Defense News:
The Navy is convinced that the next generation of ships will need to integrate lasers, electromagnetic rail guns and other power-hungry weapons and sensors to take on peer competitors in the coming decades.
However, integrating futuristic technologies on to existing platforms, even on some of the newer ships with plenty of excess power capacity, will still be an incredibly difficult engineering challenge, experts say.
Capt. Mark Vandroff, the current commanding officer of the Carderock Division of the Naval Surface Warfare Center and the former Arleigh Burke-class destroyer program manager who worked on the DDG Flight III, told the audience at last week’s American Society of Naval Engineers symposium that adding extra electric power capacity in ships currently in design was a good idea but that the weapons and systems of tomorrow will still pose a significant challenge to naval engineers when it comes time to back-fit them to existing platforms.
