Newest Royal Navy warship weighs as much as 120 London buses The Royal Navy's newest offshore patrol vessel, HMS Forth, is now fitting out in Glasgow – and we're told she weighs as much as 120 London buses. Forth, the first of the RN's Batch 2 River-class patrol ships, was launched in mid-August after being loaded onto a 160-wheel remote control trolley. She was then driven at a …
My guess is badly. Given minaturisation, of both control systems and explosives, a relatively close launch of something distinctly unpleasant would be rather bad. On the other hand, the structure of these ships should be rather better designed to contain the damage - I doubt if they are built to deflect it in the manner of land based tanks.
"shoulder mount anti-ship missile"
Interesting idea; the smallest anti-ship missile that I could find any details about is the Nord Aviation/Aérospatiale SS.12, which masses 76 kg = 167 lb, so just about shoulder-able. Trouble is, it has 650 mm span cruciform wings half-way down the body, just about where you'd need to balance it on your shoulder. Next 'lightest' AS missile appears to be the Sea Skua at 145 kg. You really wouldn't want to be behind either of these when fired as both use a pretty hefty initial boost motor at launch. The SS.12 is wire-guided but the Sea Skua needs a targeting radar.
Any missile that is shoulder-launched can do no more than cosmetic damage to a ship. To properly damage a ship requires a warhead weighing tens of kilogrammes at least, and that's excluding the weight of the rest of the missile.
To deliver that warhead you need a large missile, or a torpedo, or a small boat with a bomb (an IED torpedo - see USS Cole in Yemen). As soon as you start using such weapons you're getting way past the capabilities of insurgents. Even Iran's swarm tactics requires lots of money, equipment and trained people.
she should be good to go around 2030.
Don't worry. That bit about installing complex systems is just journalistic licence. Despite the opportunity to make this a seriously armed small warship, the MoD have worked relentlessly to ensure that in common with most other RN ships of recent years, it will be pathetically under-armed. So, no missiles, no decent guns, no AD radar, no sonar, no depth charges. Whilst it can land a helicopter, there's no hanger and not much prospect of regular chopper operation. Total armament is a couple of machine guns and a single 30mm pop gun. And the range is OK, but speed is PATHETIC. Compare capabilities to an Israeli Sa'ar 5 and weep at the ineptitude of the MoD.
Some will say "it's only an inshore patrol boat". And they'd be right - at the moment, in peace time. But given the tiny number of serviceable big ships the navy have, and the fact that if there's a real war you need all the weapons you can get, it's yet another missed opportunity, and so slow and under-armed that there's no export potential.
My guess is that the "complex combat systems" are two dry wipe boards showing how many rounds the machine guns have left.
the River class was sold to both Thailand and Brazil
The Thai orders weren't for British built vessels, just a licence on the design. The Brazilian sales were a fire sale of a cancelled order by Trinidad. All in all it isn't exactly a glowing commendation of the thing is it? And those were the earlier, cheaper design (circa £150-180m). The batch 2 vessels are reportedly £350m, and for a few pennies more you could have a Blohm + Voss K130. Which has more guns, additionally has torpedoes, anti ship and anti aircraft missiles, mines, and has its own ship-borne drone.
F*** knows what goes through the minds of MoD ship planners, but the pea-brained retards have long forgotten that warships need weapons. Was the same story with every other class of warship the poor beggars of the Royal Navy have had for decades.
F*** knows what goes through the minds of MoD ship planners, but the pea-brained retards have long forgotten that warships need weapons. Was the same story with every other class of warship the poor beggars of the Royal Navy have had for decades
Decades? Think again. Go back to about 1776 and look at what the Navy had and what was proposed. They eventually got what was really needed. Then look again around 1812... I could go on but it gets redundant. Probably because they like to think they're still fighting the last war when the new one breaks out.
And so it goes....
Iain Stevenson, MD of BAE Systems Naval Ships, said: "For Forth to enter the water less than two years after construction started is hugely significant and sets the tone for the future of modern warship building.
Less than two years for something weighing only 120 doubledeckers? It's all relative.
