1 Will be keeping an eye out for more news. Thoughts and prayers.

2 re: question during 1/19/2026 ZZZ stream An Asura is a reference to Hindu or Indian mythology. See also, the six paths. I only know the word Asura or Sura from references in Korean, Japanese, and Chinese fantasy literature. Five of the six paths are hungry ghost, animal, human, asura, and deva. I vaguely recall that the Asuras and Devas warred against each other, but I've never gotten into that bunch of literature.

1 I used to be pretty in to Dilbert. RIP.

2 Scott Adams was always honest, even when it was not popular.

He also guest starred in Babylon 5 and Just Shoot Me.  But we will excuse him for the latter.

RIP

3 Really? Which episode of B5? I was not aware of this.

4 Moments of Transition, S4E14
Here's his cameo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsS2monjQD0

5 There were four stages of being a Dilbert fan:

1. That's a funny situation that would never happen in real life.
2. That's a funny situation that has happened where I work.
3. Let's read Dilbert to find out what our messed up management will be doing next.
4. Dilbert's employer sounds better than my workplace. I wonder if they are hiring...

6 I quit reading Dilbert at one point because I thought it was making me a bit too cynical in ways that were hazardous to my career hopes. Then I didn't have a career. (OT: Brick, I think you may have stored some notes on the blog.)

It seems that President Trump has announced that the U.S. Navy is going to start building BATTLESHIPS!

Also the Navy is getting frigates....in the form of Coast Guard cutters. 

This has caused interest, excitement, outrage, and horror in various circles, the specific emotion seemingly depending on one's political preferences with apparently little input from strategic analysis or engineering considerations. 

So: In keeping with the modesty we have come to expect from the current CinC, this group of warships will be called the Trump class.

....and the first one will be called the U.S.S. Defiant.

Ignoring for a moment that we don't name battleships for people, and that the first ship built in a class is the name of the class...and that Defiant is a name that U.S. naming protocols would indicate is for a minesweeper or coast guard cutter....what exactly are the various merits and silliness of this development. 

First: the official Navy Art. 

...'kaaaay. 

Having the 5inch guns as wing mounts seems needlessly inefficient. However, it might be needed to free up space for more VLS cells. 

It will reportedly have at least one railgun. 

The inclusion of a railgun is interesting, as that program had been terminated. That it is included in a current design indicates that the railgun DOES work and its termination by the navy in 2021 was due more to the general policy of national enshitification by the Biden Administration than any technical hurdles facing the weapon. Certainly Japan, faced with an existential threat in the form of China, (and having leaders who want their country to survive and prosper) have had no problem getting one to work recently.

The Navweaps website has a good overview of the weapon, at least in it's American iteration at the time of it's cancellation. 

However, as we all know battleships are obsolete, and have been since the end of WW2. Also battleships are large armored vessels armed with large caliber naval rifles. This this is a death trap and is not even a battleship. 

OK that last paragraph is a bit wrong headed. 

Battleships in WW2 were effective escorts for the carriers with the added ability to stand up to any surface forces that got into range...they were not COST effective units in that role, but they were available and individually FAR more effective antiaircraft platforms that the cruisers and destroyers that were more affordable. 

Being able to deal with targets that came within range was their downfall, because with an absolute maximum range of 25 miles, nothing was likely to get close to a carrier that could hit targets 400 miles away (and by the mid cold war could hit targets over 1000 miles away). So battleships largely left the fleet after ww2. Both the British and Americans toyed with the idea on new dreadnoughts immediately after WW2 that would be incorporating the lessons thereof, and the US drew up designs to convert its treaty battleships into missile ships as prototypes for large surface ships of the future. This was ultimately not done, mainly due to cost, but also because during the 'pentomic' period of U.S. tactical and strategic thought, it was believed that nuclear weapons would be used in any war and it thus, it was thought that a larger number of less capable but dispersed targets would be more survivable than fewer high capability vessels. 

