The Ultimate Type 42

[Weaver]

The Ultimate Type 42

Made with images and resources from www.shipbucket.com

In the aftermath of the Falklands War, the British Government was pleased by the performance of the Royal Navy (not least because the victory got them re-elected!) and agreed to an increase in naval spending to replace the capability lost with the sunken warships and implement the lessons learned. The navy's initial plan, motivated by a desire to take advantage of this largesse as quickly as possible before it dried up, was to build an extra four of the in-production Type 22 frigate to an improved design that reflected the Falklands lessons with as little redesign and as much off-the-shelf hardware as possible. However this plan didn't survive contact with the Defence Select Committee, who pointed out that two of the lost ships had been guided missile destroyers with area-air-defence SAMs and that any replacement must therefore carry an equivalent or better system. Since buying a US system would be politically and logistically difficult and the proposed European system was still years away, the only option left on the table was Sea Dart, and since the desire to act quickly still remained the only realistic option was to buy an improved version of the Type 42 destroyer.

The problem was that one of the lessons learned from the Falklands was that the Type 42 was a deeply flawed design. This had already resulted in a decision, actually taken before the war, to stretch the last four 'Batch III' ships, although this 'stretch' really only amounted to restoring the design to something like it's original form before politics had interfered in the late 1960s. If the Type 42 was to be improved, another stretch seemed the only realistic option. The Batch III stretch had lengthened the ship by 42 feet. However this wasn't in the nature of an extra 'plug' inserted in the hull, but rather a hull that was larger overall, with 2 feet of extra beam and a re-shaped stern: essentially it was a new hull designed to use as many Type 42 drawings and as much of their equipment as possible. Since the first stretch had been ahead of the bridge, in the simplest possible location, the Batch IV stretch would have to be aft, but this was by no means as simple an exercise as the earlier one.

The Batch IV hull added another 42 feet to the Type 42 hull, this time aft of the machinery spaces. Beam was increased by 3 feet, and since the Batch III hulls had already showed signed of  longitudinal weakness, resulting in external strengthening, it was also deepened by 4 feet. Although the dimensions of the machinery spaces wern't changed , the stretch resulted in the shafts being significantly longer and at a shallower angle, which meant all the sloping engine and gearbox mountings had to be re-designed. Topsides, the main superstructure block was unchanged, but the deck house ahead of the hanger was significantly longer, housing the bulk of the new systems and the very tight helicopter pad was slightly increased in length. Below decks, the main change was the addition of a deep magazine aft, between the shafts, and changes to the operations room and galley.

The main point of the stretch was to add a point-defence capability to the Type 42, and this took the form of a pair of GWS 25 Sea Wolf point defence SAM launchers located port and starboard on the new structure ahead of the hangar. Alternatives such as the proposed lightweight four-round launcher and the automatic two round one were studied, but the former would introduce logistic difficulties since the missiles were packaged differently and  latter was felt to have too few ready-to fire rounds. The new GWS 26 vertical launch system wasn't quite ready and would require extensive testing before it could be fitted. Only a single Type 911 Sea Wolf tracker could be incorporated, aft of the launchers, while the aft Type 909 Sea Dart tracker was relocated to the roof of a new deck house ahead of the launchers which housed the hoists from the below-decks missile magazine. Air defence was also boosted by fitting a pair of  Vulcan Phalanx 20mm CIWS mountings amidships, in a similar fashion to that of earlier batches. Another problem with the Type 42 was the convoluted path that torpedoes had to take to get from the magazine (under the flight deck) to the tubes on the main superstructure, so the latter were replaced by the new Magazine Torpedo System, developed for the Type 23 frigates, which housed torpedoes in a common magazine, just in front of the hangar. This automated system could deliver torpedoes to the hangar for loading onto the Lynx helicopter, or to a pair of fixed, internal launch tubes on either beam. The Super RBOC chaff launchers were relocated from the aft superstructure, where they would class with the Sea Wolf launchers, to the former torpedo tube positions.

