It's been well known for quite sometime that the Hunter class is actively paying for such a sizable mast/array alongside its 32 VLS cells by basically eating the entire weight margins for the design, leaving effectively nothing left for future additions. There has also been concerns regarding stability, weight and speed being affected to worrisome degrees.
Its a bigger ship, more beam and length. We've been over this. There were some sacrifices for those extra missile (among them speed, maneuverability, power, seakeeping).
The large diamond at the bottom of the pattern is an L-Band addition to the normal CEAFAR S-band (diamonds across the top). That's to provide long range air search capability to the radar, which will liberate the S-band to do more tracking, targeting tasks.
Is the addition of the L band worth it in your opinion?
Damn, that’s a load of batteries! You must one of Milwaukee’s favourite customers.
L band is on German, Dutch and Danish AAW frigates. UK uses L band on their carriers. L band is common enough for long range air volume search. NATO doctrine recommends one radar for volume search and one for tracking, and ships that like to do very long range air search use L band. I don't have an exhaustive list of ships that use L band but it does have its uses, like tracking low earth orbit objects (ballistic missiles) for example.
This I did not know! I'm fairly familiar with the early years of CEAFAR but stopped tracking it (pun intended) a while ago. Thanks for the info, seems like I need to get back on that research rabbit hole.
My comment was aimed towards the River class, not the Hunter. I still find it puzzling that there is no design margin for an additional 8 cells. Publicly available information puts the weight of an 8-cell Mk41 VLS strike length module around 32000 lbs. Assuming those cells were loaded with 8 SM-2s, each weighing 3225 lbs, the total extra weight of those 8 cells plus loadout is 57,800 lbs, or about 28.9 imperial tons (26.2 metric tons) By all measures the weight of the Rivers is substantially less than the Hunters, and the weight of the SPY7s are also less than the CEAFAR arrays (weight up high being the most important for stability), so it's a bit puzzling. I have heard from some who are in the "know" that this was a decision made to minimize changes for speed of construction rather than a design limitation. If true, I would expect to see the batch 2 ships with at least 32 cells, and hopefully more.
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