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Video: ROC Navy - Taiwan Future Guided Missile Destroyer Revealed

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Naval Forces News - Taiwan
 
 
 
Video: ROC Navy - Taiwan Future Guided Missile Destroyer Revealed
 
Taiwan's National Chung-Shan Institute of Science and Technology (NCSIST) released an animation video showing the future guided-missile destroyer project for the Republic of China (Taiwan) Navy (ROC Navy) in combat. Renderings of this new project surfaced in June last year (as we reported). This new destroyer project is in line with Taiwan's new naval acquisition plan which was unveiled in late 2015. The new plan called for four new destroyers (among other vessels).
     
ROC Navy Future Destroyer DDG Taiwan NCSIST CGI of the new DDG Project for the ROC Navy. It appears to share some similarities with the DDG 51 and Japanese Akizuki classes.
     
Based on the newly released video, one of the key feature of the new destroyer class are the four AESA radar arrays presumably for air and missile defense systems. Compared to the early computer rendering and scale model unveiled last year, the integrated mast (looking somewhat similar to an US LPD 17 class mast) a more traditional mast design is now fitted on top of the deckhouse (visible at 0:12 in the video).

It seems like there is a second set of radar arrays on a secondary, smaller mast located aft, on top of the helicopter hangar (visible from 0:15), possibly an X-band radar. The hangar itself features two doors: A large one for a medium-size helicopter and a smaller one presumably for a VTOL UAV.

The destroyer is fitted with a Taiwan-designed Sea Oryx RAM-like weapon system on top of the helicopter hangar (last year rendering showed a Phalanx CIWS in this location) (visible at 0:22 in the video).

For Anti-surface warfare, the future destroyer is fitted with 16x anti-ship missiles (the video shows the new Hsiung Feng III missiles at 02:36).

For air-defense, in addition to the 16x short range SAM from the Sea Oryx system, there are 4x modules of VLS consisting of 8x cells each (for a total of 32 missiles) (visible at 0:50 in the video). Early design from last year showed a different configuration: One module forward and two in the middile of the hull (located in between the anti-ship missile launchers). The surface to air missiles depicted in the video could well be the new ship-based variant of the Tien Kung III which was tested for the first time in later 2016 by NCSIST.

Finally, the destroyer appears to be fitted with a BAE Systems 5 Inch Mk 45 Mod 4 naval gun system (0:55 in the video).
     
Animated video by NCSIST
     
Displacement of the ship is expected to be between 6,000 and 8,000 tons (slightly lighter compared to the 10,000 destroyers outlined in the naval acquisition plan last year). The first tranche of funding (US $ 600 million) is expected for this year. According to the documents, the lead ship is supposed to be delivered in 2019. This will likely be difficult to achieve however as this is a new and complex design for Taiwan's shipbuilding industry.

Taiwanese shipbuilding industry latest developments include the Tuo River-class catamaran corvette, an air-defense variant of this catamaran corvette and fast combat support ship Panshih.