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Engineers from NUWC Division Newport's Missile and Platform Systems Department have successfully teamed with their counterparts at Naval Surface Warfare Center, Dahlgren Division and private industry to demonstrate a universal and modular launcher concept for surface ships. This multi-mission launcher system, known as Modular Horizontal Launcher System (MHLS), would meet the over-the-side launch requirements of next generation surface combatants. The concept has projected benefits for existing combatants as.well as for other surface ships. The MHLS conceptual design emphasizes reduced manning, maintenance and life cycle costs and employs commercial-off-the-shelf/non-developmental item (COTS/NDI) technologies to further reduce cost and accelerate system introduction.
MHLS is a module-based system (Figure 1) having common mechanical and electrical interfaces to both the ship and associated fire control systems. The architecture's flexibility allows the distribution of scaleable unmanned modular stations throughout various positions on the ship and supports multiple mission areas simultaneously (Figure 2).
MHLS will use ready-to-fire, all-up-round, 'smart' launch canisters that serve as both launch tube and shipping container (Figure 3). These canisters are housed in unit size cartridges fixed to the modular stations in either horizontal or inclined orientations.
The canisters can support...