Taiwan Military News, Reports, Data, etc.

Air Force Brat said:

I would encourage all parties involved in this discussion to "dial it back" out of respect for our good friend Jeff Head, who is fighting "terminal cancer". He has been a very faithful moderator and friend, lets show him the respect he deserves by "playing nice" with one another. Please???? really, you all have good points, please present those in a respectful manner, and show Jeff that even though he is "under the gun" that this forum which means so much to him, loves him, and values the steady hand of leadership that he and BD Popeye have worked so hard to build here on SDF.

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Equation said:

What "freedom", you can't live on an island or peace of land that doesn't belong to you in the first place? Hawkish Taiwanese are a dictatorship themselves demanding the world to accept the stolen Taiwan province as their own after losing the civil war, therefore have no governing right to exist at all. America just can't single handedly hand over a nuke to Taiwan otherwise China could do the same to Cuba or Iran. As a result they both will be breaking the understanding from the UN Permanent Security Council understanding and status quo.

Trump is a showmanship he talk the talk and walk very gently and scatter back just enough to appease his crowd but nothing serious to hurt China.

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Ultra said:

Well, ...

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Ultra said:

Live on an island that doesn't belong to us? Says who?
Doesn't the people have the right to self-determination? Of course for someone like you who doesn't understand what freedom is, this would be a foreign concept to you .

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Taiwan has begun the process of upgrading its Lockheed Martin F-16 Fighting Falcon combat aircraft to the latest F-16V configuration, it was confirmed to IHS Jane's on 17 January.

Lockheed Martin said that work to upgrade the Republic of China Air Force's (RoCAF's) F-16A/Bs had begun with the company's Aerospace Industrial Development Corp (AIDC) partners. National media reported that the first four of the RoCAF's F-16A/Bs to be retrofitted were flown to the facility in Taichung in the northwest of the island on 16 January.

First unveiled at the Singapore Airshow in 2012, the F-16V features the Northrop Grumman AN/APG-83 active electronically scanned array (AESA) radar (derived from the F-16E/F Block 60 AN/APG-80 and also known as the Scalable Agile Beam Radar: SABR), a new Raytheon mission computer, the Link 16 datalink, modern cockpit displays, an enhanced electronic warfare system, and a ground collision avoidance system.

The F-16 original equipment manufacturer, Lockheed Martin, was awarded USD272 million to install 142 F-16V aircraft upgrade kits already contracted for USD1.85 billion. In May 2016 it was reported that AIDC was building a hangar at Taichung that could accommodate up to 24 aircraft per year going through the process. Work will be performed in Taiwan and in the United States, and is expected to be complete by 31 May 2022.

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Taiwan's National Chung-Shan Institute of Science and Technology (NCSIST) released an animation video showing the future guided-missile destroyer project for the Republic of China (Taiwan) Navy (ROC Navy) in combat. Renderings of this new project surfaced in June last year (

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). This new destroyer project is in line with Taiwan's new naval acquisition plan which was unveiled in late 2015. The new plan called for four new destroyers (among other vessels).

Based on the newly released video, one of the key feature of the new destroyer class are the four AESA radar arrays presumably for air and missile defense systems. Compared to the early computer rendering and scale model unveiled last year, the integrated mast (looking somewhat similar to an US LPD 17 class mast) a more traditional mast design is now fitted on top of the deckhouse (visible at 0:12 in the video).

It seems like there is a second set of radar arrays on a secondary, smaller mast located aft, on top of the helicopter hangar (visible from 0:15), possibly an X-band radar. The hangar itself features two doors: A large one for a medium-size helicopter and a smaller one presumably for a VTOL UAV.

The destroyer is fitted with a Taiwan-designed

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on top of the helicopter hangar (last year rendering showed a Phalanx CIWS in this location) (visible at 0:22 in the video).

For Anti-surface warfare, the future destroyer is fitted with 16x anti-ship missiles (the video shows the new

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at 02:36).

For air-defense, in addition to the 16x short range SAM from the Sea Oryx system, there are 4x modules of VLS consisting of 8x cells each (for a total of 32 missiles) (visible at 0:50 in the video). Early design from last year showed a different configuration: One module forward and two in the middile of the hull (located in between the anti-ship missile launchers). The surface to air missiles depicted in the video could well be the new ship-based variant of the Tien Kung III which was

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in later 2016 by NCSIST.

Finally, the destroyer appears to be fitted with a BAE Systems 5 Inch Mk 45 Mod 4 naval gun system (0:55 in the video).

Displacement of the ship is expected to be between 6,000 and 8,000 tons (slightly lighter compared to the 10,000 destroyers outlined in the naval acquisition plan last year). The first tranche of funding (US $ 600 million) is expected for this year. According to the documents, the lead ship is supposed to be delivered in 2019. This will likely be difficult to achieve however as this is a new and complex design for Taiwan's shipbuilding industry.

Taiwanese shipbuilding industry latest developments include the

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, an

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of this catamaran corvette and

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.

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JudgeKing said:

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And here's the video:

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