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PaperclipPerfector  10d ago (text post)   25212 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 9, 2026

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I've seen a lot of discussion about that, with various ideas tossed around, but this is all just aimless speculation so far.

Some people say they just made it big to appeal to Trump's ego, with no real thought behind it. In that line of thinking, the extra tonnage is just a mistake.

Some people say, it's a work in progress. The extra size can easily be filled up with more missiles like the old "arsenal ship" concepts with 500 missiles.

Some people say, it's a political maneuver to get Congress to fund what they really want, which is a future Cruiser/Destroyer. So just take that armament, but away the excess tons, and call it a destroyer/cruiser.

Some people say, it's not necessarily a bad thing to have some extra tonnage. It's relatively cheap to build extra steel with nothing fancy inside of it, and it adds room for future improvements to the ship. It's proposed with three untested weapons systems (high energy lasers, railgun, and hypersonic missiles), and maybe nukes, so they might as well wait a bit to see how those shake up before committing to any one big weapon system. Some extra tonnage also helps a bit with survivability, which makes it a bit more of a real "battleship."

Some people say, it's not necessarily a bad thing to have some extra tonnage. It's relatively cheap to build extra steel with nothing fancy inside of it, and it adds room for future improvements to the ship.

My understanding that an issue we are currently hitting with the Burke class is that we basically kept throwing new systems on there (we also increased the size of the ship over time, the first ships in the class didn't even have a helicopter hangar) until we basically tapped out the potential.

Yeah, it makes sense. Reading Bean's blog, i got the sense that the reason the Burke class was so successful was that they designed it with enough space to handle decades of future upgrades, but that's really tapped out now.

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