Have you guys ever heard of the Littoral Combat Ships? Of course not, cause they're useless hunks of junk designed when the US decided they needed a wet F-35.
In all seriousness though, the LCSs are not only a failure in engineering of the individual ships and classes but also in initial concept. The LCS came about as a response to a need for small, fast, CHEAP ships to perform non-combat duties such as ASW and minesweeping. Almost every country in the 80s-90s had their fleet of support vessels nearing the end of their lifespan and so were busily working on next-generation replacements.
In both the East and West the form of this next generation of ships took two forms: Hydrofoils based on the design of the HMCS Bras d'Or which had perfected the design of hydrofoils as far as stability was concerned, and ground-effect vehicles. Ground effect vehicles are basically hovercrafts, OR Ekranoplans. The Ekranonplans planned to take over support roles were ironically larger versions of the Luna class since the weird thing about GEVs is that the bigger they are, the easier they are to control and are cheaper to maintain, so bigger=better in every way.
So while the rest of the world was designing their next generation on cutting-edge technology that had been proven in the last generation, what did the US do? They out-sourced their shipbuilding programme to a fucking aircraft designer; Lockheed-Martin. Lockheed did exactly what every US military contractor does and essentially created this concept of a Littoral Combat Ship to be a shallow water frigate with a streamlined hull. As many of you are going to point out, that's just a regular frigate. Because that's exactly what it was. The LCS was just a rebranded frigate meant for shallow water operations in the Gulf near the Middle East, with special gimmicks such as modular combat systems, 2 engine types to propel the ships at 70 knots, and a low radar silhouette. The latter is absolute BS btw, since "low radar silhouette" has been disproven by the Zumwalt fiasco.
Anyways, the first class of the series, the Independents failed every single one of the mentioned requirements. The 2 different engine types, a gasoline AND diesel turbines, failed miserably because they forgot each engine type had different torque and as a result broke the ship's gearbox, so instead of 70 knots the top speed was a whopping 5 knots… you walk faster than that. The system modules? Turned out they built
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