A Friend's Frigate Benchmark
requirements, compromises, and gun envy
Want to take a break from the Second Russo-Ukrainian War?
Good, so do I.
As we (well at least I) impatiently wait for the USS Constellation (FFG 62) and her sisters to start displacing water, it is interesting to see the design decisions other nations have made to meet their frigate requirements.
As our new FFG will be the USN version of the French and Italian FREMM, it is natural to compare it to other European designs, but what about our friends in the Pacific?
What are the South Koreans building? Let's take a quick side-by-side look at their Daegu-class frigate presently under serial production.
Of course, different nations have different requirements, and you can see it in the fact that the US Navy, as a global navy, needs a larger frigate to get the range and endurance requirement we need to get to the fight and stay there. ROKN's concerns are a lot closer to home, and their design reflects this reality.
Constellation is expected to displace twice as much as the ROKN frigate...but does she bring twice the punch?
Well, you all know how stupid I think a 57mm is on a ship this size, but if you look everywhere else, you are getting a lot of fight for the size. I'm not too happy with the lack of TLAM. A ship this size should have this capability. We may want it to only do escort and ASW missions, but when war comes, warships over 7,000 tons won't have the luxury to pick out missions they want. I hope some of those MK-41 have ASROC in them and the NSM retain their surface-attack capability.
Anyways, that is my quick look. The ROKN ship does not have the legs a USN ship needs, but for her size, she's a nice bit of kit.
You ask the question "Constellation is expected to displace twice as much as the ROKN frigate...but does she bring twice the punch?", which is very similar to the questions/complaints we US sailors made about our designs v. Soviet and other European designs in the 80's. In my career as a naval architect, I was on the periphery of those studies and their lessons have stuck with me. At that time, the chief design penalties we had to put up with were the need for longer range and US habitability standards. As in other discussions, we have to include logistics as a necessary feature of the force needed to support the pointy end of the spear. Perhaps we need to modify the structure of the Pacific Fleet to include a larger logistic element, thereby not requiring our combatant ships to have quite the long legs we now design into them. Like most difficult problems, this one will need considerable thought to derive the best answer.
How does the Navy justify a 57 mm gun?