Know Your BBGN
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Why not make them nuclear powered?
The U.S. Navy says its future Trump class battleships are now set to be nuclear-powered. This is a huge development that will impact the cost and complexity of the design. With those issues in mind, now-former Secretary of the Navy John Phelan had said this was “unlikely” to happen just four weeks ago.
The Navy announced its intention to fit a nuclear propulsion system to the Trump class warships in its latest annual shipbuilding plan, which was released earlier today. The document also refers to these future large surface combatants as BBGNs, or nuclear-powered (N) guided-missile (G) battleships (BB). USNI News was first to report on this development.
More here. There’s really not any particularly good reason to build ships this large and NOT make them nuclear… especially given that the design is sufficiently spartan at the moment that you would expect a bunch of power-hungry add-ons over the design-construction-upgrade process.
The delivery date for the first ship is now 2036. I’d say that’s optimistic, in the sense that I don’t expect that even one of these ships will ever serve in the United States Navy… but I suppose that rebellions are built on hope. That being said, why not ask for everything if it’s all make believe anyway?