That’s clearly Custom made by Lego, otherwise there is no way on earth you could get so many grey blocks. You’d have to save up a couple of thousands kits to get a decent number of blocks of any colour. I also think half of the parts are custom made as I have never seen them before and I did have my own share of LEGO blocks in the past. My biggest ones were a 1/100 Kara and 1/100 Kirov (that Kirov was indeed 2m57 long and fairly tall, filling a great part of my room). I also made a much larger scaled Osa I class, I think I even have a picture of that one. I was still a kid though.

However it is still a great accomplishment and it must have taken a LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONG time to build that!

That is indeed true, the Dutch have shown their concept of a patrol vessel in a Defence Paper and it looked BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAD (and certainly when you consider that everyone expected the Sigma), it even had coast guard type of stripes on its hull. It’s weaponry was some 30mm cannon and a helicopter, pretty silly… But on the other hand indeed like the BAM. Have to look for that drawing again, maybe it IS BAM! Don’t remember correctly anymore except for those stripes (which I just noticed to be also on the drawing above) and the silly weapons.
Now, retiring another 2M classes will give them something like 200+million, not enough for 3 or 4 BAM… Of course if they have saved some from the other M-class sales, they might get enough money.
On the other hand, what is the Cost of the Sigma class? Any idea on the price of the Sigma sale to Indonesia?
Of course crew and maintenance would be much smaller than the M-classes, which they could use as an argument too.

Yes very sure, comes from a Dutch Navy officer. I can look for the further information he gave if you want that.

Edit: I checked the information, all cells are of Strike length in Zeven Provinciën, by removing the parts on the bottom, they can fire SM-3 and Tomahawk from all tubes, although it’s more likely they’ll just have 7 or 8 of them. I think it depends what investments they want to do, opt for the additional 8 cell launcher and fill that with Tomahawks or just remove some SM-2s. The fact that they never installed the second Goalkeeper as a standard equipment makes me think they’ll opt for the current configuration.

That is actually what I mean Ed, do you think a helicopter party (including Spec Ops) is enough to stop a bunch of highjackers? I seriously doubt so.
So against piracy, or its worst form, terrorism, these ships have little to do.
But as mentioned, there are more tasks for her to serve.

(and yes we have even had practices with Special Forces for such boardings and they failed quite miserably the first time, didn’t even get onboard). Only after a second run and a fair bit of help did they succeed in their task. It’s not that easy really. There is also the chance that they just blow up the ship from the moment the first special forces guy sets foot on it. Quite a nasty thing if you aren’t prepared for that and if that ship happens to be an LPG carrier… Same counts for container vessels as they often have nasty stuff onboard too (although that is normally seperated according to IMDG code which would normally exclude serious accidents/fires/explosions). Which is also a reason why you shouldn’t use the 76mm against most merchies.

hmm, guess the helicopter has actually made ships slow nowadays. Lots of merchant ships are faster than this one! and a helicopter has quite limited endurance and person capacity… If there was one of these large container vessels highjacked, a ship like this wouldn’t suffice to get it back without doing to much harm and taking lots of risks!
They do look nice though, make some nice fishery patrol boats and good for the diversified Canary island flotilla.

It’s actually from French TV, all pics are indeed of Severstal. The ones I posted at subpirates is Dmitri Donskoy, just after her refit (which you can see on her new Towed Array)

even such prefabricated parts are not part of real shipbuilding capacity. As far as I know China has only delivered its first LNG carrier in 2006.

What do you mean with “tabs being kept”??
If you mean “tables of shipbuilding”, then they are indeed kept and as I have mentioned above, they are based on ordered Gross Tonnage (which is by the way a volume rather than weight)