Lets Fire a Telephone Pole from a Frigate
Today the US Navy is spending almost a Billion bucks a pop on a neat little thing called a Littoral Combat Ship. It is hoped that the ship will have a 57mm Sexy Swedish Bofors gun capable of hitting anything that gets close enough to it on the land sea or air….and a few heavy machine guns.
For a Whole lot less money, Indonesia bought six old Leander class frigates from the Dutch (whom they fought a rather bloody war of independence from in 1945-49) for a song in the late 1980s.
Now these ships are pushing 50-years old now and have seen better days.
However they are being rearmed with Chinese C-802 missiles (think a bigger badder version of Harpoon with anti-jamming) as well as (drumroll please!) the huge SS-N-26 Yakhont ship killer!
From my article on the at Suite 101. :
Amazingly one of the class, the KRI Oswald Siahaan, has been equipped with four vertical launch cells for the huge Soviet OKB-52 3K-55/3 M-55 Yakhont (SS-N-26) missiles. The supersonic rocket-ramjet Yakhont weighs 3 tons at launch, is over 30-feet long, and uses a liquid propellant for the ramjet, which propels it up to an amazing Mach 2.5. With a range of up to 150-miles and a 660-pound warhead, the Yakhont is thought to only give a 45-second warning from detection to impact on even Aegis-equipped ships. When a ripple of all four of these large instant shipwrecks are fired at one target, even the best-armed vessel would be hard pressed to avoid a hit.
Read more at Suite101: Indonesia Rearms Retired Frigates | Suite101.com http://www.suite101.com/content/indonesia-rearms-retired-frigates-a371587#ixzz1MfEnrACr
Now thats what I call a Littoral Combat Ship!