Crews had complained about the Type 42's cramped and unergonomic operations room since the class had first entered service, and with the Batch IV needing space for additional radar and weapon consoles, this problem had to be addressed. Extending the ops room forward would put it uncomfortably close to the explosion risk of the Sea Dart handling room, so the only option was to extend it aft into the galley space. Up to this point, all Type 42s had had a single galley serving all messes and the wardroom, an 'egalitarian' feature much beloved of the labour government that commissioned the class, although the real reason for it was to save space and money in a very tight design. In the Batch IV, the main galley and junior rates' dining hall were moved aft into the extra space created by the stretch, and a separate, smaller galley now served the Wardroom and CPO's mess, allowing space for the enlarged ops room. As with all Royal Navy ships after the Falklands, great attention was paid to improved survivability and damage control, with an alternate damage control centre, multiple backup generators and pumps and duplicated power, water and data lines.

While the Type 22 Batch III frigates had been on the table, the plan had been to replace the lost ship names as soon as possible by using the last three Type 22 Batch IIs. The Lord Mayor of London had already succeeded in persuading the Royal Navy to rename the 8th ship after the capital, and seeing this, the cities of Sheffield and Coventry, grieving from the loss of 'their' ships, successfully lobbied the navy to change the 9th and 10th ships accordingly. Once the Type 42 Batch IV had been selected however, it became obvious that these would be a more fitting replacement for the lost ships and the cities agreed to this. In keeping with the 'hurt towns' theme, the fourth ship was named Chatham, after the town which had just seen it's famous naval dockyard close after 400 years of service. The  four ships therefore commissioned as follows:

D99, HMS London, April 1990
D80, HMS Sheffield, July 1990
D118, HMS Coventry, October 1990
D100, HMS Chatham, February 1991

The last three Type 22 Batch II frigates reverted to their original 'B' names and commissioned as follows:

F95, HMS Bloodhound, June 1987
F96, HMS Bruiser, July 1988
F98, HMS Boadicea, October 1988

The Type 42 Batch IV destroyers served the Royal Navy well for over twenty years. Arriving just too late to see service in the first Gulf War, they nevertheless took part in the subsequent policing operations. They also saw active service in the Adriatic during the various Balkan conflicts of the 1990s, in the Sierra Leone operation in 2000, in the Iraq invasion in 2003, and the Libyan intervention in 2011. In May 1994 HMS Sheffield demonstrated her improved point defence capabilities when two Yugoslavian missile boats launched three SSN-2B Styx anti-ship missiles at NATO forces in retaliation for the seizure of various ships trying to smuggle fuel and weapons past the NATO embargo. Sheffield downed two of the missiles with her Sea Wolf system while a third was decoyed by her ECM and subsequently shot down by gunfire from the Goalkeeper CIWS system of the Dutch frigate HMNLS Van Kinsbergen. The NATO ships then returned fire, one  missile boat being sunk by Sea Darts (used operationally in a surface-to-surface role for the first time), and the other by Harpoon SSMs. In 2011, HMS Chatham was operating off the Libya coast when she detected a fast jet, believed to be a MiG-23, approaching from landward. The jet refused to identify itself or turn away, so Chatham shot it down with two Sea Darts. Subsequent reports have suggested that the aircraft may in fact have been trying to escape to Malta rather than attack the British ship, but the matter remains unclear.


All four Batch IV ships were decommissioned as a group in 2013, the fourth Type 45 destroyer, the Type 42's replacement, having entered service in a much reduced fleet. This brought the turbulent thirty-eight year history of the Type 42 destroyer with the Royal Navy to a close, although a single Batch I ship survives in Argentine service.


Notes: in real life, the Batch III Type 22 frigates mentioned in the text actually got built and the Type 42 Batch IV is purely a product of my imagination. Their names were Cornwall, Cumberland, Campbeltown and Chatham. The 'B' names mentioned in the text really were the intended names of the last three Type 22 Batch IIs before they were changed.

BTW, I'm experimenting with using www.minds.com to store images instead of photobucket. Minds is an alternative social media site with a combination of features from Twitter, Facebook, blog sites and photo/media sites and a robust committment to freedom of speech which the big sites seem to be moving away from. Early days yet, but it looks pretty good.

[sandiego89]

Great thinking, well done.  Maybe CIWS above the hangar for wider arc?  Like it. 

-Dave

[Old Wombat]

Wish I knew enough about this profile-y stuff to have an educated opinion but, aesthetically, she's a nice looking ship!

[Weaver]

Great thinking, well done.  Maybe CIWS above the hangar for wider arc?  Like it. 

