Always time for a good picture!

So that is why captains say they have more confidence in 10-year old Japanese ships than they have in a 3-year old Korean one? However, what you say is true in the way that they pay for low stuff and get low stuff. First they went to Japan, excellent ships and low on cost due to low manpower costs. Then Korea was cheaper, again quality sinking, now China is cheapest…

But again, as Wanshan mentioned, we’re talking warships. Any idea if Korea already has built warships for export before? And if so, which ones? Wanshan, you should at least know that (I’m sure of it).

When ordering a vessel all material specifications are agreed to recognised standards, weld standards are agreed, the propulsion package is chosen by the customer usually and the yard will offer a range of potential auxilliary equipment at varying prices. The ships are built under class supervision and with the owners superintendents doing regular checks, if the owners accpt a low quality ship then usually it is because that is what they’ve paid for and accepted. In recent years I’ve overseen construction of FPSO’s in South Korean yards as an engineer superintendent and build quality and commissioning procedures were as good as anything I superintended in Japan or Europe, and the crews spoke very highly of them. The same company I worked for was building more and more high value regular merchant vessels in South Korea too as they offered good quality (equivalent to Japanese and European yards) and very competitive prices, the old prejudices about South Korean ships being cheap and nasty are way out of date unless that is what the owner asks them to build.

Not a case of better in the design, it’s better in how they are maintained and operated. You can take a excellent ship design with good equipment but it needs to be maintained and operated to be a effective weapon. Even basic things like corrosion prevention, painting the hull, polishing the hull and props make a difference. Maintaining clean fuel tanks and systems, effective filtration, using spares of suitable quality, maintaining resilient/flexible mounts in good condition to maintain the acoustic signature of the machinery. There is house keeping, what are the bilges like? Any oil and sludge, one of the causes of flash tank top fires? All of these are symptoms of the operating culture, not the ships actual design, but affect it’s combat efficiency massively. I’ve seen the same GT’s in different ships, one will run at rated power with good reliability, the other is basically scrap metal.

A 4000T break bulk freighter isn’t worth a great deal, the fact it has a crew of 24 indicates it’s pretty primitive and being North Korean the thing is probably not in particularly good shape, especially after 3 years in limbo. The PR and practice it gave the RAAF will be worth far more than the scrap value of 4000T of steel.

Why do these threads on a imaginery battle between A & B always assume you can judge a ship and it’s performance by published brochure figures? What about crew training, mechanical reliability, true capability (as opposed to brochure capability, a very different thing), tactical doctrine, will to fight, location of the fighting, logistics, condition of the vessels etc. etc? All of these tend to be a lot more important than the published brochure figures, half of which are little more than wishful thinking.