The Galena has already been mentioned, so I'd like to nominate another Civil War era vessel - the Casco class monitor:
You may notice that this monitor is missing something rather important. Well, there's a reason for that.
The Casco class was to be a shallow draft river monitor, designed with the intent of being significantly simpler and faster to produce than the Passaic class. John Ericsson did the initial design work, but reorganizations by the Navy placed Alban C. Stimers, Ericsson's old assistant, above him. Stimers had ideas of his own on how the Casco should be built, and kept overriding Ericsson, who eventually quit. Now fully in control, Stimers made significant design modifications - even worse, his office kept making alterations to the plans while the ships were in the process of being built, leading to ever growing delays and cost overruns
It was only when the first of the Casco class finally came off the slips that it was discovered just how badly Stimer and his designers had screwed up. The vessels only had three inches of freeboard, and that was without guns, or stores. The rear of the ship was submerged even in harbor, and it made less than half of its design speed. An attempt was made to salvage some use of them by building the hulls up to increase freeboard, as well as stripping them of their turrets, but of the 20 ships built, most were immediately mothballed and subsequently scrapped.
True but they're still crap ships, also gotta rip out the missile battery as I don't think CG's are meant to have those.
Some cutters during the Cold War were fitted with Harpoons, or modified to accept them on short notice. And the National Security Cutters were designed but not fitted for a heavier war load. Not that it really matters, as only a handful of Surface Warfare Modules were fitted to LCSs.
Since that require removal of a single Mark 49 RIM launcher on both subclasses it is about a three day yard job (the rest of the system can stay since there is "space and weight saved" policy common on all USCG cutters dating back decades).
Honestly I'm simply trying to find a way to keep them from being the fastest harbor tugs in U.S. naval history. It is either that so use 'em up in SinkEx since sending them into a even a medium risk environment is tantamount to premeditated murder.
The current plan seems to be a hope that the Mine Warfare Module eventually makes it into production, and to then use most of them as minesweepers, something the navy is extremely short on.
You mean they never installed the VCS?? Talk about your useless weapon.
Their originally planned vertical launch missile system, the
NLOS, was cancelled by the Army, leaving the Navy in a lurch. After that, the Surface Warfare Module substituted racks for 8 Hellfire missiles. Not exactly in the same category. There have been a few experiments with mounting Harpoon canisters though.