Originally posted by Albany Rifles
View Post
The German K130 corvettes are basically our version of the LCS ASuW package - built for the same purpose, designed originally with much the same equipment. Much like with LCS, the first thing laid down was just "how many", then the trade-off wars between different groups started on "what do we want it to be capable of" and "we want this and that fancy new thing on it". Oh, and all with the caveat that it had to be cheap and small and please not that big a crew. Oh, and since the industry knows how to build a ship we can pretty much let them do that without any oversight too. And it'll create jobs. Especially since all our allies will want to buy them too.
The end result was that we had a ship class that was aborted after the first batch (one-third of planning), didn't carry any of that fancy stuff proposed at all (although these subprojects were timely aborted, unlike with LCS), had long-time problems with cheap components bought in Eastern Europe (gearboxes) or wrong installations (air conditioning), and factually took about 9 years after first deliveries until the class was declared really fully usable.
By now we're buying a second batch.
Comment