Old concept for the Gawron
Posted on 02/24/2012 11:38:14 AM PST by sukhoi-30mki
Poland Scraps ‘Wasteful’ Warship Project
The Polish government has terminated a warship building project seen as a drain on the nation’s resources, Prime Minister Donald Tusk said on Friday.
“Vast amounts of money are still being spent on the Polish military that simply have nothing to do with defense,” Polish Radio External Service quoted him as saying.
The prime minister said the project will be terminated “despite opposition from the navy” as it was “senseless” to maintain an enterprise that costs 30 million zloty a year (7.2 million euro).
Poland launched the project in 2001, under Prime Minister Leszek Miller.
It was initially planned that Poland would build six so-called Gawron (Rook) Corvettes: small, state of the art warships that would be capable of combating ships and submarines as well as taking part in rescue operations.
The cost was initially set at 250 million zloty per vessel (60 million euro), but the project then changed to three vessels at a cost of 1.5 billion zloty each (360 million euro each). However, after more than a decade, not one warship has been built.
Old concept for the Gawron
Seems like shipbuilding, naval or commercial, should be a good money maker and job creator for Poland. Lots of smaller countries Navies could use such a ship.
“Gawron”? It’s a Klingon ship?
Crap! It looks just like our Littoral Combat Ships (LCS). The LCS program is a complete failure although they are now building LCS-5. They don’t work, the mission modules don’t work, there is too small a crew, and they fall apart once at sea. There were to be 55 of them.
It sounds like the development phase put the cart before the horse.
The mission modules should maybe have been developed first, possibly using facilities on our aircraft carriers some how, until the modules themselves were workable and the needs of the ship needed to host them were better understood - by the testing experience. Then those proven needs could have been incorporated into the LCS design.
As it is, it would seem the modules have to conform to a ship that was not designed with their needs in mind, because their needs were defined as little more than concepts and on-paper-only mission protocols - as there was little known about real-time experince with the module concept.
The propulsion system is possibly a similar story.
The Israelis have been considering a stretched variant of the same design for their air defense corvette role. If built, it would be a very impressive ship. Unfortunately, it appears even their programme is in cold storage due to funding issues.
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.