A makeover for top-heavy Navy ships?

• Jurisdiction: United States
• Date: 01 April 2008
• Author: Jean, Grace V.

* If one looks at photos of modern day warships and compares them to conceptual drawings of future Navy vessels, the most striking difference is the lack of antennas on the advanced gray hulls.

It's not that future ships won't need communications, radars and electronic warfare systems. But there will be fewer masts and, as a result, noticeably less antennas and arrays poking out the tops of the deckhouses. And if the work of Office of Naval Research scientists comes to fruition, those "forests" of antennas might one day disappear altogether as radio frequency apertures are integrated into the hulls and superstructures of the ships themselves.

"We're really trying to bring about a new way of designing Navy topsides," says Betsy DeLong, deputy for transition and innovative naval prototypes in the office's command and control technologies department.

As the demand for electronic technologies aboard combat vessels grows, the sheer number of antennas that have popped up on warships has doubled in the last decade. Surface combatants that once carried only 40...