The SAAF Forum

I beleive that they might have but will confirm. You are completely correct about the capabilities of Cheetah. I will add some video footage of it later.

Thanks Vorster.

Found out the following about the indigineous corvette/frigate programme cancelled in the early 1990'2 as stell was about to be cut...



Still don't know what the design looked like though. The class was to be built on the same slipway as the SAS Drakensberg.

So, anyone find out further details on that indigeneous corvette programme? Project Falcon was actually started with steel that had been ordered and cutting about to commence. This means that there was a concrete design in place.

When going through this thread once again, I thought it would be of interest to view the following link in connection with the submarine and light frigate parts of this topic.

http://www.secretprojects.co.uk/forum/i ... 895.0.html

Was eloptro working on periscopes for the proposed locally built subs? I seem to recall that some of the local work toward the new subs to be built was then used on the Daphne upgrade.

Also, does anyone have any further info on the local corvettes that were to be built? More than one source has stated they were cancelled as steel was about to be cut, meaning the design was pretty much set in stone.

Do you know anything about this Eugene?

Sorry for the thread resurrection, but was paging through SA's Fighting Ships Past and Present by Allan Du Toit.

The entry on the D'Estienne d'Orves class (A69) that we were to purchase, spoke about the previous attempt to buy the Baptista de Andrade class.

These were the 4 vessels being built for the SAN by Spain, with Portugal as the intermediatery. As is well known, the coup in Portugal in 1974 prevented these from being delivered, and they were inducted into the Portuguese navy. A brief perusal of it's armament and electronics show that these were meant for South Africa.

At the time, it was announced that 4 would be built in Spain (Bazan), and 2 would be built locally, for a total of 6. Adverts were placed in South African newspapers in 1972 asking for tenders to build these other 2.

Now, it was announced that these vessels were ordered in 1971. All 4 were launched in 1973 and 1974, before the coup in Portugal, but not completed in time before the coup in April 1974. The lead boat was commissioned late in 1974.

The point I'm trying to make, is that if we were to build 2 locally, with adverts for tenders from local shipyards placed in 1972 already, and the Spanish built ones were so close to being ours before politics scuppered the deal, It stands to reason that we would have had the engineering blueprints already, so late in the day.

Therefore, surely any local corvette would have been a derivitive of this design. The local corvette design was guessed in the defence media to be around 1500 tons in displacement, with strikecraft weapons, and perhaps ASW torpedo tubes and helicopter, which ties neatly with the 1400 ton Baptista de Andrade, just slightly enlarged or lengthened.
I'd imagine that by the time the local corvette project was almost launched, with the steel just about to be cut in the late 1980's that this design would perhaps have been modified, as surmised above, with perhaps permament helicopter facilities?

The basic design, which could be traced to the João Coutinho class corvettes, was used in a slightly heavier, stretched format by Spain in the Descubierta class a couple of years later. I'm not sure on this, but it has also been mentioned that the Argentinian Espora class, that is currently at Siminstown, is a further slightly enlarged extrapolation of this design.

So the indigineous corvette would likely be based on the Baptista de Andrade class?

Any thoughts on whether my reasoning is correct?

Just realised, that this thread was obviously started when the Army and Naval forums were combined.

Dean, seeing as this is primarily naval based, perhaps it should be there? Or split somehow?

We actually have many topics about the Defence Force and MOD that don't really have a 'natural home'.

The problem with the above reasoning is that no contract was ever signed for these vessels by South Africa:

To quote Commander Potgieter:

It would still be jolly interesting to know which corvette/frigate blueprints we possessed and whether these would have enabled an indigenous build when first the Portuguese and then the French purchase failed to go through.

1. Even if project Taurus didn't get very far, the French A69 purchase got a lot further and a South African crew was on the verge of bringing the first one back home when the French embargoed us. So surely we had quite a lot of the A69 plans at that stage? Could we not - based on what we had at the end of the A69 purchase - have built our own one if we wanted to? That would have been the better course as the A69 was the more advanced design, compared to the Joao Coutinho and Baptista d'Andrade.

2. After the French purchase fell through, what other frigate/corvette blueprints did we perhaps come by? We had obtained Type 209 submarine blueprints from Germany, so did we not perhaps get any frigate/corvette blueprints too?

If one had access to the right files in Defence HQ (or at Krygkor or Denel) I guess one could tell. We should ask Thean Potgieter.

