Hey Zare, any news about Korcula and how it performed in the exercise?

BTW, the navy budget was increased and rebalanced… the corvettes should enter production very soon!!!:D

Thanks, Zare!

Any news on how the Korcula performed these days with Orion?

well unfortuanetly we went for almoust 600 ton oceanic MCM desing that is best used in some distant operations than in our arhipegalo

No plans for a class of smaller minehunters?

If you need/want something larger, there’s a bigger 350-400 tonns minehunter in the works:D …

It seems that Croatia is actually gonna have a rather large number of minehunting/sweeping ships. Rumours are that NATO wants us for the job:) .
So, a class of bigger minehunters and additional 3 or even 4 ships of the Korcula class is planned.

It was quite interesting listening to the commander of the french minehunter Orion as he was interviewed on the TV. He said that even these days after every storm the french coast gets crowded with mines… I knew there were mines in the baltic from the ww2, but this came as a surprise to me…

bout that new minehunter, What are its meassures? What has it eaten (by looks it looks like really small seal eating awfully lot of herring ) What does it carry?

Indeed, it does look hiddeous:D … About the equpiment I can’t say much. Maybe Zare or somebody else can enlighten us… However, here is a interview with the designer of the ship… He doesn’t talk mouch about the equipment, but maybe it will be of some interest to you. There’s a bigger interview in croatian with more specific details, but I have doubt if I could properly translate it with all these fancy tehnical expressions… Here’s the english part of the interview from hrvatski vojnik website

Excerpts from the interview with Mislav Brlić, manager of the Small Counter-Mine Ship Project
With domestic knowledge and equipment to the unique Small Counter-Mine Ship

Who is involved in this project?
Holder of the contract for construction and equipping of the first Croatian ship for counter-mine battle is the shipyard Montmontaža-Greben from Vela Luka. The Institute for Naval Engineering made a design of the ship and the entire technical documentation. As a manufacturer, it also delivered several essential systems for operation of the ship. Of the major subcontractors, the Naval Centre for Electronics from Split (PCE) is included in the programme. It delivers the system of internal and external ship connections and part of the navigation system. The second subcontractor, the Engineering Consulting for Industrial Electronics (IEL) from Zagreb delivers the management and supervision system of the propulsive and ship systems. It is certainly necessary to mention the unselfish assistance of the MOD professional services that monitor construction of the ship on daily basis through activities of the expert committee. Their remarks and suggestions help the designer and the constructor to a large degree to remove in time the observed deficiencies or imperfections and build in additional improvements to construct a functional ship according to tactical and technical requirements.

What is hidden behind the name Small Counter-Mine Ship?
The small counter-mine ship (SCMS) represents a unique solution of such a ship in the world. With this project, Croatian experts met all tactical and technical requirements of the Croatian Navy so that a ship of small measurements carries out tasks of mine-sweeping and mine-hunting. In the world today, there is no ship of such measurements that would comprise mechanical mine-hunting and mine-sweeping assisted by towed mine-sweepers, underwater vessels and towed sonars. Its small measurements enable it to have smaller physical fields of the ship so that it is less detectable to mines. Besides searching and clearing mines, the Small Counter-Mine ship will, primarily because of its level of equipment, also serve for civilian purposes as control of maritime routes and searching sunken objects (ships, aircraft, helicopters), filming archaeological sites, etc.

Destroying mines is one of the most difficult tasks. Why are you so sure your ship will be able to do it?
The most important design criteria that have to be met in counter-mine ships, as resistance to impact created by explosion of the mine, ship’s small acoustic field, ship’s small magnetic field, small electromagnetic interference, safety of the crew and an overall good command of the ship are met by the given design solutions.

What equipment have you built into the SCMS?
The ship is packed with equipment and devices, from regular equipment that is necessary for stay of 14 crewmembers to sophisticated devices for mine hunting. The ship attracts special attention with is numerous electrical equipment. More than 11 km of special types of cables were built into the ship, including optical cables that transfer data for the command and control system. There is also a system for automatic compensation of the ship?s magnetism with its central cupboard in the engine-room and cables and coupling boxes all over the ship’s hull. The ship has two main diesel types of engines MTU 8V 183 TE62 with power of 365 kW in the main engine-room and three diesel generators MTU-ULJANIK (2×100 kVA, 1×30 kVA) that are in the auxiliary engine-room. All command of the counter-mine operations and navigation will be carried out from a room in the upper part of the ship where the pilot-house and combat-operational centre are situated. There is also a control panel for guidance of the counter-mine battle and an integral control panel that consists of five connected consoles for commanding the ship. Reading states of all ship?s systems will be done on control panels supported by more than one hundred sensors placed along the ship, from leaking sensor, sensor of the flow of liquids and gasses in various pipes, fire-prevention sensors to thermometers in storages of ammunition and explosive devices.

Hope it helps a bit…

The ship is 173 tonns of displacement, and 27 meters in length. Made from reinforced plastics and other fancy stuff which is hard to pronounce:D

Guy i know what ustasa’s did lol more than u do. I know they had concentration camps, murderd people i already knew that since day one

Then why are you insisting on using that nickname? Give me one good reason… I think this should be reported to moderators.

That’s a bad situation…the new corvette design will furfil all roles just fine, but who knows what could happen in meantime. VPBR would be a nice stop-gap measure. We can choose between two stop-gap measures : introduce a bigger ship to the fleet, or try to modernize current RTOP class missile corvettes, to extend autonomy and their field of ops. The latter is quite questionable

Well, the corvettes should enter the service in 3 or 4 years, if these plans will be followed. So, not a problem for us to stay with the RTOPs for a few years more. And yes, they are getting new engines this year, to extend their range. I think they’ll be our stop-gap measure, I’m afraid. No real use of Konis could we make in those 4 years. It would take a year alone to upgrade them.

Well i mean corvettes or even bigger ships for its navy

For now only 4 of these corvettes are planned, but since FACs will have to be replaced by something, yes, I think there’ll be additional corvettes, possibly of more upgradded type. As to the matter of even bigger ships, well, believe it or not, there was a funny plan done by one of our domestic experts in 2000 which was focused on the future of the croatian navy, and in that plan it was suggested that we buy 2 of the O.H.Perry class frigates(!) in around 2005 time period… As you can see, that didn’t happen:D . Well, it wouldn’t hurt us to have 2 or more frigattes, especially for ASW, but being honest, there is no real need for them now nor there are sufficient funds to operate and build them, atleast for now.

If you ask me, I’d rather have some submarines instead of frigattes. Too bad Velebit is going to be sold. Damn those french and their suggestions:diablo: !