The Turkish Navy has selected RMK Marine to negotiate its plan for the construction of six follow-on Milgem-class corvettes under the Turkish national warship programme, Ministry of Defence’s Undersecretariat for Defence Industries (SSM) has announced.
RMK Marine has been selected for the construction phase of the Milgem corvette programme, reported Janes.com.
The Turkish national warship programme aims to build eight corvettes and four frigates worth $3bn, with anti-submarine warfare and high-seas patrol capabilities.
Featuring stealth technologies, the new Milgem-class multimission corvettes can be used to perform a range of missions such as reconnaissance, surveillance, target identification, early warning, anti-submarine warfare, surface-to-surface and surface-to-air warfare and amphibious operations.
SSM Undersecretary Murad Bayar listed Milgem as Turkey’s ‘highest- priority (naval) programme’ with advanced ASW capability.
The first two ships of the class, TCG Heybeliada (F-511) and TCG Büyükada (F-512), were built at the Istanbul Naval Shipyard Command.
Armed with 76mm dual-purpose gun and two remotely controlled 12.7mm machine guns, the Milgem-class corvettes features an aft flight deck to allow S-70B-2 Seahawk helicopter missions, as well as aircraft ship-integrated secure and traverse (ASIST) helicopter handling and tracking system.
Countermeasure systems also equipped on the boats include Degaussing (DG), early warning (EW) radar, ASW jammers and Sea Sentor surface ship torpedo defence (SSTD).
The 99m-long Milgem-class corvettes have a displacement capacity of 2,000t, a beam of 14.4m and a design draft of 3.6m.
Capable of accommodating a crew of 93 crew including air crew, the frigates are integrated with eight Harpoon Block II anti-ship missiles and a single Mk31 RAM self-defence missile weapon system.
Image: TCG Heybeliada (F-511) at a shipyard. Photo: courtesy of Wikipedia.
