Zumwalt class DD Comparison to Imperial Navy

[phavoc]

I was reading an article on the Motley Fool (a hotbed of defense industry news!!!) about General Dynamics launching the new DDG-1000 Zumwalt, on time and on budget. At a cost of $3.5 BILLION dollars. That's just a BILLION or two short of a new Ford class carrier.

Yah, it has lots of bells and whistle, is stealthy and crap. But of the 20 they were hoping to buy for the class, all they can afford is three. It's hard to guard the oceans when you have three ships to do it. Or worse, the balloon actually DOES go up one day, and an enemy gets a lucky or clever hit on one of these keystone warships and instead of losing a small percentage of your capabilities, you lose a third or half. We can't afford to keep building hulls with escalating costs like this. 'Cheap' ships like the LCS costs hundreds of millions of dollars, and they really aren't much more than floating targets or tripwires to bring in the big guns from offshore.

Makes you kind of wonder if the Imperial fleet is following the same trend of the US Navy. They've got really good TL-15 ships, but they have very few of them. A modern version of hulls vs. hero's I suppose (you have lots of average ships taking on a few heroic ones - quantity vs. quality).

If this trend keeps going, in a generation or two the US Navy will have the most powerful dozen ships afloat!

http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2013/10/26/is-general-dynamics-massive-new-stealth-destroyer.aspx

 

[Condottiere]

The difference is that there's no indication of what the R&D costs are for the Imperium ships, which you would naturally divide over the production run of new classes. Or even when Imperium naval architects, engineers and manufacturers find themselves at dead ends, and the logical act would be to cancel the programme, instead of throwing more money at it until the die rolls double Zeros.

 

[phavoc]

The difference is that there's no indication of what the R&D costs are for the Imperium ships, which you would naturally divide over the production run of new classes. Or even when Imperium naval architects, engineers and manufacturers find themselves at dead ends, and the logical act would be to cancel the programme, instead of throwing more money at it until the die rolls double Zeros.

That assumes Imperial megacorps don't continue to lobby for dead-end projects like ours does. Whenever in doubt, assume a corporation will always insist on profits!

 

[Condottiere]

If you go for a more decentralized Imperium, domains and Grand Admirals may have their own R&D departments or budgets to find solutions for more localized problems or conditions. I'm betting that Kinunirs would come out of that.

 

[locarno24]

Depends. For patrol ships, cruisers, troops ships, etc, I can see local designs being useful.

A ship designed to sit in the line of battle, less so; firstly a primary mission of "blow crud up with a spinal mount" doesn't vary much in fine detail from region to region, and second, the dreadnought and battleship classes are really expensive to design and build - if anything is developed as a standard design at the Imperial, or at least Domain, level, it should be the heavy capital ships.

 

[phavoc]

If you go for a more decentralized Imperium, domains and Grand Admirals may have their own R&D departments or budgets to find solutions for more localized problems or conditions. I'm betting that Kinunirs would come out of that.

Depends. For patrol ships, cruisers, troops ships, etc, I can see local designs being useful.

A ship designed to sit in the line of battle, less so; firstly a primary mission of "blow crud up with a spinal mount" doesn't vary much in fine detail from region to region, and second, the dreadnought and battleship classes are really expensive to design and build - if anything is developed as a standard design at the Imperial, or at least Domain, level, it should be the heavy capital ships.

I would imagine that all ships of the line would be built at naval depots, while sub-sector naval ships would be built (if possible) at yards within the sub-sector that they are to operate within. Smaller ships could/would be built nearly anywhere that had the resources.

By book definition, any Class A starport could build naval and commercial vessels. So it's quite possible for destroyers and such to be built anywhere. Though I would suspect the Navy would have certain preferred yards to build their smaller vessels, if only to have some control over security and such.

 

[Condottiere]

If I were paranoid and uneasily sitting on the Iridium Throne, cutting edge research and development would be at the naval depot nearest to the capitol, as well as construction of the battleships and dreadnoughts.

 

[dagrillac]

If I were paranoid and uneasily sitting on the Iridium Throne, cutting edge research and development would be at the naval depot nearest to the capitol, as well as construction of the battleships and dreadnoughts.

True & I would not give great power to my relatives that fancy a turn on it either,

Regards

David

 

[phavoc]

Eventually those designs will filter out to the other depots. And if not that, by the time those ships DO arrive at the frontiers to take up defense, how to replace and repair all the new systems will be ready at those new depots, so they'd be able to build the ships too. Maybe a year or two behind the first ones, but it will take about that long for those ships to make it all the way TO the frontiers.

 

[Condottiere]

Maintenance manuals; I think that most naval depots only construct battleships after a generation has passed. Or at least, that's the policy I would follow, since it ensures that top secret systems and construction methods remain within a restricted circle as long as possible, and that outsourcing is more to make up the numbers of ships of the line.