1 On the hopeful side, some of the tools for this stuff can be miniaturized to fit up through a tiny tube. (I am not a medical device scientist, and I am not qualified to give medical advice.) Thoughts and prayers.

2 New post is another malformed request string. (My thoughts? Ships are big. There have been disputes over recent ship procurements. (LCS) I would expect that the lead times could be long enough for the fulfillment of this program to be on later or future administrations. I don't know about defining the requirements for these machines, but design and construction take time and work. I would basically have to see the tests to have an opinion, and technically successful design can also be useless. I do want to believe that DoD procurement can do good things.)

3 There was an issue with the post title. Pixy got it sorted out. Thanks for the heads up! I could not see the issue on my end!

4 Still can't comment on the battleship post, malformed request string.
In my opinion, the actual design of what ship(s) we build at this point is far less important than actually building something close to on schedule and budget. The Virginia class seems to have been successful. I haven't heard how the Columbia's are doing. But the LCS project was a disaster, and the recent frigate project, that was supposed to take an excellent (imho, better than the coastie design) Italian design and produce it in our yards was a complete failure because the idiots, even knowing that not doing so was the entire original intent and it would cause the project to fail, simply COULD NOT resist changing everything about the design along the way.
The biggest design problem I see with the BB (please no, do not name the class after Trump), is that it's not nuclear powered. A lack of electrical power is one of the current limiting factors on the Arleigh Burkes, and while the Zumwalt has a much more powerful plant, it's still not really enough.

5 Also running into problems accessing the other ship post.
There is, currently, not a single ship class being built for the US Navy that is running to schedule.  The Columbia-class is actually the closest, with somewhere between 6 months to 1 year delay.  The Ford and Virginia-classes are next, with about a year to 18 months behind, with Burke-class right behind them, and everything else currently running years behind schedule.  US shipbuilding has been a mess for a while, and the Navy has done basically nothing about it for the last three decades - which would have been one excellent reason from a long list for why SECWAR Hegseth should have fired all the admirals right after he fired CNO Franchetti.

It is even worse when you dig into the specifics.

The Virginia-class is a successful ship, but the production has been inadequate, with two shipyards pushing out a total 1 to 2 boats a year.  There has been little sign of improvement, despite both the US and Australia spending money on the production, in yearly amounts that might have been enough if they started 20 years ago and consistently spent that much each since then, but not for today.  They certainly are not going to hit the 2-3 boats a year that will be needed in the next decade, especially since the US Navy will be losing 3-5 Virginias to the Australians (Which, if you want to see a navy that is being handled even worse than the USN...Just look at the RAN.).  Frankly, the more I look at AUKUS, the worse the agreement is...And that is before Biden decided the US was done sharing nuclear power plant technologies for ships to anyone else.

LCS were fine if we had built them in small numbers to try them out, and if the mission modules had been developed.  Neither of those ended up the way they should have been.

The Constellation-class was never going to go well.  First, it was far too big and expensive for ships that were suppose to take on secondary duties and relieve the DDGs for more important missions.  We are talking about a base design - FREMM - that is only a third smaller in displacement than the Burke-class, and an actual design that was closer in size and displacement than that.  It would be larger than some destroyers - the French treat their FREMM as equivalent to their destroyers, while the Italian FREMM are almost are large as their destroyers.  A Constellation/FREMM certainly is better than the Legend-class but it is also significantly larger and more expensive, and intended for different mission sets.

Second, there was no way the Constellation would have been launched without requiring a lot of changes.  The original FREMM designs were not expected to use a majority of American equipment, and they had to be changed to USN standards for others.  That was always going to jeopardize the benefit of getting an off-the-shelf design for fast construction - either you spend more time redesigning it to use your own equipment or you end up using equipment that is literally found on just those ships and no other ships in your fleet.  Or you can end up in the weird, half way point the RAN is picking with the Upgraded Mogami FFM.  Where the USN really FUBARed was their redesign process, where they both made questionable design choices (The stated reason why a 7300 ton FFG only carried a 32 cell VLS instead of a 48 cell VLS?  Because the redesign work would take too long....) and could never settle on design requirements and selections, let alone hit design freeze, before they laid down the keel plates.  In fact, they never got to design freeze before FFG-64 and later members of the class got canceled, and while FFG-62 and 63 were under construction - which is an apt commentary on the entire program.

