Posted on 05/31/2019 8:12:22 AM PDT by sukhoi-30mki
There is nothing in service yet that will compare to the Type 26. It is the best design for anti-submarine warfare bar none, this has been the RN’s speciality since the cold war. they aren’t in service yet, but they are under construction, so the design is ready to begin construction. I’m pretty sure BAe Systems will have learned from the Type 45 engine issue, but to be fair, the MoD is partly at fault, because they didn’t specify this requirement and it was assumed when they were designed in the late 90s that they would be spending most of their time in the North Atlantic rather than in the warmer equatorial waters of the Middle East (contemporary planners wouldn’t have imagined that we’d be re-opening a Royal Navy Base in Qatar and moving back there).
Good catch - no, I meant ‘Lorenz’, the XOR cipher used by German high command.
‘Lorentz’ is the physicist.
Ahh!
yes but wasn’t sure!
thanks for clarifying!
“I meant Lorenz” = “I should have typed Lorenz, but I’m an idiot”
If it works out, we can buy them later. We neither have the time (due to the failure of the LCS) nor the money (due to the Zumwalts) to spend on waiting for the Type 26 to hit the water and get the bugs worked out.
We also don’t need to find out that the Type 26 has a nasty Type-45-like surprise hidden away due to similar MoD silliness.
Agreed - it’s no good buying something that doesn’t have a track record.
If - if - another model fits all role requirements then there’s no sense in making the perfect the enemy of the good. Especially when the ‘perfect’ hasn’t been tested yet.
The only reason for holding out for a T26 is if no current ship fits the role and tender requirements.
Yes, that I understand fully. And sadly the American companies building ships and aircraft want years and decades for their time-to-market. We need months.
Saying that, I suppose FReeper experts should look dispassionately at the alternative offerings, such as the ‘Fregata Europea Multi-Missione’.
Do they measure up?
Needs torpedoes. And no, we shouldn’t buy a damned thing from the Brits since their government and intel agencies were part of the 2016 coup attempt.
They better feel lucky we even drink tea.
To be fair, all those companies *are* having to start from scratch and warship design does indeed take years.
Ah, you know who else was part of the 2016 coup attempt?
Your government.
And who masterminded that coup attempt? Who gave orders to MI6?
Your President, and his advisors.
Not to put you on the spot here, but are you going to give up buying stuff from America?
Or will you recognise that the true enemy is the Deep State, on both sides of the Atlantic?
If we had more time and money we could simply wait before considering the Type 26 and all the other ships that are currently on the drawing boards. But we don’t and we can’t; we need ships now.
There’s also the issue that of late we’ve been trending more towards the German WW2 model for our armed forces - very few copies of a limited number of resource intensive wunderweapons, supposed to be all singing, all dancing - which was buried under the American and Soviet models. Good enough vehicles produced in staggering numbers and thrown at the Germans in those same numbers. We all remember which model of armed force won, right?
We need a good enough frigate and we need to make it in enormous numbers - the spiritual successor to the Fletcher class.
To be fair, most modern surface combatants fire ASROC-like torps out of missile cells and not old-style torpedo tubes.
Which sounds like a good plan - in a war against a near-equal combatant it seems wise to avoid ships that are too expensive to risk against e.g. land-based missiles.
If you have a large navy, armed with the naval equivalent of the T34 then that seems to be a superior model for absorbing materiel damage.
We should look at the increases in invisible costs though. Fuelling, harbourage, crew pay and (gulp) pensions.
Maybe that’s the driver behind high tech + low crews. Pensions ate General Motors alive. Would a heavily crewed US Navy end up as a pension company with warships?
As noted, most of the frigate designs being evaluated for FFG(X) use automation extensively and have surprisingly small crew compliments. Not so great for damage control and prize crews, buuuut you can get more hulls in the water for the same amount of crew. Also, less casualty risks per hull.
A horde of frigates would also be an answer to the Chinese Type 22 missile boat swarms - the Type 22 is designed (in part) to swarm a single large target or concentrated group of targets and unload 4-8 shipkillers per hull in a tsunami of missiles to saturate and overload CBG defenses. And they made 83 of the damn things so far. A couple hundred frigates coming over the (radar) horizon, fighting datalinked with networked target assignment and spraying clouds of anti-missile missiles would solve that problem rather quickly.
Doesn’t matter. It’s different that a foreign government decided to return to it’s default status as an adversary and attack our government.
And the answer to not buying American isn’t right. The answer is to disband the CIA and FBI.
We don’t need to do the Brits any favors right now. At a bare minimum they need to own up, and extradite Steele and his superiors.
Good point about Asroc although that seem tailored against subs.
Missiles are better shipkillers for surface combatants than torpedoes these days. You have to get awful close to your target to be able to use a torpedo from a surface combatant these days. At least with USN torps. The Russian Shkval torp, not quite so much.
For those who may not know ...
The VA-111 Shkval torpedo and its descendants are supercavitating torpedoes originally developed by the Soviet Union. They are capable of speeds in excess of 200 knots.
Good. Makes sense so far.
Let’s examine that small ship role. They take hits and are designed to be relatively cheap metal.
Each unit within this fleet is not very defensible: they don’t have individual Aegis or similar. They can’t individually defend themselves from e.g. cruise missiles.
The concept is networked attack and defence: perhaps these “Spktyr” class frigates act in concert with high value Frigates with classic Aegis.
All of which sounds similar to LCS. Wasn’t that supposed to be a networked platform?
But maybe LCS wasn’t low cost per unit?
We should maybe examine why LCS is being deprecated. I read that it was because LCS units have low individual survivability.
Which of course they do, but it turns out that that’s a feature, not a bug.
Maybe some FReeper can chime in on why LCS doesn’t work.
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