I want to start this off by asking which ship is more powerful and has more AAW, land attack, and BMD capability, the Ticonderoga class cruiser or the Arleigh Burke class destroyer.
Largely they are comparable, both have the same overall equipment but differ in a lot of details. SPY on the Tico's are separated into 2 deck houses while everything on a Burke is contained in one, the Signal Processor for SPY is much lower in the hull than in the TICO, overall the Burkes are much nicer ships to ride on than the Tico's however the Tico has a higher radar horizon. The Burke is all steel (except an aluminum mast and ladders while the Tico is steel hull with an aluminum superstructure. The Tico has an additional 5 inch gun that is being upgraded in the Cruiser Mod program to the newer 5/64 and is getting SPQ-9B however they are also ditching the secondary air search radar.
BMD wise they are comparable since for the most part they have the same CND suite.
Ticonderoga class: 122 missiles
Arleigh Burke class: +90 missiles
Zumwalt class: 80 missiles
Depends on what the mission set is, if it is plane guard your load out will be mostly SM-2's with about a dozen tomahawks and a handful of VLA thrown in, if it is independent steaming your load out of Tomahawks will be larger. Both ships have sufficient number of VLS cells and I've heard of ships deploying with several cells being empty, additionally the USN does not have enough missiles in inventory to fill every ship they are rotated through deploying ships.
Can the Navy get away with replacing the 122 cell Tico with a 96 cell Burke and still perform the same combat capability? Don't both ships perform the same role?
In general the Tico's stick closer to the carrier more than a Burke. I did 3 deployments on two different Burkes and every single time we were independent of the carrier. The larger number of cells means that the Tico will be more versitile than a Burke but realistically no post cold war situation can easily be imagined where a Tico will empty its magazine.
The Navy isn't getting rid of the Tico's any time soon, all the Cruisers are getting a comprehensive upgrade that will allow them to serve at least another 15 or so years or more if need be.
I think it should also be noted that the Burkes weighing in at 8300-9200 tons, over 500 ft long and carrying a huge arsenal of 90-96 missiles, they are larger and more heavily armed than many previous ships classified as cruisers, that weighed in at 7500-9000 tons and carried anywhere from 65-80 missiles.
Those older ships used aluminum super-structures, had older less efficient mechanical launchers that were space intensive and required a lot of maintenance.
If you look at the history of Destroyers the weight and equipment goes up with each class even though the role in the fleet stays the same. In Friedmans excellent history of US destroyers he lists some Aegis concepts that tried to keep space and weight in line with then in service destroyers and it could be done but the settup would be so austere it wasn't worth it so the USN had no choice but to go larger to get a missile fit out that makes sense with the capibilities Aegis brought to the table back in the 70's and 80's.
A lot of those older ships were initially classified as "Destroyer Leaders" or "Frigates" and were only re-classified as cruisers when the DL class was phased out and "Frigate" definition was changed to be more in line with international practices.
Previous cruisers such as the Albany, Leahy, Bainbridge, Belknap, Truxtun, California, and Virginia class cruisers all have smaller displacements or about the same as the DDG-51 Burke class destroyers and had slightly smaller missile arsenals than the Burkes.
Aluminum super structures, no armored spaces and lighter combat system.
The Burkes are even comparable to the first 5 CG-47 Tico class cruisers weighting in at 9000-9500 tons with 88 missiles for the CG-47s compared to 9200 tons for the Flight IIA Burkes with 96 missiles.
No. The Burkes, especially the Flight IIA's are superior in every way than the Block 0 Tico's. The USN looked at upgrading them and decided it wasn't worth it, I don't remember the specifics but the original SPY-1A's didn't get several ORDALTS and field changes that CG-52-58 got so they were less upgradable, and if they would of replaced the twin-arm-bandits with VLS it would of been a smaller loadout than a Burke, and the hangar could only accept LAMPS MK-1, so they were tossed.
For the last 10 or so years of their career most of them were doing anti-drug ops down in the Caribbean and one was in Japan and was forbidden from going to the Gulf.
The Arleigh Burkes and Japanese Kongo class should both be classified as cruisers rather than destroyers due to the mazzive size and fighting power.
Maybe but the Burkes fill the traditional destroyer roles and the Kongo's are called such for political reasons.
I haven't been following Burke Flight III news recently. Are they actually replacements for the CG(X)s or are they just interim replacements until we have something better. From what I've read so far, the Flight IIIs could be an an Atago/Sejong the Great combination with AMDR. The Atagos have command facilities and the Sejongs have vls space for 128 missiles (quad-packed essms not factored in).
The USN has not issued any specs even though AMDR is widely assumed to be on the ship it is still speculation.
Is there any general trend to the mix between quad pack ESSM and Standard rounds? ESSM has become such a powerful missile in its own right and quad packing massively increases capacity. Or is the pressure for VLS coming from land attack missiles?
The ships going through Destroyer-Mod and Cruiser-Mod are getting one 8 cell block forward and aft upgraded to handle ESSM, so yes.
