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 the first RN ship to intercept a ballistic missile since the Gulf War.

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.

Development

The Type 45 emerged from the trilateral Horizon Common New Generation Frigate project, which the UK left in 1999, choosing to develop a bespoke national air-defence platform. BAE Systems was contracted to build six hulls at its Clyde shipyards, the first of which, HMS Daring, entered service in 2009, according to BAE Systems. The class was completed in 2013 with the commissioning of HMS Duncan. The programme was not exported, but its sensor and missile architecture — combining the SAMPSON radar and the PAAMS-derived Sea Viper system — gave the Royal Navy a capability leap over its Cold War-era air-defence ships.

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