Remember the Royal Navy’s latest destroyer, the Type 45? It’s the one without effective main armament. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the lead ship of the class, HMS Daring, broke down at sea recently:
The Royal Navy’s new Type 45 destroyers continue to suffer from technical mishaps, with first ship of the class HMS Daring arriving a week late in Portsmouth on Saturday following emergency propulsion repairs in Canada. The £1.1bn+ ship had previously broken down in mid-Atlantic.
The News of Portsmouth reported on the breakdown and the destroyer’s delayed return to its home port, noting that a similar propulsion problem had occurred just four months previously during an outing in the Solent for families of the ship’s company.
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The Type 45s’ hulls and some of their kit — for instance the fire-control radar — are made in Britain but much of the colossal expense of the ships has gone on equipment from the US, Italy and France. Particularly well-known are their French-made Aster air-defence missiles, which have been delayed for several years following repeated failures in test-firings caused by a manufacturing fault.
The UK Public Accounts Committee went so far to describe the missile-system, named “Sea Viper” in British service, as “disgraceful” in 2009 … and that was before the most recent test failure. However the flaws in the Aster missiles are now reportedly rectified and successful firings have since taken place. The UK Ministry of Defence expects to declare its first Sea Viper system operational next year: until then, the Type 45 destroyers will continue to be almost unarmed, able to employ only basic guns and cannon.*
[. . .]
*Apart from Sea Viper, the only armament possessed by a Type 45 is a single 4.5-inch “Kryten” gun turret, primarily useful for bombarding targets ashore (within a few miles of deep water) and two light 30mm cannon for close-in work against pirate dhows or the like.
Sea Viper will not enhance the destroyers’ abilities against other ships or land targets when it becomes operational as it has no surface-to-surface mode. It is said to be superior to any other system against missiles and aircraft, perhaps even offering an effective defence against widely-feared shipkiller missiles of Russian manufacture which approach their target at supersonic speeds. However Aster/Sea Viper has never been tested against a supersonic target and there are no plans to do so, which means that any battle plan based on such a capability would be a gutsy call indeed.
As you can tell, Lewis Page isn’t a fan of the Type 45 destroyers . . .
