No, you want some width of pier to operate some pretty good sized cranes and heavy goods trucks to bring supplies to the ships and load them onboard. Possibly including train tracks, though train tracks could be run in the middle of the crane tracks. 50, maybe 100ft wide.
Most of the UK wasn't heavily bombed, get out of the South and the cities and it's 'well, there was that one time a lost bomber strafed the main road". We had one last year in the Medway Towns, and I can't recall the one before, despite being the closest major naval base to France.
5" if you're going to have access to HVP, 57mm may be acceptable if not.
I can see why you say Sovraponte but I like the huge magazine you can fit under the 57mm. Maybe if the Italians let us build it in the UK?
Looks like the 57mm is a requirement from the RN, which makes some sense for counter-drone roles.
edit: Yes, 4. 1 on each aft corner of the helo deck, 2 up forward port&starboard.
Depends on top weight. I meant something close to the US Mk38 guns, basically an anti-small-boat gun with anti-drone capabilities.
I'd argue that the 40mm's CIWS capability makes it so much more flexible than 'small calibre gun' type mountings that a little extra cost and weight (actually less than Phalanx for the non-deck penetrating version) is a small price to pay.
I still want a couple of guns forward as well. So a pair of 57mm and 4x 40mm.
I struggle to see a situation where that much weight of fire would be required, particularly as we have Wildcat with LMM specifically for the anti-small boat role and it wouldn't be difficult to produce a RHIB-sized picket boat with a stabilised GMG or similar.
In all fairness I agree with you, as soon as I opened the article I was greeted with an AI-generated morph of the Type 26 and 45 frigate and destroyer respectively. It seems rather that this was an insight into how the T4X might look; however, regarding the Type 45 destroyers service life it's unlikely any of the details would be accurate compared from technology we might have in a few years.
The 2019 DS30/LMM trials on HMS Sutherland showed enough issues with missile efflux they haven't been repeated - you would have to redesign the upperworks with nothing behind the mountings, or with large blast deflectors. Given the capability of 40mm airburst, that's probably not worthwhile.
You can't sink a RHIB with a 40mm grenade.
Maybe not, but LMM might do it if a sufficiently small mounting were developed.
depends on the 40mm grenade. If you count OG-7V as a 40mm grenade I bet you can.
The fact that they couldn't work out a functional 30mm + LMM mounting is so silly to me. Was it really rocket science to do some better vibration isolation and put a blast deflector behind the rockets? Anyway, another point for soft launch systems like Javelin and Akeron.
It didn't work on T23 and wouldn't on T26 so I think the Navy just looked at the 40mk4 and decided it was the better long term option.
Frankly it depends on the mission. I really like the gun/missile systems for dealing with mass raids, and the 40mm is lacking in range, saturation limits and magazine depth. This lesson was learned off Okinawa, but fast firing proximity fused 76 and 127mm guns seem to elude modern western navies unless they're French or Italian.
Wildcat with LMM holds what, 10x or 14x LMMs? That's your engagement limit.
I would still much rather have the reach of a 76 or 127 given how many the Russians are throwing around. 600 threat raids of anything are unpleasant.
With swarm attacks, the question becomes which is more stored kills; 160 rounds of contact fused 30mm and 5 LMM or 100 rounds of 3P 40mm?
20 missiles if you aren't doing anti ship at the same time.
Phalanx CIWS is also 6 tons loaded.
That's why I'd been thinking something closer to the USN Mk38Mod4 or DS30B than a full on Bofors 40mm. But yes, I do expect that 2030s ships are going to resemble late-WW2 ships in terms of all the small guns on them.
Reduction in mast size? Aren't you the one who wanted something ASEV sized?
How stupid do you think BAE's designers are, that our AAW destroyer for the specific purpose of defending carrier groups wouldn't be fast enough to keep up with a carrier group? If it's IEP then we know there will be a vast amount of installed power available; two MT30s on IEP is what powers our 65kt aircraft carriers to 30kts, I would be quite worried if the hullform was so bad they couldn't manage a 12kt destroyer.
ESM systems don't matter?
The Queen Elizabeth class officially had a speed of 25kts plus, yet we know the QEs have been clocked at 32kts. Stated speeds and actual speeds aren't the same thing.
Compartmentalization and classification will be the death of the program yet.
That wasn't my point - which was why would we (and the rest of the public) know what the requirements specify for speeds for Type 83? And second to that, that anything published may bear only a tangential relationship to the actual facts.
Oh sorry my bad, I see the problem. It doesn't really matter whether it's 30 or 25 or 32 kts, the point still stands that it shouldn't be difficult to match that speed with a destroyer's powerplant. T26 reaches its maximum speed on a single MT30 so installing a second should do the job.
