The move comes amid outcry from Democrats after the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts affixed Trump’s name to its sign in Washington.
Donald Trump’s name is being attached to a new class of U.S. battleships that will have nuclear capabilities.
Making the announcement at an event at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, Navy Secretary John Phelan referred to the warships as “Trump-class battleships" and said a forthcoming vessel dubbed the USS Defiant will be “the largest, deadliest and most versatile and best-looking warship anywhere on the world’s oceans.”
Trump’s eponymous battleships will be armed with guns and missiles, as well as hypersonic weapons, electronic rail guns and high-powered lasers.
What they, and most other countries need, is much more smaller ships.
The reason there are no battleships produced since 1944 is because they suck. It’s a lot of firepower on a single platform. 1 modern torpedo and everything is a coral reef. Battleships were to be on the line of the battle, the naming comes from ship of the line. But these days we don’t have line battles anymore. We have long range missiles. So it’s basically a slow platform with a loss of most of your firepower if it sinks. And it will sink, when 500 cheap drones will easily saturate it’s defense capabilities.
They want to add a railgun. Any idea how much energy that takes? It needs to be nuclear powered, otherwise the entire shill will be defenseless for a long time after each shot, as it needs to refill it’s batteries since a shot depletes the entire ship. But ok, nuclear powered you say, the US can do that. Ok, great, now you have a weapon which can fire… so fast, the curvature of the earth and gravity have too little influence on the projectile, so over the horizon targeting doesn’t work, only line of sight. Again, ships these days aren’t supposed to be in line of sight range when fighting, we have long range missiles. So a railgun is useless. They found out during the Zumwalt disaster.
Clearly they used AI to render this ship. Look at the helicopter platform. It will be mostly unservicable with a seastate above 3 which is most of the time. The entire deck will constantly be washed over, no helo can land or takeoff from that. Next to that not all surfaces are angled, creating a huge radar cross section. Easy target.
So this isn’t a serious combat platform, this is a micropenis compensation project. Why else would it be named after the senile dictator? Hitler wanted 2 battleships too, they both sank (one without seeing battle once). Those resources would have been much better spent on much more U-boten.
Navies want bigger ships with more capabilities, but the actual need these days is small specialized escorts ships. Small, fast ships able to escorts the high value larger platforms for defense in depth all combined with a wide spread insane amount of firepower. Some ASW, some AAW, some ASuW, but not everything at once. A single loss shouldn’t be decisive to the eventual battle outcome. Strength in numbers. But tell that to a crooked pedo dictator with a micropenis.
I am thinking drone submarines might be a thing eventually. Sneak up to a coastline and release them all before anyone is the wiser. Would probably make manufacturing and costs way less of a burden if there is no need for oxygen.
The issue with submersible drones is connection. Underwater only very low frequency can go through the water, reaching outside of the water. There are new technologies to improve it, but it’s very limited. So drones would need to operate autonomously. It’s possible, but detection and acquisition is hard, and based on known loggings in databases. And loggings do not exist for newer platforms, or if a platform received new screws for example. Semisubmersibles are a better option, they can be equipped with starlink for example. You can see their effective use already with Ukraine, fighting off the Russian black Sea fleet without a navy in their own. Fully submersibles are possible, but much more difficult to use effectively. The US already has them, but mainly for logging and registering the sound velocity (based on salinity and temp, on different depths) but not for engaging, or at least as far as we know so far.
Fiber optic cables solve that
This is used for launching torpedoes, they are called wire guided. Although they mostly use thin copper wire for that. But the seas are vast. It would mean you would need cables of hundreds of kilometers per drone, they will break under its own weight after a few hundred meters, if they are even able to reach that. Even if you only want to use them to defend your territorial waters, that’s 12nmi (22km) from your coastline.
Another option you might think off is a cable to the surface, but it will be dragged down when the drone moves. Warships usually move between 20 and 30 kts, carriers can go even faster. You need a drone capable of catching up but with these speeds there’s a significant amount of drag. The wire guided torpedoes have a copper wire spool so it doesn’t pull a wire though the water, but lays the wire behind it. If you want to have a drone with a massive fiber optic cable winch inside itself, the drones will get huge.
So when using cables, drones are kinda useless as it would only work short range and we already have torpedoes which are very effective at sinking ships. Only one is needed to sink a massive ship. It explodes under the ship, creating a massive amount of pressure, then a vacume, breaking any ship in half. As you can see here.
So current submersible drones are operating autonomously and are not remotely controlled. This is the best option imo, or like I said before: semisubmersibles. But engaging targets autonomously is a tricky thing. You don’t want it to accidentally hit the wrong one. But when you have an acoustic profile of your target, it’s definitely possible. There are already torpedoes with these capabilities, as well as missiles targeting radar profiles or locking on stored images. But like I said before, you need to have this information about your target. So in most cases a sub needs to have logged the ship while being close to it.