Patrol ship HMS Tamar geared up for an intensive period safeguarding vital fishing stocks in the South Pacific through training in New Zealand.
Making use of their hosts – both personnel and ships – the crew of the Portsmouth-based vessel made use of the waters of the Hairaki Gulf, just off Auckland on the North Island, to get acquainted with the Royal New Zealand Navy’s deployable boarding team.
According to a news release:
“That team is integral to Tamar’s next mission, in Fiji, so getting used to each other’s navy’s ways of working – similar given their heritage, but not identical – was crucial. The customs launch Swan V and the multi-purpose HMNZS Canterbury – the ‘Swiss pocket knife’ of the Kiwi Navy – served as ‘vessels of interest’ for search teams to first board, then scour for ‘illegal’ fishing hauls.
Tamar is about to work with authorities in Fiji, conducting joint patrols of the waters of and around the island chain, helping the Commonwealth nation build up their capacity for and knowledge of board and search operations to help curb illegal fishing. Fishing counts for around one tenth of Fiji’s exports, while illegal activities not only deprive the island of immediate income, but can also upset the delicate ecological balance of the South Pacific… and future prosperity.”
The same waters also allowed a specialist training team from the UK to fly out and assess Tamar.
A few more ships please, a B3, with a tad more fightyness.
Surely a great way to enhance recruitment by offering visits to exotic places…join the navy and see the world….wasn’t that the slogan? Should be no problem when the defence budget hits 3%.
So many advantages for providing ecenomical opportunities for training and command experience on a decent sized ship.
AA
I agree these vessels have been a major success and with frigates and destroyers costing a billion these days we need something like this to fly the flag. You have to wonder how much a small sea ceptor battery onboard would really cost as well as a hangar for aircraft. Those two additions would make it plenty fighty.
“A few more ships please, a B3, with a tad more fightyness.”
Uparming an OPV isn’t a great idea. The fit out for the River class is fine. If we want to increase hull numbers best way to do it is via more T31, they cost about £350 million each and have MK41 and a big hull for future equipment.
Given OPV type duties and the proliferation of UAV / FPV type threats, which are just as likely to be adopted by pirates and drug smugglers alike as a low cost defensive tool to keep pesky authorities at bay then some form of Efficient and Effective AA capability to deal with uav swarms would be prudent as a defensive tool. 40 / 57mm ? …or can AA targeting capability be added to existing 30mm ?
I agree that replacing the 30mm with the 40mm or even 57mm would be a reasonable cheep way of giving them a bit more credibility and protection but when they return to the UK and take over for the river B1’s when they are retired in 2027/28 they will be a bit over the top.
When replacing B1s the systems can be swapped out. Larger guns can be redeployed onto that huge fleet of auxiliary and type 32s etc that are coming 😉
Good point 👍
It could be as easy as putting a Martlet pannier on the 30mm. Much improved longer ranged anti- air and surface target engagement. A mod like this would not be seen by a numpty politician as a ship having a big gun and therefor making it a frigate. It would provide much better self defence. As I understand it, a protected magazine space was incorporated into the B2 to store a few.
What happened to all the 20mm cannon we had? I know they did not keep a maintenace/,ammo contract on them, but its considerable firepower over a .50 for (,not that I know,) minimal extra crewmwn.
AA
Vard Marine has a ‘Vigilance’ class design that they are promoting for a replacement to Canada’s Kingston class. It is a Swiss army knife OPV/Corvette/Minesweeper. The modular mission bay and the increase in armaments is possibly something that the UK could look at. Same crew size as current OPVs.
I wonder if the RN collects data about how often the Rivers use their cranes & when they do whether they had to (i.e. if they hadn’t had the crane they would have been unable to access one from elsewhere).
If the cranes don’t get much use, and/or if there would have been suitable dock-side facilities that they could have used had they not had the onboard crane, I’m thinking that maybe the most cost-effective upgrade would be to replace that crane with a UAV hangar to operate something like a Schiebel S-100 or, if the hangar could be of sufficient length, the upcoming S-300 which at 4.8m long and 0.9m wide gives a massive uplift on payload vs S-100 potentially offering 24 hour endurance with a 50kg surveillance package or a 250kg payload at 4 hour endurance which would be enough for a decent Martlet loadout plus onboard targeting if one really did at some point feel the need to make the Rivers just a bit more fighty potentially right out to over the horizon.
I’m no expert but perhaps we should have ordered the Khareef class corvettes instead. BAE built 3 for just £400m for Oman (cf £348 for the Rivers). 76mm gun, space for sea ceptor and NSM, enclosed helicopter hangar.
In some ways that you could class as a ‘Pocket Frigate’. Would be ideal manned by 40-50.
The khareef has a crew of 100…it’s the weapon systems that require the crew……add weapons add crew..the bas crew of a rivers 2 is 35….
Big difference:
khareef has a range of 800km and an endurance of 21 days vs a rivers 2 range of 10,000km and an endurance of 35 days…
for a long range patrol vessel that is huge
Also khareef has a complement of 100 crew rivers 2 is about 35…massive difference in ongoing cost..
basically the khareef is a rubbish and very expensive long range patrol ship…a very good green water combatant.
BAE entered the khareef design for T31 but Arrowhead 140 won the competition.
Be interesting to see what comes out of the joint project with the Dutch. They are thinking to replace both their Holland OPVs and their LPDs with a 9000 ton Enforcer. Scholarship question. Solve the following equation:
T32 = batch 3 River = Bay class replacement.
Yes, saw that. However 9000 tons very big for an opv. Just thinking of the crewing. Could do for several other classes of ship however.
AA
I should really know this but are the River b2’s dual crewed to get the most sea days out of them?
Multi watch system allows max use of vessel. Ideal for relatively low tech units
Good move, Cheers 👍
It’s the Hauraki Gulf. And the Customs launch is Hawk V.