A larger ship has more slack capacity to perform other missions. You can house marines/special forces, you can ferry supplies, given the size of these things you can probably squeeze in some extra helos if you were so dedicated.
Additonally, larger ships get fucked up on the open ocean less. Talk to any one who's actually served in the navy. If you are leaving green water, you want to be on a larger ship. When Iran and Russia tried to deploy to Venezuela in the late aughts/early teens, the Iranian frigates were stuck there for a couple months to get repaired to the point they could make the journey back.
But the main thing, as frothing retards ignore, is the Trump Battleship and Casino is looking to be mostly missiles and power generation. This will not just mean lasers (if they ever become reality) but better RADAR and other sensors.
These ships are barely more than figments of imaginations. I haven't even seen proposed armoring, which is going to go a long way to determine how useful these ships would be as "battleships" in that you can't glass-cannon a battleship, you build them with the expectation they are going to need to take a very serious punch but remain in the fight. Speculation about the effectiveness of laser defense and RAM are slapfighting about nothing right now as they don't yet exist.
Which makes debate difficult because whether these ships are good or bad effectively hinges on that exact question of defensive capabilities.
Again, given what happened with the Zumwalt I believe there is lots of room for legitimate questions about the wisdom of going all-in on large displacement ship class as a platform for systems that have been in development for decades and are still not yet viable for production.
additionally there are non-tactical factors to consider with making a large surface combatant.
US shipbuilding is in bad shape. We make Carriers and A-Bs, and made one Zumwalt. Even if its just a couple ships that serve as "Super Burkes", its good to demonstrate the ability to make large ships.
For people going on about "Just build another aircraft carrier", aircraft need pilots which means you can't just send them into harm's way. Surface-launch terrain-following cruisemissiles are something you can send into harms way without no fallout if hostile AAD catches them. Having a ship that that dip into hostile waters, launch, and return will be vital. We can't always rely on subs/stealth for that, a ship that can do so openly and brazenly will be needed against China.
Granted having never seen a ship building schedule or how fucked or not fucked port logistics are, or knowing about the exact design considerations for large warships, I would rather see them try to make another Zumwalt or two with improvements from the past decade of learning, and lay down either an assault ship or carrier to serve as a dedicated hull for the emerging defensive technologies.
so maneuvering hypersonics do have a better chance at defeating laser-based active protection systems, similarly, naval cannons/coilguns have both a small (hard to spot & target), and really FUCKIN fast (by the time the laser would have zapped it, it already hit you) projectile
A railgun round would be virtually indestructible to laser systems unless they were insanely powerful, like "Sci-fi offensive weapon powerful". Lasers hitting missiles works because missiles are thin-skinned, full of various explosives, and have precison sensors.
That is, your laser just needs to melt through the missile's outter coating and it will probably lose aerodynamics in a way the system can't compensate, or for fast missiles aerodynamic forces will probably tear it apart.
Ratchet that up a notch, and if you can breech the fueltank or cause the warhead to detonate via heat, that will kill the missile.
And even if you can't do either of these, if you can blind or otherwise render inoperable the sensors, chance are the missile won't find its target.
None of these things affect a railgun round, its pure mass and the kinetic energy in said mass. There is nothing you can do except erode that mass.
We are also still very far away from hypersonics that aren't just ballistic missiles. The guidance packages aren't there. You need a system that can survive the forces and process input fast enough, and sensors of enough quality to be able to provide useful data while under that sort of strain.
I notice that none of the 9 people who negrated my post were able to provide a reasoning for why this ship makes sense, beyond "big ships look cool", which shows that they view national defense as a meme topic without practical relevance.
I notice you are melting down about Trump beasue the 8 threads you have to do can't contain your buttrage, and its simply not worth the effort to engage you with real arguments because you are a retard to who jacks it to AI BDSM porn you share publicly. You just want to melt down about Trump and will take any position that allows you to do that. If this had been a Biden-era project Trump had canceled, you'd be melting down repeating NPC talking points about how it degrades the USN's capabilities against China.
You are also a Eurofag.
You will never be a real military power.
You have no force projection, no expeditionary capability. Any UN peacekeeping missions you deploy are fake and half-hearted.
