Construction
The Type 42 destroyers (also known as the Sheffield-class) were made in three batches; Cardiff was built in the first. She cost over £30 million, which was double her original quoted price. Her keel was laid down on 6 November 1972, at Vickers Shipbuilding and Engineering Ltd in Cumbria. The build was interrupted by a labour shortage at Vickers. To solve this problem, she was towed to Swan Hunter in Tyne and Wear and completed there.
Type 42s were designed as anti-aircraft vessels primarily equipped with the Sea Dart, a surface-to-air missile system capable of hitting targets up to 56 kilometres (30 nmi) away. Cardiff’s secondary weapon system was a 4.5 inch Mark 8 naval gun, capable of firing 21-kilogram (46 lb) shells to a range of 22 kilometres (12 nmi). After the Falklands War, in which two Type 42s were sunk by enemy aircraft, the entire class was equipped with the Phalanx close-in weapon system, a Gatling cannon that fires 3,000 rounds per minute and is designed to shoot down anti-ship missiles.
Read more about this topic: HMS Cardiff (D108)
Famous quotes containing the word construction:
“The construction of life is at present in the power of facts far more than convictions.”
—Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)
“When the leaders choose to make themselves bidders at an auction of popularity, their talents, in the construction of the state, will be of no service. They will become flatterers instead of legislators; the instruments, not the guides, of the people.”
—Edmund Burke (1729–1797)
“No real “vital” character in fiction is altogether a conscious construction of the author. On the contrary, it may be a sort of parasitic growth upon the author’s personality, developing by internal necessity as much as by external addition.”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)