CGN-38 Virginia Class Cruisers - Midlife Upgrades

[A Tentative Fleet Plan]

Although there were 20,000 ton designs for CG(X) the built of the ships were intended to be modified 14,000 ton Zumwalt hulls with a new deckhouse and radar.

I suspect had CG(X) been built it would’ve ended up somewhere between 14k and 20k tons, assuming it’s non-nuclear.

If CG(X) was going to be built in any numbers, it would have been a Zumwalt hull with a new deckhouse with 4 enlarged arrays (either SPY-4 VSR or AMDR), as seen in various bits of Northrop Grumman media released at the time.

 

[that_person]

That’s a fair point. Don’t forget the Zumwalt has room for SPY-4 though, it was just never installed.

 

[A Tentative Fleet Plan]

That’s a fair point. Don’t forget the Zumwalt has room for SPY-4 though, it was just never installed.

I believe CG(X) was intended to have a variant with a larger array.

 

[uk 75]

The six nuclear destroyer leaders (California and Virginia) always seemed to me a bit like the sole RN Type 82 HMS Bristol, expensive ships which were orphans in navies which moved on to Spruance/Kidd/Tico and T42.

If all had been different the six ships would have been Typhon DLGNs but withour AEGIS.and with an armament similar to Bainbridge and Truxtun these ships were obsoloscent by 1990.

I suspect even if the Cold War had continued the DLGNs and Long Beach would have been scrapped to provide money and crews for the more effective Burkes.

Resistance to nuclear power in 1990 was at its height after Chernobyl and nuclear ships.were not welcome guests in many ports.

 

[Winchester]

No, it will be 9500-10500tons, like the Japanese Kongo/Atago/Maya classes. They're literally a modified Burke with AW flag space added, and if you want 160ish missile cells onboard the ship is going to be longer and heavier yet. That's adding a full 64 cell set to a Burke, though I expect it to be accomplished as a 64 forward and a 64 plus a 32 aft. That's a minimum 10m stretch, which would add ~1900 tons to the ships.

There's slightly more to the Kongo/Atago/Maya than just being a "taller Burke", IIRC a lot of the internals are different. That the shape of the superstructure is so similar is because there's only so many ways to arrange the SPY-1D, either you put it over the bridge like the Bazan/Hobart, or you put it under the bridge like the Burke/Kongo/Atago/Maya/Sejong; and IIRC the contractor for the system was involved in creating the latter setup.

(Working out the exact relative positions of the SPY-1 panels and the software offsets required was apparently sufficiently bothersome that they tried to standardize as far as possible - hence why the early Aegis ship proposals like CSGN, CGN-42, the Long Beach rebuild, and the Litton drafts for the Aegis-Spruance that were posted earlier this week all had variants of the same superstructure.)

The 8" Mk71 was supposed to fit in the same hole as the 5" Mk42, though I think it goes a deck deeper

Designed to fit in the same hole, sure; but they reserved about twice as much space under the deck in order to provide enough magazine space. The extra magazine space reservation was deleted from the Ticonderoga-class in order to give them 44-shot launchers fore and aft; and deleted from the Spru-cans when the VLS was installed.

There's a diagram from some point in the Burke development that shows exactly what the Navy thought were equivalent weapons, space-wise. A 2-module VLS was (on the diagram) interchangeable with a 3-inch gun; a 4-module VLS was interchangeable with either a 24-round Mk26, a 5-inch gun, or an ASROC launcher with a reloader; and an 8-module VLS was interchangeable with either a 44-round Mk26 or an 8-inch gun.

If you are talking about a DDG(X) that combines the "cruiser" and "destroyer" roles, that's a 9500-10500ton ship. Speaking in shorthand, it's a Burke with one extra deck for AW flag spaces, which the Japanese have happily designed for us today. Beamier design because it's a full deck taller, but it draws less water in exchange. Though making it able to handle the North Atlantic may require much deeper draft, that can be handled just in ballast water.

I don't think I can see the Navy building a 20kton Missile Cruiser anytime soon...

The original DDG(X) graphic did look kind of big...

Edit:

The six nuclear destroyer leaders (California and Virginia) always seemed to me a bit like the sole RN Type 82 HMS Bristol, expensive ships which were orphans in navies which moved on to Spruance/Kidd/Tico and T42.

