Because they can hardly build any good ships! China has the bad reputation in warships since the delivery of two or three frigates with non-watertight doors (that were meant to be watertight) and not following the order correctly by placing on Chinese weapons while Thailand wanted to put her own weapons on them afterwards. The ships were in such a bad condition when they arrived that they were directly taken to the dry dock.

Korea, maybe their indigous warships are ok, but for the merchant ships they produce in great volume, those are of a low quality, maybe they fear for getting low quality stuff too.

Do I smell some bad experience with bricks there Steve?
I still like Tom Clancy’s books, although I agree that the Bear and the Dragon was much less than Red Storm Rising and Red October. That is explained by the fact that in RSR and RO John Gresham helped him. On the later books, Gresham didn’t help and likely he was the biggest brain behind those books.
Again, it should be taken in account that Tom Clancy wrote those books at a moment where most of you (and me) hardly had any idea how things worked and what was around in the world’s armies at that moment. A time when the internet with all its I-know-better-cause-I-read-it-on-the-internet kind of guys wasn’t around.
And yes, he forgot some weapons and made some unlogic/unbelievable alterations to the scenarios, but at least he tried to write a book and kept many of us interested. For me it was great to read and it will always be great to read anyway. On one side I would like to see a movie of Red Storm Rising, on the other side I’d rather leave it to my imagination.

Haven’t read Robinson yet. Hard to find over here, same with any other story in that genre actually…

Dandpatta,
the bow flag is a different flag than the aft ones. All navies have such flags.
The bow flag is raised, when the ship is either at anchor or when the first line is ashore (meaning the first mooring line is connected to a bollard ashore). This bow flag, called the jack, has most of the time, different dimentions than an official country’s flag.

The aft flag on warships, is the official country flag. Official in this case, means official towards the Navy. So, for the Navy, the flag forward is not the official Indian flag, but the flag aft, with the white, is the official Indian flag for them. Same counts for other navies, occasionally the Jack is the same flag as the official one (the offial one has a different name too, but I can’t remember that one).

edit: so if you look at “most navies”, you will notice that Russian, UK etc. all have different flags on their aft mast and that they have different flags on the bow too. So, in normal circumstances, at sea there is no flag on the bow, only the one aft is shown.

Well you did say they should make it illegal, which somehow makes people think you don’t like it 😉 I guess you just mean you like this more than your job?

UAE only has two ex-Dutch frigates of the S-class I think. They were at Jebel Ali when I was there two years ago. The other UAE ships are all smaller corvettes I think.

I do see the problem there Steve. You need 4 GTs for it, and fuel isn’t exactly cheap nowadays. Even the price of HFO has raised from 260$/t to over 300$/t nowadays and that is just HFO, add to it that the oil will only last for 27 years (worst estimates) to a maximum of 50 years (about the best estimate), which means you already have to take in account new methods nowadays. You can see this forward looking idea in the merchant navy itself, tankers are getting smaller as these huge tankers will not be needed in 30 years and as their servicelives are mostly aimed at an age of 20 to 30 (or even more if possible without too much sacrifices), it would be useless to still build 400+m tankers.
Navies will, in the near future, undoubtedly have to look around for fuel and economy (which is actually already happening). Carriers like this design might be propelled by two GTs and still make a sufficient speed.
Last ship we had a steam turbine of 36,000hp, to propell our ship to over 20kts without a problem(officially something like 22kts, but as the need wasn’t there, we didn’t do that, we did make 24kts over ground though). Ship was 277m longx43m beam, with a laden summer displacement of 105,000t. This turbine did guzzle around 120t of fuel each day (depending on what we were using).

Missile boat goes down in collision

OUR SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT
New Delhi, April 22: A missile boat of the Indian Navy sank in the Arabian Sea last night, two-and-a-half hours after colliding with a merchant vessel off the coast of Goa.

The crew of 71 was rescued and evacuated to Goa.

Naval headquarters sources said the missile corvette INS Prahar ran into the merchant vessel Rajiv Gandhi, a container carrier of the Shipping Corporation of India coming from the opposite direction, around 9.45.

The Prahar was a much smaller ship.

The boat remained on the surface for over 120 minutes, fortunately for the crew who could ensure their SOS had been read, and sank gradually as water flooded it.

There was little damage to the merchant ship, which has anchored off Goa.

That’ll teach them to follow the regulations.

Any idea if they will salvage this ship? If it stayed afloat for 2hours, it probably means that the damage was minor and that the crew was capable of stopping the flow somehow (which again means minor damage overall to the hull). Electronics are probably wasted anyway, but if the ship is not too deep (for which I actually fear), they could salvage it and use some parts for spare on other ships.

It has somewhere been suggested that it would have Shtil-1 in VLS mode, but they also mentioned “carrousel” launchers, which makes that report rather unreliable… I think it mentioned 4 8-cell launchers or something like that.
I honestly think for Kashtan too, although it was also mentioned that Kashtan was refused by India, but as Russia did not want to incorporate Barak, I am not sure what will be installed. I guess we’ll see in a few years.