You know, if they intend to or not - it seems with each passing month, more and more people are starting to state what we have been saying about LCS for years.
"Navy Secretary Ray Mabus told Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., that better fuel efficiency of the General Dynamics-built LCS over the Lockheed Martin-built ship only comes into play "at the upper end" of the ships' performance, and that's not a major problem because "they would be used very infrequently at such high speeds."But no successful aircraft sacrificed its ability to carry weapons so the afterburner could work. Some aircraft have - and the results were unimpressive to say the least. LCS; the RA-5 of today.
....
“The amount of time this ship spends in this high-end regime, even though we need that speed, and we need that speed very much, as we are seeing down in the Caribbean and other places, the amount of time a ship spends in that regime is not going to be very extensive. It’s tantamount to saying, our airplanes are in afterburner all the time, and we know that’s not the case,” he said.
For review; just a few:
- Warship requirements needed for, you know, a ship going to war - were compromised to meet a fetish for speed. A fetish that, from the Battle Cruiser to the Patrol Hydrofoil, consistently proves to be a false economy.
- Once a ship displaces water and has to, you know, do things warships do - the need for speed just isn't there.
- Once that truth is demonstrated, again, people will pretend that it was the plan all along.
PS: Someone make sure Sid's blood pressure meds are handy.
Every time I hear the intellectual contortions required to say something good about this bozo concept...I am reminded of this pic...
ReplyDeleteIts all just about as believable.
Bottom line is both designs are going to be way overweight Its so obvious even I figgered it out.
As for that hardchined semiplaning hull being efficient at lower speeds...
Compared to what?!?!?!
If it sits at the pier all of the time, it could be argued its damn near a perpetual motion machine!!
Lets just say the assertion is disengenuous in the extreme.
And for the youngins who aren't familiar with what was purportedly going on in the photo. here is the backstory.
Gad, but I am gettng old! As soon as I saw it, I recognised Rosemary Woods.
ReplyDeleteRE: Navy: LCS fuel disparity not a deal-breaker - Navy Times
ReplyDelete<span><span>When one overlays the CSBA document proposing a newer CONOPS on LCS, I see several critical points/assumptions. Here is just one of them: The LCS will be used differently from earlier warships and the uses suggested by Martin Murphy include many more scoot and shot, picket operations, go fast to AO, and generally moving about at high speed. That means actual fuel consumption SHOULD be determined by how much of the time is spent at high speed (I would assume there is some percentage distinction in the evaluation factors already which may or may not be right?).</span></span>
<span><span>I certainly saw this on my PBRs, we could patrol for 12 hours at normal speeds, but when were got into firefights, that frequently meant a trip back to base afterwards to refuel/rearm. And that also meant time off station for Charlie to pass through - they knew that we knew that.</span></span>
Phib:
ReplyDeletePlenty of examples to tar and feather on the avian side than the RA5C. For starters there were the Pirate, Cutlass, and demon, all of which suffered in the engine department/weaps aloft trade-off. Perhaps a better example to tie LCS to would be the F-111B -- a "transformational" weapons system that carried all sorts of hype with it -- until it was time to try and get it onboard the boat.
I maintain the RA5C could have had a longer/successful life had the sensors and TTP of the time not demanded the jet refly the attack route to gain the target area BDA. For that matter, if you are going to slam an aircraft for emphasizing one particular design feaure over others, how about the F-4? A fighter with no gun? And yet after Navy learned some hard lessons, reworked TTP via NFWS, the no-gun navy F-4's went on to rack up a respectable kill ratio ovefr the North in a SAM/AAA dense environment.
w/r, SJS
Quite so SJS...
ReplyDeleteThe Viggie did perform well, given the constraints. But the fact remains the aircraft always suffered from the design compromises necessary for the very high speed.
And it was sorely missed by '82 in Lebanon, when the analysis of the TARPS products always started off with, "Poor quality imagery..."
My beef is the hard learned lessons of Survivability have been so willfully blown off by this generation of SWO's.
The folks I grew up around way back when (Heavy One transistioned into the A3J after the deployment they were flying off to that day) had a reason to believe that very high speed was a worthwhile attribute.
What happened over the course of the following decade proved otherwise though...
So, why in the world is the same -wrong- arguments now being made in defense of 40 knot ships?
That's got to be the shortest Nasal Aviator I've ever seen....
ReplyDeleteUCAV-N test pilot...
ReplyDeleteSigh...gotta clean the damn keyboard and monitor again. One of these days I'll figure out how to eat a snack and not paint everything.... :)
ReplyDelete