If all had been different the six ships would have been Typhon DLGNs but withour AEGIS.and with an armament similar to Bainbridge and Truxtun these ships were obsoloscent by 1990.

I suspect even if the Cold War had continued the DLGNs and Long Beach would have been scrapped to provide money and crews for the more effective Burkes.

Resistance to nuclear power in 1990 was at its height after Chernobyl and nuclear ships.were not welcome guests in many ports.

No Chernobyl is pretty much a prerequisite for a realistic "Cold War continues as normal" timeline. No Three Mile Island may be a prerequisite for continued nuclear propelled surface combatants.

 

[Firefinder]

I suspect even if the Cold War had continued the DLGNs and Long Beach would have been scrapped to provide money and crews for the more effective Burkes

Also needs to be remembered that by the 1990s the newest of the Nuke Cruisers, the USS Arkansas, was already 10 years old.

The rest of Virginia class was pushing everywhere from 12, 13, and 14, years old going down the list.

While the California class were 16 and 15 by 1990.

Long Beach was 29 herself. And the other DLGNs were not much younger.

With those ships be built to the surface warship standard of 35 years of active use, not the carrier standard of 50 years. As seen by their 15 year refueling cycles for the California and Virginias.

And those ships were hard used as well.

Basically only the Virginia class had a chance in hell of serving past 2005 and even then they be likely decom in 2010.

 

[Archibald]

No Chernobyl is pretty much a prerequisite for a realistic "Cold War continues as normal" timeline.

After reading that (scary and depressing) book, I would say that a Chernobyl like disaster at a RBMK was almost unavoidable. Sweet geez.

Amazon.com

 

[Scott Kenny]

No Chernobyl is pretty much a prerequisite for a realistic "Cold War continues as normal" timeline.

After reading that (scary and depressing) book, I would say that a Chernobyl like disaster at a RBMK was almost unavoidable. Sweet geez.

Amazon.com

Yeah, whoever designed the RBMK plants was criminally incompetent. Straight up a matter of WHEN a Chernobyl happened, not if.

 

[Winchester]

Also needs to be remembered that by the 1990s the newest of the Nuke Cruisers, the USS Arkansas, was already 10 years old.

The rest of Virginia class was pushing everywhere from 12, 13, and 14, years old going down the list.

While the California class were 16 and 15 by 1990.

Long Beach was 29 herself. And the other DLGNs were not much younger.

With those ships be built to the surface warship standard of 35 years of active use, not the carrier standard of 50 years. As seen by their 15 year refueling cycles for the California and Virginias.

And those ships were hard used as well.

Basically only the Virginia class had a chance in hell of serving past 2005 and even then they be likely decom in 2010.

According to Wikipedia, the Virginias were designed to last 38 years, and given advances in "zeroing" hull wear, they might have lasted even longer, if the investment was made. The major problem I can see with the Virginias though is that - aside from their pricetag and the price of refueling them - they were just strangely designed in general.

Let me count the ways the Virginias were weird:

1 - they were single-ended Terrier ships with all the radars at one end to start with.
2 - Swapping to Mk26 fore and aft and then adding a hull-mounted hangar appears to have flipped the missile launcher arrangement around so that the majority of the missiles were at the opposite end from its directors.
3 - the hangar, of course, didn't work and they had to weld it shut
4 - Despite having a big sonar and having been *designed* to carry helicopters, the scrapped hangar was replaced by two tomahawk launchers that blocked the helipad from being used, while the Californias which had very limited helo facilities kept their pads.
5 - it had two of the most rapid-fire launchers available at the time, but only two fire control channels to feed it.

Based on some statements in the Navy training publication about the Mk26 (the one that's linked in the wiki article), the Virginias *might* have at one point been destined to have a 44 round launcher forward and a 64-round launcher aft, but that never happened and the statement may be a typo. I'm not sure at this point. That

The Kidd class were equally weird, what with instead of having all the fire control systems facing aft, they split them equally forward and aft... but then the forward launcher, the one that was according to the design specs earmarked for ASROC, only has room for four Standard missiles.

Unless the Kidds routinely stored all their ASROCs in the aft launcher (which would be the smart thing) it would be limited greatly in rate of fire for Standard after the first two salvoes due to running out of missiles forward...