I heard the newfangled engines were problematic, and I know they are definitely not suited for ocean voyages. As someone who didn't follow the program that closely, what other issues were there?
Aside from constant propulsion plant issues (engines and gearboxes) that get all the news articles, there's the issues of the cracking hulls. Each ship, including the new ones, have literally THOUSANDS of real time monitored
UNREPAIRABLE micro cracks that SIGNIFICANTLY sea state and maneuver restrict the individual hulls in a constantly degrading death spiral......to the point that some of them are so limited that they're "not even suitable for river boat day cruises" (direct quote from a report I read authored by one of the USN's leading design engineers that was ancillary documentation to our contract bid). Many of the hulls untie from the pier and head out of port for just long enough to burn enough fuel to take on fresh fuel to avoid having to de-fuel stuff that's sat in the tanks long enough that the .mil procedure would be to get rid of it by pumping it to a fuel recycler and to keep things 'working' long enough to prevent having to put equipment in preserved lay-up status.
I managed the technical crew that removed the Gen 1 monitor system and installed the modern Gen 2 systems in all the hulls.....including the new ones as delivered! We also did the expansion systems with new sensors after each annual inspection.
It's 'real time' monitored ashore by a full time encrypted datalink that the ship can NO LONGER interrupt or interfere with anymore(for 'reasons') short of going cold iron, and even then we installed an integrated UPS with about 24 hours of battery life. It monitors ships performance, sea state, and every one of those cracks as they continue to propagate.....and what the CO does/does not do according the engineering limits, to endanger his ship.
I also managed the production crew that built, integrated, and tested for delivery ALL the wiring harnesses for all but the first 3 sets of ASW and MCM modules. There are ........issues. Not only with specs, but performance and shipboard integration that significantly hamper actual effective operation. I've had more than one OPS O posit that that they could probably better perform ASW missions by tying sailors to ropes, throwing them overboard, and hauling them up every 5 minutes to report what they saw down there. Well documented issues in several different Naval and defense industry periodicals.
We built the prototype of the auxiliary gun module as well (again, my crew built all the wiring harnesses and did the integration). All but impossible to build as spec'd. Performance testing in land based superstructure modules showed that the structural stresses of firing the gun module would, in short order, probably destroy itself and the ship it was mounted on. No further gun modules were produced.
And Fincantieri is NOT what one would call an 'above board' contractor with quality lower than a skid row shoebox. The got the FFG(X) program, God help us all!
Austal (who makes the ill fated Independence class) is orders of magnitude better quality (albeit they were handed a flawed design, and to their credit pushed back on it from 0800 day 1) and more ethical in their business practices.
Like I said, all open source. I can elaborate more DM so as not to clutter up this thread.
Bottom line, the LCS (Freedom and Independence) class of US Litoral combat ships are garbage death traps for the Sailors onboard, and are rife with problems nothing short of scrapping the program is going to fix.