Kudos for applying the correct measurement scales... however is El Reg missing suitable displacement measures? Should we allow El Reg to hijack another measurement for this undeniably important unit of measurement? :)
24 knots (arg, what non-El Reg unit is this?) compared to 20 knots... that's a fair gain but being the techo-geeks we are haunting El Reg, what gave it this improvement in speed?
Also, that's one big bastard "hangar" (I don't know what it's meant to be called) where the pic is showing the ship coming out from, how does that compare to the airship hangars, particularly compared to the recent Airlander.
Damn, I'm feeling curious today!
'24 knots (arg, what non-El Reg unit is this?) compared to 20 knots... that's a fair gain but being the techo-geeks we are haunting El Reg, what gave it this improvement in speed?'
I suspect it's mostly because it's about 11m longer. Everything else being equal a longer hull is faster, hence a Batch 3 Type 42 could easily outrun an earlier Batch 1 or 2 due to the extra length (14m), the engines were exactly the same.
Something to do with the wave-making resistance if I remember my degree correctly. Basically the ship's motion forms waves, the faster it goes the longer they get, at the point where a half wave length is the same as the ship's length the power required to go faster increases significantly.
Disclaimer, it's been a few years that explanation may be over-simplified.
Might I suggest converting knots into an easily understandable unit, "the top speed is nearly seven Thorpes."
The maths:
Ian Thorpe swims 400 m in around 3 minutes 40 seconds (220 s), equivalent to 1.82 m/s or 3.54 knots.
So a Thorpe is 3.54 knots, making 24 knots equivalent to 6.8 Thorpes.
Two years is only impressive if you compare it to more than two years. Those damned words of comparison. So what are those two years compared to and why. Was the speed of construction important. My first reaction was that two years is a lot for a ship that size.
I had to compare that with one of the worlds biggest cruisers, MS Oasis of the Seas.
Length: 362 m
Construction started: November 12, 2007
Launched: November 21, 2008
Weight: 100,000 tons
Draft: 9.3 m
Beam: 65 m
Place built: Turku, Finland
That is one year for 62 times more London buses.
Completing her toke one more year.
"MS Oasis of the Seas is an Oasis-class cruise ship owned by Royal Caribbean International. Her hull was laid down in November 2007 and she was completed and delivered to Royal Caribbean in October 2009.".
Could it be that when a shipping company order a ship they want it ASAP and turn to yards able to deliver. Ships like that cost +1b$.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS_Oasis_of_the_Seas
Considering that in Canada it's been years that we've ordered ships and they haven't even started cutting the steel yet.
You've got at least one, apparently :)
This is being built by BAe, given the difficulties encountered with the F-35 (and presumably from the Ae bit in their name, things that fly should sort of be their forte) if I were assigned to this I'd want to pack my water-wings the first few times at sea.
The shipbuilding parts were actually inherited from GEC when it "merged" with BAe to form BAE Systems. They were originally Yarrow Shipbuilders, Vickers Shipbuilding and Engineering, and Kværner Govan - nothing to do with the aircraft parts that came from BAe.
Officially the "BAE" (note all caps) part of the company name doesn't stand for anything - a bit like how "BG" doesn't mean "British Gas" and "BT" doesn't mean "British Telecom" any more. I suppose it makes sense seeing as how most of its business (and employees) are no longer British, and because it has interests in things other than aerospace these days.
From memory, Babylon 4 went back in time taking the human commander who turned into a menbari to fight the war, thereby putting his DNA into menbari which when he was captured later on during the (other) war, led the menbari to surrender because menbari don't kill menbari... in other words, a time paradox where effect comes before cause.
Genuinely curious about this. Why did we build this massive ship (contract stuff aside)? Somebody said it was patrolling safe seas, in which case, what's the need for it to be so big? Is it to enable longer journeys? So that it can perform better in choppy waters?
Could somebody break it down into dummy speak for me please? About the level of a simple strategic computer game like "Aircraft carriers to launch fighters but weaker in direct combat, Destroyer class ships to engage in naval combat with big guns, Corvettes speedy but weaker, this 1600 ton warship for...".