I would like to see a class of nuclear power surface warships again, but there are reasons why nuclear power is not as useful on a regular warship as it is on a carrier.  And this is not even getting into the bias against cruisers that the current USN leadership seem to have internalized.

6 Yeah, there are two sides, the engineering/construction and the doctrinal or operational. I basically do not know anything about using ships. I am not a surface warfare officer, this is not financial advice, and I did not sleep at a Holiday Inn Express last night. 

We need to actually build new things, because maintenance gets expensive the older the electronics are, and endlessly retrofitting eventually stops working. 

This includes ships. 

But, a jobs program that does not deliver usable things is a waste.

To schedule and on budget would be great, I'm not sure it is always possible, but I would be surprised if we could not do better on everything but software.  However, if you do not freeze specifications, the design rework screws stuff.  And, delivering on a 'no fooling, that was final' takes leadership. 

I'm basically feeling cynical or at least 'we will see' on whether Trump's administration delivers on these promises.  Long term construction projects a) difficult b) less shiny c) necessarily involve future administrations and congress. 

7 Constellation-class / FFG(X) and the Legend-class / FF(X) clearly are intended for different mission sets and fulfill different operational requirements.  I do expect that there will be a Constellation-equivalent coming down the line eventually, since there still a need for a ship smaller, less capable, and cheaper than a DDG that can still handle missions with carrier groups and surface action groups like DDGs, while freeing up DDGs from escorting convoys and amphibious readiness groups.  But it will probably a smaller ship than the Constellation / FREMM, probably closer to 5500 to 6000 tons.

FF(X) is actually closer in concept and mission set of the La Fayette-class frigates, especially once they get the VLS and towed array sonar.  Though the modular containers might allow them to ship similar capabilities even with the Flight 1 ships.

1 Congrats on surviving another crazy season!

Due to my somewhat insane work schedule, stream times for he week are now 3pm EST/ 7pm UTC except for Saturday, which baring any new interference from the IRL RNG will be at 6pm EST/ 10pm UTC. 

Stop by, say "Hi!" and bully a streamer over at https://www.twitch.tv/brickmuppet

1 Well, thank God you did go to the hospital!  May you make a full and speedy recovery and feel better soon.

But it defies excerpting. 

1 Previous post gives me an interesting error I try to click through.  Looks like the version of the title that goes into the URL needs to be rewritten.  My guess is that the periods do not work with this blogging software.

Of course, may just be a stupid browser trick on my end.

I've basically been head down, and that could be messing up my view. 

This is not really a problem we didn't already have, and I am still confident that conditions are favorable for a non-war resolution. 

I think I like the song, but that may change if I ever understand whatever the poetical allusions are. 

2 @PatBuckman Yeah. I don't know what's up with the prior post. It gives a malformed request string error, which I don't think I've seen before. I'll say something to Pixy. Thanks for pointing it out!
Regards the anxiety in the post itself: I'm less confident but still hopeful that we can avoid serious unrest. 
But I retain hope.  
Regarding the song they've incorporated some specific Genshin Impact lore, which someone not familiar with the game will not know, but for the Genshin players here is probably cute. 

This has kept me up at night for about a week. I've got a degree in History. I know where this numbnuttery leads. 

There is a lot of talk right now of civil unrest. 

If it comes, it will not be anything like 1860-65.

It will be like Spain in 1936. 

If you are one of the smooth-brains who are actually enthusiastic about such an event (and there are such moral lobotomites on both the left and the right) then I suggest that you read up on the conflict.

It is high octane nightmare fuel.