40% of HMS Dauntless doesn’t work

The Clydebuilt part’s OK, though, but £400 million of the Type 45 destroyer, Dauntless’s overall cost of £1 billion is not earning its keep.

This is the cost of the ship’s main armament, the Sea Viper missile system which the UK has developed in partnership with Italy and France. This system accounts for 40% of the cost of each Type 45, which, when everything does work, will be the most advanced destroyer in the world.

The Sea Viper system, theoretically, is said to be capable of identifying and tracking 300 simultaneous hostile targets -  aircraft or incoming missiles – within a 250 mile range and taking them out with missiles the size of a Ford Ka. But not yet. Firing tests have resulted in a number of failures thought to be in the areas of range and telemetry. Troubleshooting is ongoing and the Ministry of Defence and the contractor MBDA UK are reviewing the situation.

The good news is that the ship itself seems to have outperformed expectations.

Those who have seen Dauntless, or any of the other 3 Type 45s launched, cannot but notice the strange angular shape of their hull, seamlessly including much of the superstructure. These angles are calculated to reduce the ship’s visibility to radar, with the result that the 500ft destroyer’s image on radar screens indicates that it is a fishing trawler.

Anyway, HMS Dauntless was handed over to the Navy by BAe in a ceremony at her home port of Portsmouth on Thursday (3rd December), joining her immediate Type 45 predecessor, HMS Daring, the first of the class.