All of that aside, my guess is that we never built an indigenous corvette/frigate not because of the lack of engineering blueprints, but due to

(i) The lack of funds and the greater priority being given (understandably if not necessarily rightly) to the Army and Air Force at the time of the border war

(ii) The fact that the Joao Coutinho, Baptista d'Andrade, Descubierta and the A69 weren't such fantastic designs anyway. If we had built, say, our own A69, this ship would have entered service in the early 80's at best, by which time it would already have begun to look long in the tooth. French A69's and Spanish Descubiertas visited the Cape and I went onboard one of the Descubiertas (Infanta Elena, if I remember right.) Primitive is a word that comes to mind.

(iii) Following on from (ii), our own engineers probably would have wanted an up-specced version, but this in itself maybe contributed to delays as we expected more and more from the design, meaning that the calendar forever shifted to the right and the thing never got built.

Benguela, in Allan du Toit's book, and in the link I provided earlier in the thread, there is mention of the local corvette programme.

Basically, after SAS Drakensberg, the decision to be made was to build either the local subs, based on the Type 209, or the local corvettes. Some work had been done on the submarine systems, under various project names. Long-lead items were also apparently ordered.

It was then decided to rather upgrade the Daphne class, and concentrate on the corvettes, with the submarine construction programme following on from the corvette construction programme.

The corvette programme was cancelled as part of the huge defence cuts, just as steel was about to be cut.

Thus, if construction was just about to begin, obviously there was a definite, concrete design to go ahead with.

It would be interesting to know what this design entailed, and whether it was a local design, ala the SAS Drakensberg, or whether it was based off a foreign design, and modified from there.

I also think the sophistication was not a primary issue, in my opinion.

What the Navy needed was bigger boats than the strike craft, with better sea-keeping abilities, and a platform that could mount ASW systems.

As stated before, I'd imagine a strikecraft weapons fit (76mm, Skerpioen) with sonar, triple Mk32 torpedo tubes, and probably a helicopter.

At least, that's my opinion.

Substantially correct. Cost is what killed the cat. Firstly the Blohm and Voss designed Joao Coutinho (they built three of the original vessels for Portugal in Germany) was a mid 1960s design and it was at best what one could describe as an "austerity" design. None were ever built in Portugal, neither the Joao Coutinho nor the Baptista d'Andrade class. Secondly having the "plans" (a word deprecated by engineers who like to refer to the things as "drawings") is a very long way from actually building a ship - especially in a shipyard with no experience in that particular area.
If one recalls the problems Sandock Austral had with the strike craft one can appreciate the magnitude of the problem. Armscor had a man flying backward and forward to Israel on a weekly basis to discuss specific problems with Israel Shipyards and going back to Durban to advise on solutions. In the early 1980s we obtained the drawings and go-ahead for the HDW 1500 design from Germany. We were already dealing with them for the submarine drawings. I knew an Armscor engineer who spent a lot of time at HDW between about 1984 and 1987 (or thereabouts) on this project. Then the financial pinch really hit and that was the end of that. The emotive "steel was about to be cut" (often used about various failed projects about the world) was unlikely to have happened. I doubt the project ever got to that stage - the submarine project was more advanced and some lead items for it had been acquired. South Africa had been trying to design it's own corvette for some years - with continuous disastrous results mainly caused by giving the weapons people priority. These characters wanted to load everything including the kitchen sink aboard with the results that the basic parameters inevitably kept being compromised, repeatedly, to such an extent that the preliminary design had to be scrapped over and over. Pretoria (or whoever) had laid down an absolute maximum size/displacement and none of the weapons people could appreciate the fact that you could not put all the candy in the store on the ship. I use the word design in the previous very loosely - because I doubt the think tank involved ever got beyond back of the envelope drawings. I know it was a most frustrating time for the engineers - who had more-or-less been relegated to a backseat in the think tank - to such an extent that some of them began to get truly mutinous and refused to attend further meetings on the design and it eventually became obvious to Koos Bruinzeel )(sp? - he was a Dutchman -the Armscor engineer loosely in charge) that lack of expertise was going to hamper the process fatally. At the time the idea was named a "mini-corvette" and would have been smaller than the project Taurus vessels.

Eugene, so you're saying that the local corvette/light frigate would have been the HDW FS 1500 derivitive??