Firstly it's not a massive ship, it's really quite small, less than half the displacement of a frigate.
It's essentially for patrolling territorial waters (out to 200NM from the coast for the Exclusive Economic Zone, 12NM for more Sovereign stuff) so monitoring fishing activity, protecting offshore installations - oil and gas etc. stopping smugglers, that sort of thing. When they say patrolling safe sea areas, it's to make them safe, not because they are safe.
Although it says "offshore", it's basically a coastal patrol vessel (for patrolling our territorial waters).
They'll spend a lot of time hosting on-board guests from Customs and DEFRA, assisting them in Customs/anti-smuggling operations and fisheries protection.
Additionally, having a few smaller vessels knocking around is good for training.
After the last time they grounded a frigate it was suggested that there was a bit of a training gap - once upon a time we had lots of small coastal vessels, and young officers would get the opportunity to cut their teeth commanding a small vessel, before moving up to this sort of offshore vessel before they got a sniff at getting on the bridge of a larger frigate, destroyer or carrier.
More recently we've moved to having fewer coastal vessels, whose operations are directed by aircraft and satellite intelligence, which operationally is all around more efficient - an aircraft can cover a much larger area than a ship and since most of it is empty, you're better off doing aerial surveillance and just having one ship which is sent where it needs to be (instead of lots of ships covering the area).
The downside is fewer small ships gives you fewer places to post up-and-coming young officers for their first experience of command.
If you shape the pool carefully enough, a thimbleful of water would be sufficient to float it in*. I guess that a thimble is about 0.0043 Bulgarian Airbags or approximately 0.000000001 Olympic-sized swimming pools.
If you really wanted to push the boat out, you could easily manage to float it in the volume of a British Standard Egg Cup (a defunct official British measure that predated elReg standards by a few decades).
*I assumed that I could use a massive, but precise, 3D printer to create a boat shaped pool around it.
Pah! The daily fail and sun are pretty new and modern really, I wouldn't say that El Reg started it but El Reg has gone a long way to defining the standards:
So, what's the velocity of a sheep in a vacuum? (2007)
El Reg official units of measurement: Linguine, Jubs, Hiltons and all (2012)
...and no unit of measures would be complete without an online standards converter: The Reg online standards converter
Now go wash your mouth our young man and come back when you've studied the correct units of measure.
Nice to see some BritNat misprepresent things with a classic bit of Yoon propaganda.
The problem in the UK is that there are currently too many MOD yards and too few orders. So the money paid to BAE keeps English and Northern Irish Yards going just as much as Scottish yards. Still, why let facts get in the way of some bit of Little Englander bigotry.
These patrol boats may be "warships" but don't seem to be equipped for war at all. A brace of automatic cannons and/or machine guns and that's it. Where are the depth charges? Anti-aircraft missiles? Torpedoes? Surface to surface missiles?
Or it could be renamed the "RN Nigel Farage" ...
FFS, man, get a grip! It would be HMS nor "RN", and by the conventions of the Royal Navy it would be called Farage. It's only you bloody Yanks that do that whole name-and-middle-initial shit, as in the USS Elmer D Phud (to be the fourth of the Gerald R Ford class carriers, I hear).
Having said that, we should indeed have an HMS Farage. Launched by Sir Nigel Farage.
Winston Churchill in his role as Sea Lord wanted to name one of his Majesty's dreadnoughts HMS Oliver Cromwell to honour Cromwell as the great general he was. His Majesty was less keen on honouring someone who chopped off the head of Kings and turned it down, not just once but twice (just to make sure that Winston got the message).
So the possibility of full names is certainly there. No doubt if I had a hunt through my RN history books I could find some other examples.
When I were a lad, the RN's biggest warship displaced (not "weighed") as much as about 2,500 London buses. Moreover, they had powerful weapons and were armoured more heavily than a London bus - which I suspect this isn't. When I first saw the photograph, my first reaction was, "It's an MTB!" Bit it isn't - it hasn't got torpedoes.
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