By Geoff Fein
As construction on DDG-1000 gets underway in the coming year, the Navy and the two shipyards heading up the effort will have a design that is significantly further along than any previous surface combatant has ever been, according to a Navy official.
When the Navy awarded the construction contracts last month to General Dynamics [GD] Bath Iron Works and Northrop Grumman [NOC] Shipbuilding, DDG-1000 design was more than halfway complete, Capt. Jim Syring, DDG-1000 program manager, told Defense Daily in a recent interview.
“This is a big lesson learned from LCS (Littoral Combat Ship), in terms of, don’t start fabrication before production,” he said. “So we awarded contracts here with about 55 percent of detailed design complete. At the start of fabrication it will be 85 percent.”
The USS Virginia‘s (SSN-774) design was 50 percent complete at the start of fabrication. LCS-1, the USS Freedom was less than 25 percent complete at start of fabrication and DDG-51 was 20 percent along in its design at the same time, Syring said.
“We learned a lot of good lessons from those two programs,” he added.
One of the things the Navy has done throughout the process was to design DDG-1000 to enable some ease in early-on production, Syring noted.
Both the two industry teams were brought into the detail design and helped develop some of the features that will make the ship easier and more affordable to produce, he added.
For example, DDG-1000 will have three-meter deck heights.
“Go on a DDG-51 today and you are probably less than eight feet, with bundled, distributed systems above it, which makes it very hard to install systems,” Syring said. “So what you have is systems on top of systems up in the overhead. What we were able to do is spread them out, not only from a vertical but a horizontal standpoint, because the passageways are very wide. It’s just a bigger ship…its allows you to do that.”
Modularity is also the name of the game. The gun systems are all modular as are the sonar and even the anchor, he added.
Gun systems are all going to be modular, built off- site in Cordova, Ala., and shipped to the yards.
“We are going, in many cases, [to] bundle the distributed systems and actually install them in segments in the ship,” Syring said. “Then all the EMEs (electronic module enclosures), all the electronic and combat system components, will all come in those enclosed cabinets into the ship. So you won’t be walking consoles on or computer equipment on, which enables us to take these through a pretty sophisticated test and integration before it even gets to the ship.”
Future ships can have system upgrades go on in parallel to construction because the design will show one of these cabinets being installed, and what is inside of the cabinet will actually be irrelevant, Syring said.
There is also a lot of room for growth, he added. DDG-1000 will have approximately 1,500 metric tons of available margin at the end of service. That’s almost twice what a DDG- 51 has, Syring noted.
“The capacity for the rail gun, laser weapons, future radar upgrades…all that is exactly why we want to build this ship and not more 51s,” he said. “Growth to the future is through this platform.”
The industry partners have also done a considerable amount of work in preparation for construction of DDG-1000, Syring said.
“I can’t overstate how well Bath Iron Works is doing on the DDG-51 programs. The ultra hull facility up there helps them immensely in terms of being able to outfit…construct…major parts of the ship on land,” he said. “They’ll build DDG-1000 in nine modules.”
The ultra hull facility will build one module that will be more than 4,000 tons, which is bigger than an FFG-7, Syring said. “That, for me, as a customer, is fantastic because I get workers in here in a controlled enclosed facility. I can just turn this thing out.”
Bath is also doing all the vertical launch system welding for the Navy, he added.
Northrop Grumman’s Pascagoula, Miss., shipyard has a new panel line facility and DDG-1000 will be the first customer, Syring said. The company’s Gulfport, Miss., composite facility is up and running, and the Pascagoula yard has its crane back, he added.
BAE Systems leased a former bridge manufacturing facility in Cordova to build the Advanced Gun System.
Raytheon [RTN] has systems built across the country and is building the multi-function radar dome in the United Kingdom, Syring added.
“What I have been able to do with Raytheon on SPY III and [Lockheed Martin] Moorestown is…since it is a single contract now…demand commonality in terms of electronic components, in terms of receivers [and] exciters,” he said. “All those electronic components are very similar, if not the same.”