-Dave

It'd block the arc of the aft Sea Wolf tracker unless you pushed everything forward of it one deck higher. I actually tried something like that with a single Sea Wolf launcher on the hangar roof and it looked wrong. The location of the CIWS alongside the funnel is actually the real location used on Type 42s. They did experiment with having just one mounting in between the turret and the Sea Dart launcher, but they gave up on it for various reasons.

[Weaver]

Wish I knew enough about this profile-y stuff to have an educated opinion but, aesthetically, she's a nice looking ship!

Well basically, 'Hood' drew the original profile and I modified it. I stretched and deepened the hull, moved some topside bits around, took other topside bits from other profiles and parts sheets, and drew the bits in between that join them all up. It's all done in Paint: the very basic pixel-by-pixel drawing program that comes with Windows. I don't post my pics on Shipbucket because I don't care to get into blazing rows about the shape of a 3-pixel ECM antenna, but I respect their committment to a rigorous standard and I do my level best to work to it.

[nighthunter]

Weaver, as a former shipbucket.com moderator, I have to say, you did good. I'd defend your artistic talents in the forum. Just post it to Alternate Universe Designs.

[Thorvic]

So when are you building it ? 

They were going to fit the light weight Sea Wolf in place of the Phalanx abreast the funnel using the four cell launcher derived from the Sea Cat mounting, the trackers would have been between the funnel and the mast from what i recall. The phalanx or sea ram would be relocated to a position on the fwd deck between the Sea Dart and the Main gun, which was trialled on Edinburgh. Canceled as cost saving.

The stretched 42 to fit the Sea Wolf seams a better solution to the larger Type 43 proposal with the double ended Sea Dart or the Type 22 batch II based Type 44 with Sea Dart and Sea Wolf forward, and probably shoud have been ordered to replace the lost type 42s instead of the extra batch 2 Type 22s with the lost Type 21s being replaced by the Type22 Batch III.

[Captain Canada]

Looks good !

[Weaver]

So when are you building it ? 

When I get around to it....

They were going to fit the light weight Sea Wolf in place of the Phalanx abreast the funnel using the four cell launcher derived from the Sea Cat mounting, the trackers would have been between the funnel and the mast from what i recall. The phalanx or sea ram would be relocated to a position on the fwd deck between the Sea Dart and the Main gun, which was trialled on Edinburgh. Canceled as cost saving.

Yes I thought about the lightweight launcher, but then I realised that it's missiles would be logistically different from every other Seawolf missile in the fleet, since they were packed in a disposable fibreglass box and fired from it, rather than being unpacked and loaded 'naked' into steel boxes that were part of the launcher. That might be okay if you were refitting twelve Type 42s and the three carriers, but for only four ships, it seemed problematic.

I thought the forward placement of the Phalanx tested on Edinburgh was abandoned because it caused maintenance difficulties? On the face of it, it should have SAVED money if anything, since it meant the Batch IIIs could have one Phalanx mounting instead of two, whether or not they got LW Sea Wolf.

Is there any suggestion where they would have carried reload missiles for the LW Sea Wolf and how many they'd have carried? I can't see how they'd have made room for many personally.

The stretched 42 to fit the Sea Wolf seams a better solution to the larger Type 43 proposal with the double ended Sea Dart or the Type 22 batch II based Type 44 with Sea Dart and Sea Wolf forward, and probably shoud have been ordered to replace the lost type 42s instead of the extra batch 2 Type 22s with the lost Type 21s being replaced by the Type22 Batch III.

I quite like the Type 43, apart from the midships helicopter arrangements, but it would have been formidably expensive. I also tend to look askance at the very close placement of the Type 909s and Type 911s and wonder if they'd have interfered with each other.

[Captain Canada]

Needs a bigger hangar and a pair of Sea Kings 

[Weaver]

Needs a bigger hangar and a pair of Sea Kings 

Just what I'd expect from a Canadian... 

Seriously, I think something like this is about as far as you can go and still call it a Type 42. Add in two helos and it becomes as much an ASW asset as an AAW one, the superstructure would have to get WAY higher to carry the radars above the hangar, and the hull and propulsion would therefore have to be enlarged to the point where it'd be more like a British Ticonderoga. Of course that wouldn't be a bad thing, it just wouldn't be a Type 42.