The Sea Control Ship (SCS)

[Moonboy242]

Time to stir up the pot again. Anyone remember this:



It's one of the many different Sea Control Ship concepts explored by the US Navy. The idea was to build a lot of smaller ships for convoy escort, anti-submarine patrol, and other missions where risking a supercarrier wasn't required. A few years later the US Navy sold those plans to Spain (Spain sold them to Thailand) and they became this:



Is it better to have a lot of smaller ships that can be easily replaced, or a few large ships that cannot? Are the US Navy supercarriers "too many eggs in one basket"? Weapons free... You may fire at will.

[Tracy White]

It depends on the nation and what they can afford. For many countries, even a small carrier is too many eggs in one basket.

[Admiral John Byng]

Well the US Navy has more carriers than the rest of the world combined (I think) so they are having their cake and eating it.

[James Hood]

When the concept came up in the late 70s, it certainly was an interesting variant on the CVE.

In this opinion, VTOL fixed wing high performance aircraft never "grew" to the expectations of the SCS. The Sea Harrier and AV-8B were "about as good as it gets."

However now with high-capability UAVs...?

[ussafs3]

Rockwell was building the next generation VTOL fighter for the Navy, The XFV-12, that was part of the SCS equation, but it turned out to be a huge disappointment and was canceled. That pretty much killed the SCS concept.

[Geoff B]

Yeap the XFV-12 was a bit of a farce, its a pity the Convair(Gen Dynamics) 200 didn't get the development funding as the technology was probably more viable and would have given the US a VTOL aircraft similar in configuration to the Yak-141 but about 10 yrs earlier (plus would have probably taken the F-35B out of the JSF program too !)

Anyway the Sea Control Ship was a nice little ship design and a fun one to build:-