Indeed. Ana's younger sister.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Admin
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/

Seriously. Not only that, but apparently it happend to my ship the cruise before I joined her, too. Fortunaly, at the moment no one else needs to worry about falling victem to her curse, as Clinton had her mothballed as obsolete in the face of Ageis class cruisers like the Ticonderoga, though NONE of them have the endurance of a Nuke...

The Kicker? She was CGN-41... USS... ARKANSAS

>...though NONE of them have the endurance of a Nuke...

<RANT!>

Tell me about it. We can't even get around to the Yellow Sea without seeming to have to make a pit-stop in Sasebo. I think pebble-bed reactors would make for awesome, if slightly pricey, DDG's. Really, they should be a bit more forward thinking when they build these things because I'm getting sick of hearing about how the Zumwalt class is going to be so awesome. It's gonna be another diesel chugger (slight misnomer since it uses turbines) so what's so great about that? And they wanna put railguns on these things? The operational range is gonna go to shit, I don't care how much progress they are making on how much juice railguns consume. If you gotta slow your ship down or stop it all together to fire its main weapon, then somebody somewhere fucked up. And not necessarily the design team either.

Okay, I'm done. ^_^;;

Black Aeronaut Technologies Creative aerospace solutions for the discerning spacer "To the commissary we should go," Yoda declared firmly. "News of this kind a danish requires."

Just wait until the next-gen of the ship, where there's a four-inch railgun going the length of the ship.

Looks like a destroyer, sinks aircraft carriers.

--
Geoff Depew - Darth Mephron
Haberdasher to Androids, Dark Lord of Sith Tech Support.
"And Remember! Google is your Friend!!"

Ah, spine-mounted weaponry. Long a staple of science fiction, but not used on actual warships--yet.

You just know there's a naval officer out there somewhere who can't wait to say, "Fire the Wave Motion Gun!" :)

Two weaknesses there, Meph. First its gotta get a line of sight on the carrier, and she's gotta go bows on to get a firing solution. Carrier defense doctrine calls for us to have any ship on the bottom before they can get over the horizon, and for the most part we can except for submarines, which is why the anti sub warfare people practice their trade so hard.

Although, it -has- suddenly occured to me that with a weapon like that an attack can come from far beyond the horizon and with little to no warning. The projectile is going faster that mach ten. The fastest cruise missiles in the world don't even touch mach five.

Black Aeronaut Technologies Creative aerospace solutions for the discerning spacer "To the commissary we should go," Yoda declared firmly. "News of this kind a danish requires."

Hmm. I'm not sure I agree, Black. We're still talking projectiles here, so unless it has some sort of terminal guidance package, just the wind effects of an OTH shot would proboly be enough to generate a miss.

A railgun projectile will, of course, be traveling much faster than a Mk45 projectile and somewhat less subject to the effects of wind currents. :)

Black Aeronaut Technologies Creative aerospace solutions for the discerning spacer "To the commissary we should go," Yoda declared firmly. "News of this kind a danish requires."

Or, if you build it in already with some loft, then you run into having a nasty minimum range barrier.

Stupid, I know, but I'm pretty sure that's how they'll go. We already have GP rounds for the Mk45 Mod4 system (Mine's an older Mod2). They require two rams and two cells in the loader drum: one is the over-sized projectile itself with stabilizing and control fins and all kinds of nifty goodness, and the second is the super-charge powder can.

Lately they've been talking about the successor of the Mk45 that will be on the Zumwalt class destroyers, something that I think is a bit of a lost cause right now. The new gun system will rely entirely on GP rounds, loads at a ninety degree angle, and fires at forty-five degrees. I cannot help bu think to myself what this accomplishes. I feel that with better computers and a few modifications, the Mk45 system would beat the holy crap out of whatever overblown new trick they want to try out.

And on this note, I think we've gone far enough off-topic to either move this over into its own thread or carry on this conversation in private notes. ^_^;;

Black Aeronaut Technologies Creative aerospace solutions for the discerning spacer "To the commissary we should go," Yoda declared firmly. "News of this kind a danish requires."