard they had structural failures with the hulls . Really embarrassing if that is true .
 
This is your thread so we can talk Navy here all you want .

I really haven't kept up with those littoral combat ships .
I heard they refunded them ? just to keep them in the fleet ? Because initially I heard they were going to decommission them even though they were practically brand new .

The San Antonio class is a good design .
The problem the Navy has is the congressional mandate to always have 11 fleet carriers . It ties up a big chunk of the budget .
They've been trying to get away from that requirement for a long time now .
That's another thing about nuke boats - they're super expensive to decommission . The money being spent to decommission the Enterprise could buy several more ships .
That's one reason they extended the service life of the Nimitz .
The Ford is finally operational . Took long enough !!

So what all went wrong with the littoral combat ships . I heard they had structural failures with the hulls . Really embarrassing if that is true .
So to start, they designed those ships to replace the role of a frigate.. well sort of the main focus was to get a ship that was fast enough to engage smaller surface warfare ships in litoral waters as well as preform a few other mission roles, the designers created a modular system that was supposed to be plug and play pull into port and swap the modules out in a couple of weeks and be ready for a whole new mission set.

The swap out wouldn't require going into dry dock or to the ship yard and could be done by the crew. This was all in theory unfortunately in reality the swap out took months and cost tons of money and couldn't be done by the crew so eventually they gave up and made the ships set into what ever mission modules they had on board and scrapped the rest, all future ships would no longer have the swap out options requiring more ships to be built to cover all the mission types.

That was strike one failure to meet multiple mission demands. Strike two was the propulsion plant, they had this half jet drive half turbine system and the ships had some sorta special transmission that would allow them to combined the two systems and gain a few extra knots of speed, unfortunately the transmission failed to work properly and created a situation in which the ship couldn't do more then 14 knots, and the fix required a whole redesign of the systems and lengthy dry dock times. This also cost tons of money. So another main selling point of the ship as well as mission requirement speed was lost.

The final straw was the aluminum hull, it was cracking left and right and the Navy had to put special temp regulations on how fast the ship can operate and in what sea states basically the ships couldn't go out in anything greater then a simple storm and if they were out and the weather got bad they had to nearly go dead stop and wait it out while getting beat up by the sea state.. imagine a call over the 1MC from the captain hey guys it's getting a little choppy we got shut down and wait here in the middle of the Pacific for a little while.

These temp regs got renewed multiple times and these ships became so limited in what they could do the navy just said nope we're done..

Now they are designing a frigate which is what they should have did from the start in the mean time they are actually considering pulling what ever frigates they have left in mothball and refurbing them.

As for the Zumwalt.. that ships keeps exceeding the budget limits and they still don't even know if it's a good boat..

I kinda cliff notes it for ya but that's the rough and dirty of it, the ships failed to do pretty much everything they were supposed to do and in the end couldn't cover the hole in the Navys future mission plans left by the down sizing of the fleet and removal of the frigates.

I got to be on the USS San Antonio during it's sea trials I was attached to a Marine amphib unit that was brought on board to see how the ship handled at full capacity
 
14 knots ?? LOL . WTF
What do you mean half jet drive & half turbine system ?

I always thought the Zumwalt was just a test bed for new stealth designs and new weapon systems .
But they have 2 and a third in sea trials .
That new frigate is what they want ,

I posted this video in my Ford Class carrier thread in chit chat back when he uploaded it :

 
14 knots ?? LOL . WTF
What do you mean half jet drive & half turbine system ?

I always thought the Zumwalt was just a test bed for new stealth designs and new weapon systems .
But they have 2 and a third in sea trials .
That new frigate is what they want ,

I posted this video in my Ford Class carrier thread in chit chat back when he uploaded it :


I could be botching the terminology but the ship has two different types of propulsion systems, one similar to a jetski and a second one that I guess is more like a bow thruster but big enough to propel a ship run off diesel/gas turbine engines. The ship has a sorta of transmission system that and run the two propulsion systems together for extra speed but similar to a Ford lol the transmission system is doomed off the lot to imploded the old saying can't find them grind them and build your own.

Anyways these ships would be under way and they would engage the transmission and boom both propulsion systems down to limp mode and the ships would need to be towed in to port and taken out of the water or would limp back and spend months trying to solve the problem.

They put rules in place that the ships that werent broke couldn't engage the systems under certain circumstances. But ya these ships would become slower then the whole fleet when they were meant to be faster then most of the fleet.

As for the modular design it was like the IKEA of ships the idea was a two month turn around to swap modules the first swap took nearly a year the second 10 months.. there were countless problems they scrapped the idea all together.

As for the Zumwalt I know they have a third going into sea trials, and because the ungodly amounts of money they spent the navy is hesitant to really discuss the amount of short falls it's having they are desperately waiting for that rail gun system to be fully worked out and ready for use.

My opinion is the navy will eventually work it's way back towards surface combat ships because every country has something equally as powerful enough to take out a ship what we don't have any more is the brute force of naval gunnery to get up close in personal should we have to.
 

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