![]() ![]() ![]() Reportedly, the German Navy is working on installing a retractable thirty-millimeter Moray autocannon to provide fire support for special forces, which would seem like a throwback to the days of deck-mounted guns. The Type 212’s ability to operate in waters as shallow as seventeen meters deep, enabled in part by its X-shaped rudder, makes it ideal for creeping close to the coast to deploy Germany’s elite naval commandos, known as Kampfschwimmers. Based on the IRIS-T air-to-air missile, IDAS would be used primarily to shoot down hostile aircraft, but can also attack ground targets and medium-sized or small surface ships up to twenty kilometers away. Recently, the German Navy has started installing the capability to fire IDAS fiber-optic missiles while submerged from four-cell magazines in the torpedo tubes. A Norwegian combat management system is intended to integrate data from the Type 212’s various sensors, which include both a towed passive sonar array deployed from the sail and a hull-mounted flank array. The torpedo’s wide-aspect conformal sonar also allows it to send sensor data back to the launch vessel. Its six tubes can fire off up to thirteen 533 millimeter DM2A4 Seahake torpedoes connected to the submarine by a fiber optic cable, allowing the crew to guide the weapon to a target up to fifty kilometers away. The Type 212A is intended as a stealthy reconnaissance boat and ship hunter, which is why its armament was initially confined to torpedoes. The small vessels are only fifty-seven meters long and are manned by crews of just twenty-seven each-including both men and, as of 2014, women. ![]() To operate in this maritime theater characterized by shallow, cold waters averaging around fifty meters in depth, the German Navy has a flotilla of six Type 212A submarines, numbered U-31 through U-36. The modern German Navy has two principal missions: participating in expeditionary operations, such as combatting piracy or supporting peacekeeping operations, and sea control of the Baltic Sea-which has grown in importance, given recent tensions with Russia. Though more expensive and complicated to refuel compared to the Stirling, the German PEM hydrogen fuel cells benefit from greater power output (and thus higher speed), have no major moving parts that betray acoustic stealth, and do not impose limits on diving depth. German submarine developers were close on their heels with the Type 212 in 2002, which uses hydrogen fuel cells. It was left to Sweden, in 1997, to deploy the first operational submarine using an AIP system, the stealthy Gotland-class boats that employed a heat-converting Stirling engine. ![]()
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