How does mass affect warp speed?

[STR]

Vulcans might have found the ring-shaped warp engine superior early on, but perhaps it could never be developed to go past warp seven? They would be culturally stuck with it, though - much like today's navies are stuck with boat-shaped ships, even though more efficient alternatives exist.

Modern warships are a gigantic compromise of conflicting requirements, most of which are volume intensive. In other words, the larger the volume of a hull, the better the warship. This is in contrast to battleships, where weight (displacement) was the critical factor due to heavy armor requirements. A convention hull is an excellent shape for maximizing volume. The US Navy and its counterparts are not "bound by culture," that's absurd. They are consevative, they have to be given that poor experiments get people killed, but when they have unique requirements they make unique ships. Pegasus Class hydrofoils, LCAC's, and the Littoral Combat Ship come to mind as examples where speed was an overriding factor.

 

[Timo]

Most of those failed to enter production, though. The Pegasus never reached tactical significance with the six-boat "fleet", and never was going to get the funding for that to begin with. The LCS teeter-totters on the verge of cancellation. The Zumwalt is essentially gone already; stealthy hulls and superstructures would be useful in all types of naval warfare, especially against the primitive opponents of today, but there's no effort to introduce them.

The "convention hull" may offer good volume for seakeeping, but a catamaran would automatically be superior - more stable, with a gigantic improvement in useful area and volume-built-on-that-area over the two convention hulls that comprise the water element of that design. And what a wonderful flight deck! A SWATH catamaran would be better still. All would enjoy advantages in shallow-water operations, hot at the moment - but nobody really dares attempt those. Prototypes abound, but the "risks" are considered not worth taking, even though betting on a monohull will not guarantee success any better.

When did the USN attempt a real "departure"? The last time was with introducing flattops and beachable amphibious attack ships. One would expect harebrained experiments to meet with inertia, yes - but one would then expect flexible or multipurpose designs to proliferate, for hedging the bets. Yet multimission remains a big no-no for most of today's fleets, to the degree that many current European navies still despair with a balance between anti-aircraft and "GP"/ASW frigates when the issue is technologically outdated already.

Tradition is not solely a sailor-driven issue, of course. It is more a thing of the manufacturing side of the medal: dockyards want to build what they specifically are good at building, and subcontractors want to provide what they always have provided. And it does work, so why fix it merely in the hopes that it might work better?

Timo Saloniemi