Sadly, yes.
The gun/missile system was an attempt to overcome the Soviet advantage in MBTs in Europe before the M1 tanks were fielded. The M60s L5 105mm gun was good, but there were doubts about its ability to reliably penetrate the newer Soviet tanks. Also, missiles were at one point super sexy and everyone thought they’d be the wave of the future, before both countermeasures (active and passive) and the availability of hyper-velocity kinetic penetrators became a thing. So they cobbled together this horrible abomination, with a 152mm HE (I think HEAT, or maybe both HE and HEAT? Can’t recall.) low-velocity gun round and the fancy-schmancy Shillelagh missile system.
The system kind of sucked, from what I can remember from that era. The vibration from the cannon was severe, so much so that it pretty much made the system useless on the M551 Sheridan light tank. The rounds were huge, so they could not carry many even in the MBT. The weird turret wasn’t great either, and AFAIK no one preferred it to a plane-Jane M60A1, much less an A3. But before the Abrams, there was a period where we were scrambling to field enough anti-tank systems under armor for what we feared might be a very dirty NBC battlefield.
vyshka
1594
Hopefully just what CENTCOM says it is
It was going to cost way more to repair her than replace her. The problem is the replacement is going to be years (and years) away. The remaining Phibs are going to get a lot more wear-and-tear in the foreseeable future.
Was just coming here to post that. Makes sense, given the economics of things.
jpinard
1599
Great Britain wants to be US mini, so this fits.
Enemies - why bother with torpedoes when we just sink ourselves?
Check out the videos. 6 months to repair isn’t going to be nearly enough time to fix such extensive water damage.
That ship has haunted pipes.
You would think the British of all people would be able to build a ship that doesn’t sink.
Then they need to return to wood, think of the money saved!
Skipper
1604
Good lord that’s scary. Plus, what crew is going to trust things are right if/when it is repaired?
jpinard
1605
You actually looked at the videos. Yea I know. Who builds a ship without a water cutoff valve? That had to be flooding for a while and was still spouting un-impeded.
That’s crazy it looks a torpedo hit that damn thing. It makes issue like electric catapults seem positively minor.
That depends on the sources of the leak. If it’s somewhere that is now underwater and can’t be easily isolated, it can be really hard to stop. There are always some spots in ship design that are worst case for a failure. Maybe they found one here.
ShivaX
1608
Yeah, but usually you discover those because you took a torpedo. Not because you were sitting dock and then nearly sank.
jpinard
1609
Hard to believe they’d build one of those spots around the engine room.
Shaft seals are in the engine room and her sister ship had a leak in that exact area. Stopping a leak from that area without catching it early is going to be really tough. Agreed, not a good sign to have this happen sitting at dock. Scary stuff for the crew.
ShivaX
1611
By comparison, the US tried to sink an old super carrier with basically the entire naval arsenal, failed and had to scuttle it.
That’s a ship with no crew on it hit by weapons that likely didn’t exist when it was made.
Meanwhile the UK is like “we’re in danger of losing our docked carrier”.
jpinard
1612
Normally that’d be sensor’ed to the sky so at the first hint of a leak, alarms would set off a cascade of safety breaks. But if they literally didn’t engineer proper seals where the shaft exits the ship… ack.
