Type 45 Daring

The Royal Navy's specialist area air-defence destroyer — built around the SAMPSON AESA radar and the Sea Viper missile system, with a 48-cell Sylver VLS, a symbol of high-end European naval capability, and in April 2024 the first Royal Navy ship to shoot down a ballistic missile.

Overview

The Type 45, also referred to as the Daring class, is a guided-missile destroyer designed and built for the United Kingdom's Royal Navy. Its primary mission is area air defence — protecting a task group against saturation attacks by anti-ship missiles and aircraft — although it has operated increasingly in a general-purpose multirole capacity. Six ships were built between the mid-2000s and 2013, and the class remains the Royal Navy's most capable surface combatant, undergoing a rolling programme of propulsion remediation, sensor evolution, and missile integration.

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