It’s a commonly asked question. The short answer is that there is no such thing as a cheap frigate these days!.

Not if you want the kind of comprehensive capabity set discussed. Most of a ships costs are in its black boxes. Sensors, weapons, comms, EW etc. Put the same fit in a small hull as the big hull and you get an expensive small hull with no room for growth and development. See Royal Navy Type21 Amazon class frigate.

We have sunk more than a billion into the design of T26 to date. That money is spent, gone and will never be seen again. If we can leverage that design into a more austere GP frigate layout we make that billion do more for us. Effectively we divide it across 13 hulls and not just 8. That means unit cost for the 1st 8 T26s drops by more than £50mn and we save having to shell out another billion designing the cheap corvette!.

The net result being we end up with additional units of the same basic T26 type which we will already b set up to support and deploy all the emerging offboard systems being trialed now likely for a similar cost to the ‘from-scratch’ light frigate.

This really does sound like one of those political smokescreen announcements that, when we get close to winding up T26 units 5 and 6, will be reversed to ‘BAE has done such a great job with the new frigate and has found huge build savings so we’ll reward the great workforce and leadership by continuing into building a batch2 modified design’.

I’d stake 20 pounds on that today! :highly_amused:

I wasn’t so much talking a cheap Frigate because as you say I cannot see any frigate being cheap. I was rather referring to a specialist frigate that can do away with some of the traditional functions of a frigate because it will always be around other vessels that can provide that function. They could then be a dedicated & specialized fleet escort freeing up the 8 “full” T26’s to perform other task.

I really struggle with the idea of a cheaper “general purpose” T26. As I said, I’m nothing but an interested bystander so I don’t understand the finer points, but I struggle to understand what a cheaper general purpose T26 look like? What systems and functions would you lose? Would the loss of these systems make it next to useless if a war were to actually break out? I don’t really see how you can make it cheaper without having a big HMS Clyde in which case just make more river classes.

However I do bow to your superior knowledge and I take your point about design costs 🙂 .

I’m no expert on these matters but what would be the potential of, instead of general purpose (cheap) frigates, the royal navy was to look at a new type of escort corvette.

I assume that a large proportion of the escort fleet’s resources will be spent following one of the QE around or taking part in other task forces of high value. I also assume that a QE won’t leave port without a Type 45 in tow.

Why doesn’t the Royal navy commission a class of perhaps 4 Corvette’s which essentially acts as a moving gun/missile/ASW platform in conjunction with a type 45 as fleet escort. It could be designed without a flight deck as it will always be with a carrier, with proper links could have a basic radar as it would always be with a type 45, Low storage as it will always have resupply ships close by and a relatively small crew. Significant savings could be made on omissions of these factors. This would free the Type 26’s to perform other duties especially in times of war you could potentially significantly increase the availability of T26 by decreasing the amount assigned to each carrier group. The ship could h

I’m sure my idea will have massive holes poked in it but I was really just curious about its feasibility.