The Technology Powering Navy Ship Launched Hypersonics, Lasers & Radar Systems

By Kris Osborn – Warrior Maven

Navy ships will be firing massive, high-powered, scalable lasers to strike enemy ships, destroy drones and possibly even burn through the metal of an inbound ballistic missile or ICBM. 

Future surface ships will be operating new generations of highly sensitive, long-range high energy-density radar systems 35-times more precise than existing systems. 

Destroyers, cruisers and other warships will be firing larger, faster, longer-range and more precise missiles, even including deck-launched hypersonics, new sensors, high-speed, AI-enabled computing and command and control systems will change current paradigms for maritime warfare by exponentially improving lethality, range and manned-unmanned multi-domain networks.

Technological advances have enabled developers to engineer weapons with greatly improved capacity, however many of them rely upon much greater amounts of expeditionary power. Therefore, identifying innovations which support the need for expeditionary high-density energy output, storage and distribution, has for years been a major focus for Navy developers. 

A ship’s electric drive propulsion system can help support this, which is part of why electric-drive systems are built into Navy’s Zumwalt-class destroyers and other surface platforms. Additional on-board power-generation capacity, fortified by large generators, can of course be measurably enhanced by innovations with improved on-board power management technology.

Video Above: How the US Navy Can Fast-Track Building 500 Warships