HMS Glasgow, currently being built on the river running through her namesake, has now had her bow section attached.

BAE tweeted the following.

Eight of these ships will replace the eight dedicated anti-submarine Type 23 frigates which will reach the end of their active lives by the mid 2030s.

In addition to the Clyde built Type 26, five Rosyth built Type 31 general purpose frigates are intended to replace the general-purpose Type 23s currently in service and also coming towards the end of their long careers.

According to the Royal Navy:

“Just over half of HMS Glasgow is now complete or under construction, out of eight planned vessels in the class (all are named, three have been ordered, two are in build at Govan – HMS Cardiff is No.2).

Once the fore and aft sections are complete they will be joined on the hard in front of the block hall, before the bridge/main mast are craned into place. The completed ship will then be ‘launched’ by being lowered into the Clyde via a barge, then towed downstream to BAE’s yard at Scotstoun to complete fitting out.

The 26s replace the ‘souped-up’ anti-submarine Type 23s which will begin retiring from service later this decade after more than 30 years on patrol, while still to come are five Type 31 general duty frigates which have yet to be named and will replace their five Type 26 counterparts like for like.”

It should be noted that the above quote from the Royal Navy is incorrect, the five Type 31 Frigates which have yet to be named will actually replace their five Type 23 general purpose frigate counterparts like for like.

George Allison
George Allison
George has a degree in Cyber Security from Glasgow Caledonian University and has a keen interest in naval and cyber security matters and has appeared on national radio and television to discuss current events. George is on Twitter at @geoallison
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63 COMMENTS

    • Hi Ian,

      In this case much of the delay appears to be down to the MoD / Tressury limiting the follow of money to below optimum levels. I.e. in year spend is lower, but overall cost is higher…

      This is a pretty common issue as the MoD tries to balance the needs of all three services and indeed the broading of capability need into the Space and Cyber arenas, which will now hopefully better funded given the recent up lift in budget.

      Cheers CR

    • Money and Tight Fisted Politicians! And the fact there are more votes in Health, or Social Security or Education than in Defence.

    • You have to remember these are being built during a global pandemic. And BAE Systems will have to have many procedures in place to protect it’s workforce.

    • I am not sure they are really that slow once the projects start. They are very advanced ships which require precision rather than speed to build. China can build fast as it has millions of slaves to do the work for them and zero health and safety procedures (if people die then they have plenty of new slaves to replace them)

      • They are extremely slow. But that’s at the request of the Treasury who would rather pay 10bn over 10 years than 6bn over 5 years because they think they are 200m a year.

  3. The lower Bow was added in early Dec. The upper Bow is still missing, I was hoping that would of been added by now.
    Progress has been disappointing slow on T26 since December!

  6. The usual moans. These are built exactly on schedule and with a global pandemic to work around they are doing bloody well. The timeframe has been set, and it isn’t going to change. Speeding up the build rate would rob money from another vital project, so it is what it is. These will be fantastic warships, and provide a world beating capability for the RN.

    • They cost nearly double the cost of an Italian Fremm in 2020 dollars. You are getting 24 strike length cells at the high end of the category for ships with 48 like Horizon. And the UK gets the discount price. The Canadians and Australians really pay the premium. They are the priciest version of the same thing over again. Great ships, sure, but the definition of a Pyrrhic victory.

        • Sorry, meant to reference Fremm as it has much the same size and propulsion system. French version has 32 cells, 16 of which are strike length. Italians use 16 Sylver 5m for theirs.

          • That is true but the Fremm does not have 48 Sea Ceptor. The Mk41VLS on the T26 is not for air defence but for anything else they want to install as long as the missile can work with the T26 radar/sonar suite.

      • The problem with Type 26 is not even the cost, it is the age span.Unless RN keeps updating almost all will be different from each other. The 1st will be already outdated when the 5th enter in service.

        • The RN moved to Fleet Time Fitting (spiral updates) decades ago. As and when updates and new kit become available they are fitted. The days of saving them all up for a DED,RP1 or RP2 are long gone.
          For big ticket items things like SCOT5 (2000s), Artesian(2010s) etc would have only been done in DEDs years ago. Now they have been done in 4-6 week FTSPs.

          Project planning is far better. All the prep work is done when it can be squeezed in. So things like new cables are run, foundations welded in etc in earlier FTSPs. Then when the fit is due all the secondary items are already in place and its a case of connecting up and testing.

          • Very good points.

            I’d be interested in your views on why Montrose has such high availability. Usually on here we chirrup on about how, if a ship is used all the time it will get knackered. However, now the opposite tune is being played, by RN press office, in that continuous running is beneficial to reliability.

            Whilst the latter is true all components generally have a specified design life. Wheel bearing on a car etc.

            OK, with machinery, how hard it is run that is critical not just how often.

            However, T45 was supposed to have been run more or less continuously. So Admiral Lord West stated when it was coming into service. It was one of the reasons we could make do with so few of them.

            Thoughts?

          • Montrose has a captive audience onboard which helps and a rather good bunch they are as well, from both crews.
            There are defect that appear ( I know i have fixed a few of them) but the worklists produced by the ship and the Ship Controllers for the alongside maintenance periods is usually comprehensive and any Contractor assisted work gets completed with very little drama.

            Being where she is means she is top of the tree for Defect Stores deliveries which also helps. A T23 doing day running in Pompie isnt going to get the same stores support

    • Exactly. Any project has 3 variables – cost, quality and time. We want high quality at a reasonable price. We can speed up (in theory anyway) the production schedule but at the cost of either quality or price.

    • The focus now should be on keeping enough T23’s in decent shape to avoid escort numbers dropping too substantially and getting the T31 into service as quickly as possible, hopefully with a 2nd batch to follow.

