Talk:USS Norfolk (DL-1)

For everyone's information, two of the later 3"/70 turrets are displayed next to the running track at Boca Raton Community High School in Boca Raton, Florida. The school is located at the corner of Glades Road and NW 15th. Both turrets are marked "USS Norfolk, DL-1" on the rear.69.165.175.130 06:50, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

Why the Norfolk was so big, and why it was the only one of it's class.

Take a look at this page... [| http://forums.davidweber.net/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=489].

Read the first (and long) entry, title "Belated authorial response to BBs (thanks Gena and David!)" also labeled "by Duckk  » Tue Mar 23, 2010 7:58 pm".

About half way down the quote (from David Weber) states... Space constraints were another huge (and steadily growing) factor in the 1950s and 1960s, because of the sheer volume consumed by the electronic systems involved, especially when those were vacuum tube technology, and the need to somehow provide sufficient generating capacity to simply power all those systems put yet another squeeze on the internal volume (and expense) of the vessels. To build a surface ship with the capabilities the Navy really wanted in a dedicated anti-submarine destroyer in 1949 required the USS Norfolk, which, at 5,600 tons standard, was darned near three times the displacement of a Fletcher-class destroyer (2,100 standard), one of the most powerful destroyers in the world when she was built to a design that was less then seven years old when Norfolk was laid down. (Norfolk was also so expensive that only one of her was ever built.) The situation was just as bad when the designers started looking at dedicated anti-air escorts, and the possibility of combining the needed qualities in a single hull which would be capable of performing both the anti-air and anti-submarine missions in anything much smaller than a battlecruiser hull simply didn't exist. Faced with limited funding, the Navy was forced to build much less capable units than it wanted and then to operate them in a sort of proto-net centric fashion, if you will. Dispersed platforms, each dedicated to a particular type of mission, functioning as an integrated whole in order to provide the required capabilities it couldn't afford to buy in single units. In other words, the carrier battle group.

If there is some informed "Gearhead" out there who can elaborate on this, and place the cited material in the article, this would be a Good Thing. LP-mn (talk) 20:53, 9 April 2010 (UTC) .