U.S. Navy Seeks To Improve On LCS Designs

Photo: Austal

Oct 21, 2011 By Michael Fabey - aerospace daily and defense report

Both variants of the U.S. Navy’s new Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) are proving their worth, says Rear Adm. James Murdoch, LCS program executive officer, but there’s room for improvement.

“We’re confident we’ve got good designs,” Murdoch said during an Oct. 19 briefing with reporters. “The lead ships are pretty good.”

That said, “They’re small ships with a lot of propulsion plant in them,” Murdoch says. “There are good opportunities to make them more maintainable.” The Navy hopes to do that partly by leveraging more of the data captured by the vast array of sensors on the lightly manned and highly automated ships.

“We’ve done a good job fixing problems we saw in the first two ships,” he says.

Water-jet propulsion systems drive corrosion concerns on both ship types. What the Navy has sought, according to Murdoch, was a “more robust design in shaft seals.”

He also has been paying particular attention to the ships’ waterborne mission area, “the heart of the operations’ package.”

For example, with LCS-1, built by a team lead by Lockheed Martin, the stern doors open and a ramp comes down with “waves washing in and out,” he says, inviting salt-water corrosion. When operations are done and the doors close, he says, what’s needed is a “tight seal and a dry space.”

Another improvement the Navy would like is the ability to deploy longer boats than the 5-meter vessels slated for LCS ships, he says. But the service has to always be concerned with weight — every pound added cuts into ship speed. “Either you want a ship to go 40 knots or you don’t,” Murdoch says.

LCS-1 is just about done with its first shakedown availability. The biggest challenge, Murdoch says, was to finish the shakedown work so quickly after the program’s budget appropriations came so late. “We had a lot of work that needed to be done and we needed to fit it in a short period of time.”

LCS-2, built by the Austal USA team, is going through development testing now. “I put too many building hours in LCS-2,” Murdoch says. The hours are being reduced on LCS-4 through “better modular construction techniques.”

Sea trials scheduled this week for LCS-3 were delayed because of gale force winds. With LCS-3, the Navy is seeing more fuel capacity thanks to changes in underwater hull design. The ship has better buoyancy and performance.

While the Navy still plans to use Raytheon’s Griffin missile to replace the canceled Non-Line of Sight (NLOS) missile for surface warfare in initial LCS increments, Murdoch says he wants a better system for the second increment, which the Navy hopes to get next year.

“Increment 1 does not have quite the range, the capability NLOS has,” Murdoch says. “It does not have over-the-horizon range. You need to be laser-designated.”

By lowering the current standards, though, the Navy can deploy the first increment more quickly to battle swarm-boat threats.