      The Rivers and T31’s forward based will be real force multipliers allowing our clutch of T45’s and T26’s to at least focus on integrating with the CSG and deploying on other tasks that warrant their level of capability.

  7. I very much hope th ey are building it out of thicker than usual gauge ofSteel Plate.
    I notice our ships often have distorted plates after a few years hard service in North Atlantic. In contrast Russian ships being ice strengthened seem to stay in shape longer.
    Since there is an increasing possibility we may have to operate in the far North and in roughest waters on the planet, off Iceland, isn’t it time we added a thicker gauge of Steel onto our ships?

    • Gunbuster has previously mentioned the Differences in Hull Steel Thicknesses used for Royal Navy Ships,they do Vary but not by Much – usually in the 8mm to 15mm Range.

    • Their ships have to operate in those Conditions almost endlessly during part of their mission, ours only irregularly and quite rarely, so why would you suffer all the disadvantages to incorprate something with only marginal benefits in rare use scenarios at best. As for holding their shape well Starships are like that off the production line and they are expected to go into space and back in seriously hostile environments so I doubt that it’s of any disadvantage other than aesthetically, it’s not like that it’s going to offer more than marginal if any advantages in terms of protection. If it needs that there are far better modular products available and being tested to do that job more efficiently and can be altered and updated as new materials and requirements come available or dictate. And they can be put precisely where they are most needed.

    • Sometimes I ask myself if some form of armour such as what tanks have could be useful. I somehow remember seeing somewhere that it would take 8-10 Harpoon missiles to cause real damage to a ship with WW1 armour. So possibly we should have an internal hull 25 mm Wotan soft, an external 6 inch KC hull and in the middle Kevlar. That would stop any shell and many missile types. Steel as a passive defence is not to expensive and for me a ship is a comprimise of three things, attack, defence and speed. We seem to have forgotten about passive defence. A 6 inch armoured KC external hull over 300 ft would be an additional weight of about 500 tons. The original KC ingot of 200 inch x 132inch x 26inch weighed 200,000lbs thats how I came to the 500 tons. 5.5 ingots would give a belt of 300 ft at 5.5ft above the waterline 6 inchs thick. To protect the machinery all the way to the main gun would be about 1000tons of armour. This with an internal hull would stop most missiles. I have wondered if gel could be used between the external armour and the internal hull instead of kevlar. The external hull breaks up the missile, the gel catches or slows down the shrapnel and the internat hull stops penetration. Stupid idea I think, maybe someone could do the maths.

      • Hey Ron.
        The Bismarck had really thick armour belts around the sides, and it was essentially wrecked because a torpedo destroyed one of the rudders, smashed it’s own rudder into the hull. Effectively the ship was done for by then. Paraphrasing a whole battle there of course, but the point is, even the best ships have a weakness somewhere.
        I do share your concern that our armour does seem a tad thin though… almost like taking steps backward.
        M@

      • Easy to defeat. Fly the missile into the hangar door, destroy the helo, set the AVCAT on fire, probably puncture an internal deck or two, allow the avcat to get inside the ship.
        Alternatively target the Gun Housing. Its not armoured and is GRP. The blast would go straight down into the gun bay which is full of ready use ammo . If the miller flaps are in place it may stop the blast getting to the deep mag but i doubt it.

        Steel Armour belts etc on a ship are pretty much worthless.
        Internal spaces with critical systems are usually protected with a kevlar type plate. T26 is getting a fit from Plasan , an Israeli firm with an obvious pedigree in protection systems

        • “ Fly the missile into the hangar door, destroy the helo, set the AVCAT on fire, probably puncture an internal deck or two, allow the avcat to get inside the ship” without getting too specific that was part of the lessons learned from the Exocet that hit Glamorgan. There were mitigations in place for this on all subsequent designs.

          As regards the Kryton GRP housing: that is true but how much effect would depend on the penetrating shell and the design of the stored shells. Again without being too specific there were simulations of explosions used to model various survivability criteria for the Mk8. Some interesting things were learned. Some of the cheapest passive measures present are surprisingly effective!

      • Warship armour(WW1 & 2) actually was very limited in extent, just covering the vitals laving the rest of the ship virtully unprotected. So Harpoons or even standard WW1/2 or modern artiliary could cause a lot of damage to a cruiser or battleship of that era, or its crew.
        It adds an awful lot of weight that limits much else & besides, there are numerous ways for modern weapons to punch straight through. The best defence today seems to be the SAMs with anti-missile capability & CIWSs, though how well & how long a ship equipped thus can last against a sustained attack remains unproven.

    • Ships flex plates distort.
      Even Commercial vessels with 30mm plate get distorted.
      If you use a thicker more brittle armoured steel you start to get issues with the steel cracking.
      The Longy and vertical stiffeners behind the plate are the important bit anyway. Without those it doesnt mater how thick the plate is.

    • I thought that too untill I worked on a shipyard & found it wasn’t the sea force denting the steel but the effect of the heating from the welding that causes that effect.

      • At last someone who knows what he is talking about. Oh, I’m a retired welding engineer from a Naval Shipyard (US). Tugs will do some damage at the water line, I should mention.:)

  8. Thats it then, job done…launch her and have her FFBNW sides, a stern, decks, weapons, living accom, propuslion, radar, crew or paint! Right next one…..

  9. Named after Glasgow……hmmmmmmmm so it will be a dump to look at, have nobody working on board, park benches eveywhere for the white lightning ninjas, shit local authority accomodation which is mostly sub letted to FNs, fat blokes cutting about thinking they are hard and drunk women schreeching at each other!…………….;0)

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