Three Hulls of Fury

USS Independence in a drydock.

I stumbled upon this photo while browsing through Google Reader and it stopped me in my tracks, pretty bad@ss! (It looks even more bad@ass if you click to enlarge)

That is a photo of the USS Independence LCS-2, it's the flagship for the U.S. Navy's new Littoral Combat Ships (I didn't know what littoral meant either, it basically means 'close to shore'). It's a little over 400ft in length and is designed for special mission use. Unfortunately it doesn't have Destroyer Class amount of firepower, it's geared towards defense, but it's still impressive, and its trimaran design is very striking.

Here's a few more photos.

At Night.

In Water (well, almost)

The ship has a missile launcher, machine gun, torpedoes, and loads of cool defensive measures, but I'm disappointed that the gun you see mounted on the front isn't a Phalanx.

This guy (the Phalanx) is basically the last round of defense against missiles. It uses good ol' American brute force, it's self tracking/targeting and can pump out 4,500 rounds per minute (75 rnds per second) of 20mm armor piercing tungsten or depleted uranium core kinetic energy projectiles (that's nerd for bullets)...