USN BBGN-72 Pennsylvania

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Author: DINO

Last revision: 1 Dec, 2024 at 12:25 UTC

File size: 1.33 MB

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Description:

With the dawn of the 21st century, the US Navy was put before the question of what the role of the future’s navy would be. The cold war had just ended, global tensions were falling, and there was no other power in the world that could match the United States either militarily, economically or technologically. The last wave of military equipment – The nuclear super carriers, VLS and Aegis, had nothing short of revolutionized naval warfare, but now, there was no visible direction to go in any longer…
The US military made many questionable choices in the early 21st century. Projects like the LCS and the Zumwalt would go down as massive money sinks that brought no real return, Technology from the cold war like the Ticonderogas and the Harpoons would be kept in service way longer than originally intended while the development of critical technologies like hypersonic missiles would be completely left out and production lines of new weapons like the B-2 and F-22 shut down prematurely.
Back then, we all just thought "but the US Navy can get away with this, they have such a huge technological advantage over everyone else…", but today, it seems this technological edge is running more and more thin.

So for the Pennsylvania class, my goal was to design a ‘What If’ modern battleship for the early 2010s. After all, this is what we could have had, if the US Navy hadn’t wasted all these years for essentially nothing.

I think it wouldn’t be too far stretched to say that a modern battleship would not have heavy guns but instead missiles in the role of primary anti-ship and land attack weapon. Missiles offer greater range, greater accuracy and greater potential for saturation attack over guns.
Additionally, anti-air could also be handed to the missiles – With the universal size of Mk 41 cells, the loadout could also flexibly balance between anti-air and anti-surface ratio, depending on mission profile.

As core of a battlefleet, similar to aircraft carriers, the battleship’s role would be fleet defense, with screens deployed to shield it, so I chose to only install a limited number of CIWS and ESSMs, as the role of these weapons are more close range self-defense. Still, having them and not needing them is better than needing them and not having them, so the ship still has 2 gatling guns, 2 RAM launchers and 4 decoy launchers.

The two Mk 45 guns are also mostly included because it’s just better to have more options. While they wouldn’t see regular use, they can still perform anti-air and shore bombardment support.

Two nuclear reactors power the 40 000 ton vessel, paralleling the propulsion method found on the Navy’s aircraft carriers. With a ship of such size, the additional performance and independence from refuelling justifies the additional construction cost.

Specifications:
Length: 259 m
Beam: 31.5 m
Height: 55.7 m

Armament:
2 Mk 45 Mod 4 127mm naval gun
2 Phalanx 20mm CIWS
2 RIM-116 RAM CIWS
416 SM-6 VLAA missiles in VLS
32 * 4 ESSM VLAA missiles in VLS
80 RGM-200 hypersonic cruise missiles in VLS
160 RGM-158 LRASM anti ship missiles in VLS
368 RGM-109 Tomahawk cruise missiles in VLS
making for a combined of 1056 VLS cells.

The in-game missile armament in particular actually deviates a bit from my head canon for the ship’s intended loadout. As I am limited by the missiles that are in the game, firstly all standard missiles (which I imagine would actually be a mix of SM-2ERs as the cheaper option, SM-6s as the more potent but more expensive version, and SM-3s for ballistic missile defense) are just represented by SM-6s. Secondly, there are no accurate representations of ASROCs currently in the game. So for the time being, the cells which I imagine would actually be filled by ASROCs house different missiles at the moment. Thirdly, I feel like the real value of a guided missile battleship would only show if it actually had a potent anti-ship weapon. Now I understand that the LRASM is somewhat controversial and there are people that argue it doesn’t need speed if it can avoid detection, but again, having unused option is better than having an unfullfilled necessity. So I used the YJ-23 from the H/PJ series weapon pack Vol2 mod to represent my version of an US hypersonic missile.

These are the other ships I used for the gallery images:
Midway Island ( https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3317708968 )
USS John Paul Jones ( https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2874297661 )
USS Gerald R. Ford ( https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2896705000 )
Callaghan class cruiser ( https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2997249259 )

I hope you have fun with her!