Posted on 05/08/2007 3:32:56 PM PDT by Enchante
The Royal Navy showed off its largest and most powerful attack submarine Tuesday, a month before the over-budget, overdue vessel is to be launched.
Military officials say the HMS Astute will be able to circumnavigate the planet without surfacing, and its nuclear reactor is designed to last for the vessel's 25-year operational life, meaning it will never need to be refueled.
The Astute is due to be launched from the BAE Systems Inc. shipyard in Barrow-in-Furness, northwest England, on June 8 and to enter service in January 2009.
The sub is to be followed by two more Astute-class submarines, Ambush and Artful. Together the navy estimates they will cost about $7.2 billion, more than $2 billion over the original estimate.
The project is also years behind schedule. The HMS Astute originally was due to enter service in June 2005, but in 2002 the government said the date had been pushed back to 2006. In 2005, the Ministry of Defense said it would enter service by 2009.
Nearly 40,000 acoustic tiles, designed to mask the submarine's sonar signature, have still to be attached to the ship's 318-foot hull, which is 30 percent longer than that of the submarines now in use.
At $2.4 billion each they’re coming in more expensive than our Virginia-class subs which (last I saw) are around $2 billion each?? Of course, costs per unit soar when all the R&D has to be divided only among 3-4 units produced. Couldn’t the US and UK find a way to collaborate on some such projects, or are the classified issues and defense industry priorities just too hard to resolve?? We did work together on the Trident missile program, yes?
I’d be interested to know how this stacks up to US attack subs, such as Los Angeles Class.
Sounds (?) like a lot of dead weight...
Yes, and if anyone can make comparisons with the latest USN attack boats, the Virginia class, that would be of great interest here too. Here’s something on the Virginia class:
http://www.naval-technology.com/projects/nssn/
I think we ended up only building 3 of the Seawolf class due to costs?? Is the Virginia class a reduced version of the Seawolf, or something much different?
At least the Britts can build one and not blow themselves up with it.
Now as for the russians?
Nah, those are the screen doors.
LMAO
Here's a photo of it firing a torpedo during tests in the Antarctic
If they don’t work, they could always wait for a new leftwing government in Canada, and sell them to that country.
Ordered: March 1997
Builder: BAE Systems Marine
Laid down: January 2001
Launched: 8 June 2007 (planned)
Commissioned: 2009 (planned)
Status: Under construction
General Characteristics
Displacement: 7800 tonnes submerged
Length: 97 m (323 ft)
Beam: 11.3 m (37 ft)
Draught: 10 m (33 ft)
Propulsion: Rolls-Royce PWR2 reactor (with full submarine life core), MAN (Paxman) 1900 kilowatt diesel generator
Speed: 29 knots (54 km/h) submerged
Range: circumnavigation 40 times without refuelling
Complement: 98 officers and men normally, capacity of 109
Sensors and processing systems: Thales Underwater Systems Sonar 2076, Atlas Hydrographic DESO 25 depth-finding echosounder, Two Thales Optronics CM010 periscopes, Raytheon Systems Ltd Successor IFF system
Armament: six 21 inch (533 mm) torpedo tubes, 38 Spearfish torpedoes, UGM-84 Harpoon and Tomahawk Block III cruise missiles, naval mines
Series too..!!
The British are officially scraping the bottom of the barrel to get adjective names for ships.
Well, actually, they scraped it during the 1940’s when the first HMS Astute came into service.
LoL!
fyi
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.