An idea?

Interesting idea. These ships/boats could be a good strike platform.

But I do not think that these new breed of warships would be suitable to operations other than war like: Showing the flag, gunboat diplomacy, boarding of commecial vessels, enforcing embargoes etc.

These OOTW tasks take up a lot of the capasities of todays navies and becomming more and more important every day.

Problem is, how do you command the submarines? “let them wait for the next radarship to come”? There is current etc. Position determination and radio commands are hard below the surface. GPS doesn’t work that deep, unless you really stay very shallow, with all the risk of detection from the air… I think the idea has something, and probably the problems can be solved somehow, if it’s not now, then probably in the future.

Interesting ideas, a 21st century U-Boat that spends most of it’s time on the surface but can submerge when necessary could prove useful in the future.

It might look something like this http://www.swath.com/history.htm

Just had a thought. How about this for a new breed of naval vessel? Take a stealthy hull like the Sea Shadow or something similar and have it basically serve as a radar and sensor platform. That way it can be pretty small and much harder to locate (AEGIS type arrays do lend themselves to stealthy construction pretty well). Then, for weapons delivery, you have three or four remotely controlled miniature submarines following around the sensor platform. They are pretty much loaded with vertical launch cells and provide you with your firepower. Radar ship gets blown up? No problems, you have the weapon subs set to go into hide mode and wait around for another radar ship or properly equipped “normal” navy ship to show up and take control.

You can even try and have the sensor ship be a submarine itself, with radar arrays and the like on telescoping masts for target acquisition. The advantage here is that stealthy submarines are stupidly hard to find, and you can run underneath the surface without regard for weather or sea states at higher speeds than you can on the surface. Of course, barring sonar acquisitions, you’re pretty much ignorant of air threats until you slow down and raise the radar mast. One option, instead of a retractable mast, is to build a stealthy conning tower and house the arrays there. Then when you come to the surface you retain the stealth characteristics of the first idea I had, but you retain the advantages of having a submarine-based weapon system. If you’re going to go this route, it may be more sensible to just have the whole thing be one sub. You could take something the size of an Ohio-class SSBN, for example. Give it four SLBM tubes, a bunch of Tomahawk VLS cells, and a bunch or Standard SAM VLS cells. Add radar arrays on a stealthy conning tower, and you’re in business. Imagine that, you’re in the middle of a naval battle, you think you’re doing pretty good, and then out of nowhere all of these missiles start blasting your surface fleet, with you having no idea where they came from!

What do you guys think, is this an interesting, potentially workable idea, or am I just full of it?

A submersible ****nal ship. Cha-ching! $$$. Something that might work in a similar manner though would be to put SM-6s in some of the VLS cells of three or four LAs you might have in the warzone. With their CEC capability all they’d really need to hear is “put one about right here” and launch it. Spaced based radar talking to the subs would be even better. Granted they’d have to troll around with an antenna up to listen but talk about your bolt from the blue.

The problem is that the only countries rich enough to afford such platforms are also rich enough to actually be able to defend them too, so why make them semi expendible, when with a carrier for aircover and a few Sea Wolf subs to escort it it could do the same job and continue to operate in hostile waters.

sounds like a submersible sea shadow, which doesnt seem hard to do with weapon drones… why could the submersible also control UCAV’s for protection?