What belongs on a 40,000-ton surface combatant

What would a 40,000-ton modern surface combatant look like?

The answer places it beyond the suggested 20,000-to-25,000-ton heavy-cruiser analogue and imagines a missile battery of at least a thousand VLS cells.

The estimate offered for a modern heavy-cruiser analogue is about 20,000 to 25,000 tons. A 40,000-ton ship would be larger than a Kirov and larger than some aircraft carriers. The answer therefore imagines an exceptionally large missile battery. Its suggested benchmark of at least a thousand VLS cells is a deliberately expansive expectation for the hypothetical ship, rather than a worked design.