Tanker - Builder
I always like this design . It seems the Navy was experimenting with deckhouse placement and seaworthiness .
They really were.
The need to build the missiles to suit the action meant needing hangar-like spaces to make up the parts. Those spaces then had to be aligned to the launcher rail loading stations. Which meant getting them up near to main and weather decks.
To keep things complicated, the various missile parts needed elevators to draw them out of magazines (doubly true for Special Weapon warheads which needed even more magazine security).
And a lot of this was the Venn diagram of missile CEP, estimated time and detection range of potential enemies, flight times and the like, which necessitated either very large warheads or special weapons. The combined missile weights then requiring additional boosters to get them to target, which became one more thing to assemble on the missiles to demand. Boosters were also requireed to get the rirds up to speeds where their ramjet engines would run, too.
Improvements in technology shrank the size of guidance packages. Whic halso hugely improved CEP. Also, better rocket fuels allowed reductions in airframe size and need for boosters. Better refinement of potential enemy targets also helped, if largely by reducing the need for special weapons for War loading, too.
Which allowed standardizing on a standardized missile which could be preloaded and staced in a magazine which was also the launch array. Which reduced the number of moving parts and crew manning and the like, but, mostly reduced the need for deckhouses.
Which is a complicated esthetic for me. Ok, we don't get to poke all those pretty blue-and-white dummies up o nthe rails. But, there's a menance in that nice flat deck with its unassuming doors seeming more intense than splinterplate deckhouses with funny angles and lots of empty space seemingly wasted.
Bainbrdige was always one of my faves, a sence of barracuda to that long bow. An elegance we'd not see again until the Californias were launched. Which had a nice symmetry with the implied power of a bluefin tuna.