Shipbucket

It can be a OHP sonar but in a Different casing. It is like choosing to use MK-29 or MK-41 VLS for lunching Sea sparrow.

Its actually very diffrent because of the shape of the transmitter. 56 is spherical. 53 is cylindrical. If you put a ball in a box designed for a can you create degraded areas called baffles. In this case youd have degraded areas to the rear and on the bottom of the array.

I would change the sonar so it made sense for the ship type.

seeker36340 wrote:It's an interesting project given the bureaucratic gunfight over various "high-low" concepts from the 1950s on. The USN basically gave up on frigates under John Lehman with an emphasis on getting AEGIS into the fleet and producing destroyers with long range. A frigate like this would have been an attractive export product.

Ok, Let's make an assume, that Zumwalt got his ships, not just the O. H. Perry class vessels. I have spent about four hours working up a Harpoon entry on this ship, and then a friend and I put her into action as part of a convoy that was heading in the North Atlantic around 1980. I looked at her sonar and well it would appear from the unit under this ship it would most likely have been SQS-26\53, and this would have given her a better range then the SQS-56 mounted on the O. H. Perry. So the right choice was made there, but this sonar is going to make her a crowded hull. But given the choice of the 76mm gun being carried the smaller magazine area is going to offset that a bit.

This isn't the first US modern era frigate to be over crowded. When Bronstein went to sea, she had a similar outfit of weapons and sensors even on a smaller hull. Even though she was considered crowded and in some measures unsatisfactory, she did do an adequate job.

So there is reason to believe that this ship could make it into the fleet.

So when we tested the ship it performed well. It was able to make the intercepts and it was able to push the enemy away from the convoy.

Good job on the ship.

This ship fights well for a frigate.....

Both SQS-53 and SQS-56 transducers are cylindrical, although of course SQS-53 is dramatically larger.

I like this ship,so I look foward to see export versions of her.

erik_t wrote:Both SQS-53 and SQS-56 transducers are cylindrical, although of course SQS-53 is dramatically larger.

That's interesting. What is the reference for that?

Ship does look good btw.

Pictures of SQS-53 are easy enough to come by. Friedman gives cylindrical dimensions for SQS-56; I can't find a picture.

As far as I know, the USN has never had a surface ship scanning sonar of any shape other than a cylinder. Indeed Spherion is the only spherical surface-ship unit of which I am aware.

To backup what Erik stated, the SQS-56, like other sonars, are often described in terms of diameter and height. These dimensions make the most amount of sense when applied to regular cylinders.

For example, the SQS-56 is described as being 100 inches in diameter and 48 inches tall with 36 'staves' of 6 elements each.

Yeah you're right. I looked it up in the tech pub, its 36 staves and 8 elemets, so basically half the size of 26CX and 53X flavor transducer arrays (interms of number of elements).

The sonar dome is dome shaped and I remember seeing on an Australian frigate a spherical array, I thinks thats why i got confused. But the newer composite dome casings are flatter.

My bad.