2 ms·

Whats the advantage to these over the Arleigh Burke III's other than that these look cooler? It seems like you could have 2 or 3 of the Burke class for every on

• smacktoward 9y ago
  There's the stealth aspect, of course (which is a big difference from conventional ships like the Arleigh Burkes all by itself), and beyond that the Zumwalt class was supposed to incorporate a bunch of other next-generation features too: cutting-edge guns and missile-launch systems, an advanced permanent-magnet powerplant that could generate ten times the electrical power of conventional ones (which in turn would allow mounting things like beam weapons, when they became practical), new automated systems that allowed a crew half the size of a Burke's to operate the ship, and so forth. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zumwalt-class_destroyer#Design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zumwalt-class_destroyer#Design for a good overview.) Trying to roll so many technical leaps forward into a single ship proved to be a big mistake, though, as many of those advances were never able to be practically realized and some of those that were ended up costing much more to develop than originally anticipated. So the Zumwalts have become kind of a white elephant; the cost overruns caused the Navy to eventually cut its order for the ships from 32 to just three, and those that will be delivered are unlikely to ever be as capable as they were originally planned to be.