Sunday, April 13, 2014

Austal USA Looking Into Turning Independence-class Littoral Combat Ship (Corvette) Into a Frigate

The US Navy's (USN) Independence-class Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) shipbuilder said that the seaframe's flexible design will accommodate any changes resulting from the navy's ongoing programme review and that the company's engineers are already studying weapons options to augment the ships' lethality.

Austal USA President Craig Perciavalle told IHS Jane's on 9 April that the 127.6 m aluminium trimaran Independence-class variant possesses design margins able to handle changes in requirement.

"We're focusing right now on doing some studies ourselves on what can be done to 'up-gun' the ship, and we've made a lot of progress," he said. "We have concept engineers looking at other weapons, based on what we think [the navy] would want, confirming that the platform could handle that - missiles or whatever other things that we feel [it] might be looking for."

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