The World's Most Tricked Out Aircraft Carrier May Finally Be Commissioned This Year

[Boats]

The World's Most Tricked Out Aircraft Carrier May Finally Be Commissioned This Year
BY: Terrell Jermaine Starr - Friday 6:50pmFiled to: USS GERALD R. FORD (CVN-78)
RE:http://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/the...all-1792496792

(Photo on site)

The U.S. Navy is nearing the final stages of commissioning the world’s most technologically advanced aircraft carrier ever. Next month, the wildly expensive and yet incredibly awesome USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78) will embark on a critical series of trials that will test its navigation, communications, ship handling, habitability, propulsion plant, and damage control, USNI News reports.

Hosting the trials will be Northrop Grumman Shipbuilding, the maker of the Ford, to ensure she is seaworthy. The ship will neither launch nor recover any aircraft during the tests, Ye-Ling Wang, program manager for future aircraft carriers at the Navy’s Program Executive Office for Aircraft Carriers, told USNI.

Crew certifications will also taking place for the Ford. The ship is the first of three Ford-class carriers that the Navy has ordered, though eventually the entire preceding Nimitz-class, made up of ten of the largest supercarriers the world has ever seen, is expected to be replaced by the Ford-class. The cost of the first Ford-class ship totaled $13 billion to build, which makes it the most expensive warship ever built, according to MarketWatch. Though it can hold more than 4,500 crew members, it requires 700 fewer people to operate than the Nimitz-class carrier.

A new feature that distinguishes it from the Nimitz is (EMALS) Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System that will replace the traditional steam catapults we’re used to seeing lift jets into flight. The difference between EMALS and the steam catapult system is that EMALS is lighter and takes up less space, and should, in theory, require less maintenance and human attention. Because of its design, it will be able to launch a wider range of aircraft (like drones) at varying weights in rapid succession. EMALS can also launch aircraft every 45 seconds, 25 percent faster than the catapult system.

Another important feature is its integrated active electronically scanned array (AESA) radar. There will be no moving parts on this system, meaning the maintenance will be relatively low, but perhaps more importantly, AESA radar is much more capable in an all-out shooting match. It is a significant improvement from the passive electronically scanned array (PESA), which can only emit one beam of radio waves at a time, whereas the AESA can emit multiple frequencies at once. What makes this feature so useful in a combat situation is that an AESA can emit signals over a broad range of frequencies, making them challenging to detect in radio noise. This allows a ship to radiate powerful signals while remaining relatively stealthy at the same time, although we are still talking about a massively non-stealthy aircraft carrier.


As far as power goes, it will be outfitted with two A1B nuclear reactors, which will deliver 250 300 megawatts of electricity, three times more than Nimitz-class reactors. The EMALS will need that support in order to launch aircraft every 45 seconds. The reactors will also come in handy when the Ford is armed with free-electron lasers (FEL) at some point, which is not some sci-fi thing but what the Navy actually wants to do. FELs should be able to be fired for just a few bucks a pop and use around 10 megawatts of power, making them less expensive to fire than missiles.

Defending the ship from attacking missiles and aircraft will be the RIM-162 Evolved SeaSparrow Missile or (ESSM), a mid-range defensive firing system. Accompanying the ESSM will be the RIM-116 Rolling Airframe Missile (RAM), which is used primarily used against anti-ship cruise missiles.

The Ford appears to be truly be ready for commission this time around. The ship suffered a few setbacks that postponed its commission date in 2016 to some time later this year. Based on what we know about the Ford so far, it should be worth the wait.

My Note: This Carrier makes my old Essex Class Carrier look like a destroyer. (Hugh!)

[Boats]

Pentagon comments on this vessel:

Pentagon Orders Lame Independent Review Of Totally Awesome $12.9 Billion Aircraft Carrier
By Raphael Orlove - 8/30/16 5:07pmFiled to: DEFENSE BLUNDERS
RE: http://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/pen...wes-1785957301

The upcoming USS Gerald Ford is a $12.9 billion masterclass in neat new tech with electromagnet catapults and super radar and lots of other cool and very necessary things. Who cares if some of these things maybe, uh, don’t work?

That’s the issue at hand for the Pentagon, now ordering an independent review of the supercarrier (the first new class of carriers in more than 40 years) and its entire $42 billion program, as Bloomberg reports. Bloomberg acquired a memo from Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics Frank Kendall to United States Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, and it turns out that Kendall is less than pleased with the super neat and very big USS Gerald Ford. As Bloomberg quotes:

“With the benefit of hindsight, it was clearly premature to include so many unproven technologies” on the vessel, from those needed to generate power and launch and land aircraft to its radar and elevators to move munitions, Frank Kendall said in an Aug. 23 memo addressed to Navy Secretary Ray Mabus and obtained by Bloomberg News.

[...]

Kendall’s memo lists five primary technology areas to be reviewed, including propulsion and electrical system components that he said could be tied to “recent issues discovered with the Main Turbine Generators,” launch and recover systems for aircraft and a new dual-band radar that he said has had “integration issues” on the Ford “that need to be avoided” on the next two vessels in the class.
The Ford is supposed to be the U.S. Navy’s newest aircraft carrier, and like any 21st-century bit of military hardware it’s supped to come resplendent with technology, including electromagnet catapults instead of old steam catapults, a new kind of arresting gear system that has demonstrated a 20 percent failure rate, a new dual-band radar system that may be already obsolete, and new turbine generators to facilitate this electricity-over-steam ethos.



According to Kendall’s memo, all of these systems have those problems.

Worse, this carrier is a shining beacon for the Navy’s concurrency myth, the idea being that modern computer simulation means testing is unnecessary. The Ford was supposed to go into production without any real kind of testing, and it was designed in such a way that its fancy and unproven new technologies couldn’t be easily replaced with existing, totally fine, but ugh totally boring old systems. As we wrote a year ago, this whole drama is puzzling:

With all this in mind, one has ask why the Pentagon thought putting such a large asset, both in expenditure and size, into production with such an immature set of core subsystems that also happen to be nearly impossible to replace with proven ones, was a good idea?

It’s not as if existing arresting gear, catapults and radar systems, or the previous Nimitz Class design for that matter, are ineffective. Including all these immature sub-system into a carrier that costs more than $13 billion assumes massive amounts of totally avoidable risk.

Unlike the F-35, we do not have the luxury of building hundreds, or even dozens of Ford-class carriers in the near term in order to “eventually get it right.” What happens if the ship’s core technologies, namely its launch and recovery systems, are simply not in an operational state by the time the ship is supposed to formally enter the fleet? What cost will such a delay bring to the program’s already ballooning budget? Then there are also the operational and end-strength issues as the Navy is already experiencing a critical ‘carrier gap’.

What’s worse is that it may not even be possible to retrofit this giant vessel with proven “legacy” systems, such as hydraulic arresting gear engines and steam catapults, if their newer, high-risk alternatives prove to be far from reliable.

And if these new systems aren’t reliable at all, they’ll need to be taken out. Which means cutting the entire carrier apart.
Anyway, now the Pentagon wants that all tested and they want the whole program reviewed because it’s a shitshow.