Australian Air Warfare Destroyers

[Lone_Raven]

Morning all, just doing some casual research crap and posting it on the WoWs forums for you people to all see. The topic of today's Red Bull-fueled research are the three Australian Air Warfare Destroyers, known locally as the Hobart-class.

Coming in at just under 150 metres in length weighing 7,000 tons, the three ships of the Hobart-class (HMAS Hobart, HMAS Brisbane and NUSHIP Sydney) are the most capable surface warships ever to enter service in the RAN. They are equipped with a mass of advanced weaponry and sensors, the former including the RIM-66 Standard-2 SAM, RIM-162 ESSM SAM, Harpoon AShM, MU90 torpedos, a Mark-35 127mm main gun and multiple autocannon and CIWS mounts. The main-piece of the latter is the AEGIS combat system which also encompasses the four SPY-1 phased-array radars that can be seen as the funny octagonal panels put on the forward superstructure near the bridge. For ASW purposes the ships also carry a singular MH-60 Romeo 'Seahawk'.

All three were built as a modular design, a little over 30 module blocks being constructed for each ship. Hobart was laid down in 2012, Brisbane in 2014 and Sydney in 2015. Hobart suffered early on from faulty construction in her keel and combat modules, a fault contributed to Australian shipbuilders not having relevant or enough experience building large warships, the faults taking around a collective year to correct and get the ship delivered to the RAN.

Hobart was formally commissioned to the Royal Australian Navy in September 2017, however she did not attend RIMPAC 2018 and has not seen any active theaters as of yet. 

Brisbane is intended to be formally commissioned to the RAN in October 2018.

Sydney is intended to be formally commissioned into the RAN in late 2019 with no exact dating having been set. 

What follows below are a series of photos of the three ships, mostly Hobart. (Apologies for low-quality pictures, pulled these all off Google.)

 

[RalphTheTheatreCat]

HMAS Brisbane is currently in at Garden Island awaiting commissioning and HMAS Darwin is there awaiting a watery grave somewhere after her decommissioning.  Word on the street is the Brisbane is the most advanced DDG in the world at the moment.

Ill try to get some closer shot of them both next to each other for you this weekend when I am working.

 

[Lone_Raven]

If you could do that, that would be great! Although I disagree with it being THE most advanced in the world, most certainly Top 10 or Top 5 though.