"Changes To Ships- Predictions" Topic

Before World War Two, many designs of naval ships proved to be inadequate to actual combat needs. For example, most navies started adding lots of anti-aircraft armament that wasn't planned for in the original designs as a result of the early successes against ships by aircraft. Additionally, as advances in radar came, ships were fitted and then refit with stronger and more capable radars over the course of the war.

In the event of a major conflagration between major powers, what do you predict the changes would be to current warships? In other words, let's say you were putting together some ships for a major modern naval conflict- how would you expect those ships to change once an actual war occurred? There's no reason this should get political, but rather should stay analytical.

Increasing demand for electrical power – lasers, railguns and such.

Demands for 'stealthing' of other types of radiation – infrared is going to be a real problem, specially with the need for more power generation.

Ability to hangar, service, launch and retrieve unmanned craft, both water and air borne.

Electronic Warfare: Both the ability to attack an enemies systems and the ability to protect one's own systems in combat. Maybe a return to Line of Sight signalling between ships, by laser seems most likely, with heavily redundant encoding of message packets to avoid 'piggy backing' of malicious code.

Possibility of heading back to the 19th Century with 'protective armoured decks' installed to protect fragile and vulnerable systems. Vertical armour makes the ship girder too rigid to survive underwater explosions but carefully designed horizontal or sloped armour would give protection without fatally increasing rigidity.

Increased fuel efficiency, more speed for less horsepower. Airfoil masts and solar panels for 'cruising' or 'patrol' speeds with diesel or turbine power only for 'sprint' or actual combat use.

They'll eventually have much lower freeboards, in order to avoid enemy sensors, so will be similar to all those drug "subs" you see the narco cartels using.

Eventually someone will figure out they should really be building submarines, instead, with full-on underwater capabilities for the best stealth and protection.

Launching and storage of 'large' numbers of unmanned craft, but if these are 'throwaways' may not need retrieval systems… in a war time situation, being able to launch large numbers that are ready packed in containers would be cost effective – easier to do, easily stored, easily launched – think about the current range of 'containerized' munitions and scale up slightly.

Great stuff, guys. To make the question more specific- what changes do you see happening to the ships that already exist (and how). For instance, for maintaining and retrieving drones, as well as stealth, do they cut off everything above the deck and build new? Bolt on munitions? (I would predict that bolt on asm containers would be a big thing- with every ship from small to large having more asms), as well as mounting more anti-air defenses- bolt on phalanx and RAM launchers (or their equivalents for foreign navies).

Another example is from the Falklands with the Atlantic conveyor. Do you see nations creating ad hoc aircraft carriers out of container or tanker ships? Or militarizing civilian ships in other ways?

I think that you are talking about changes once the war has started.
I dont expect tha any modern naval conflict between two main contenders would last enough to make any change

I see the future ship designs looking a lot like current day submarines, when surfaced. Minimal, if any bridge, or sail structure, either. None at all would be best, in order to keep detection ranges to a minimum.

Perhaps a retractable sail, or sensor mast. Seems to me like that'd be best.

The vessels would have the option to at least minimally submerge, to at least 100 feet, or so, and would have vertical launchers that can function when surfaced, or submerged.

Torpedo/missile/drone launching tubes fore and aft as well, just for grins.

Also, to avoid giving away the game, and their position when launching weapons into the air, we'll see sensor/weapons launch pods created, which will fire some time later, once the vessel has moved far away from its current position.

Drones will provide the near and over the horizon targeting for the vessel, which will be received by a floating communications buoy, which will then transmit the data to the vessel hiding beneath the waves, when it has to hide, or directly to it, when it is floating on the surface.

Assuming that any naval conflict lasted long enough to see lessons learned applied to the ships fighting it, my immediate expectation would be lots more AA capabilities bolted on. So CIWS and SeaRAM installations. Then additional antiship missiles added.

There would definitely be a huge increase in electrical demand, but that's very difficult to retrofit.

Next-generation ships would probably be trimarans or some other reduced-drag hull design, to use less fuel when simply traveling. Might even have turbine-powered generators for use while in combat that don't drive the ship.

You'd also see a further demand for reduced signature designs. The challenge is minimizing the wake, but if ocean-surveillance satellites can track submarines from their wakes on the surface, there's little point in trying for strategic stealth anymore. So tactical stealth, suppressed IR, superstructures designed to randomly-scatter radar, and lots of "don't let the incoming hit you" systems. A sufficiently-powerful laser can laugh at even a Soviet-sized ASM swarm, but you're talking about a laser putting out 100 megawatts in that case.