You do *not* want a nuclear reactor in a surface combatant - you puncture one in a shooting match and it's a total goat f*ck.
Friedmans US destroyers book brought up a problem with nuclear surface combatants that I never thought of before. It makes them more balance critical and that can affect future upgrades. Basically with a nuke plant there is not large amounts of fluid (fuel) to transfer between tanks to keep the trim adjusted if you add or remove weight instead ballast would need to be added in a different part of the hull. Not a show stopper but just an additional issue.
It's spacious and roomy, meaning it'll be easy to work in and around, much easier to handle damage control and evacuate casualties. Assuming the divisions in ventilation and water tight compartments have been well thought out (and I have no evidence to suggest otherwise) then it looks like a solid leap forward.
I'd say ditch Flight III and just tweak this one personally.
A spacious CIC with extra consoles and the room that can embark a DESRON staff, Flag staff or other additions (Marine gunfire support staff?) for a particular mission is a nifty feature. Embarking them on a Burke is a pain for everyone since there are not enough consoles or space for everyone to operate comfortably. The Burkes were never really designed to operate with an embarked staff since at the time of their design the staff would be embarked on a ship with enough room (a Spruance, or whatever replaced them, aka a DDG-100), since Rummy disposed of the Sprucans early Burkes became the only option.
Until the USN decides what it REALLY wants the Flight III is an important filler design just to keep the yards busy doing something useful, letting them shut down wouldn't be a good thing.
I do wonder if that will happen. Maybe just one gun, aegis, bmd, more vls. A few basic cost reduction measures. They will have plenty of space/power for upgrades, lasers, rail guns, radars etc. with lower crewing requirements they should be cheaper to operate by about half.
Now the thing is built I think stake holders will quickly see the value in it. With flight iii looking pretty expensive and definitely a last century ship, with very little/no growth potential.
Keep the engineering plant and the PVLS and ditch everything else. AMDR hooked to a variant of CND and a standard LWG gun or two.
No matter what the USN build the armchair admirals will hate it.
Flight IIa was already up against it's margins for growth and the USN has a well established inability to do "just enough" so I think it was always obvious that the feature set would creep. Doing a warmed over IIa never seemed realistic to me because of that. I hope they'll rethink terminating DDG at 3 ships, put it that way.
Right now the plan is for the first batch to be Flight IIA's with Baseline 9 and some other upgrades. Flight III is still several years away since AMDR isn't even developed yet.
The problem is "just enough" doesn't play well with the US Congress. They tend to see "just enough" as "not enough".
More on the Zumwalt. Interesting info on the computing complex employed on the ship. The bridge looks like a Hollywood B-movie set
It looks to be the most comfortable posting at sea for even the lowest-ranked seaman with amenities to envy.
Inside The Zumwalt Destroyer | Popular Science
That isn't the bridge, it is another example of the media getting it wrong. That is a CIC mockup using COS equivalent consoles (Dell monitors and tower) for software testing and training.
http://surfwarmag.ahf.nmci.navy.mil/feature_ddg_1000.html
At the bottom of that page they have an image of what the completed CIC should look like. The consoles look like the same ones Aegis Baseline 9 uses, which makes sense.
