Back in October, I linked to an article which told the sad story of the Royal Navy’s most expensive class of unarmed warships, the Type 45 destroyers. In November, I linked to another sad story about the £1.1bn+ lead ship of this class breaking down in mid-Atlantic and having to make an emergency stop in Halifax for repairs.
In the first bit of good news about the Type 45’s, they’re now finally getting their primary missile systems into service:
HMS Daring, first of the £1.1bn+ Type 45 destroyers now coming into service with the Royal Navy, has finally fired her primary (and only significant) armament, the Sea Viper missile system.
The glad news comes five years after the ship was launched, three years after she was accepted into the Royal Navy and well into the tenure of her third commanding officer.
It’s not all good news, however, as the Sea Viper may not be the wonder weapon it’s been implied to be:
Stripping away the hype, Sea Viper has never been tested against a supersonic target and there are no plans to do so — meaning that it would be a brave decision indeed to rely on it against supersonic threats in combat. (The system’s first four trials even against subsonics saw two failures.)
Sea Viper’s French-made Aster missiles can probably reach out to 75 miles, but the inescapable curvature of the Earth means that the Sampson masthead fire control radar can’t lock on to a low-flying target until it is within 20 miles or so. Various modern and indeed not-so-modern anti-shipping missiles (eg the “Klub”, “Sunburn” and “Brahmos”) are both low-flying and supersonic.
Then there are some serious gaps in the Sea Viper’s (and thus the Type 45s’) capabilities. The system cannot attack surface targets, meaning that the Royal Navy’s new and cripplingly expensive destroyers will be almost powerless against properly-equipped warships or even quite minor gunboats and the like.
