Saturday, September 18, 2010

Some recent developments in Chinese Shipyards

We've had some new photos coming out recently showing new ships under construction. Probably the biggest development is what we saw in Wuchang shipyard in Wuhan. The photos below shows a new variant of the 039 series of ships that is noticeably different from 039A (aka Yuan class). I haven't posted the photos until now, because the earlier ones all looked like pictures of models or seriously photo-shopped pictures. Remarkably, they decided to make this new variant look a lot like a kilo submarine. Here are the photos and I will let you guys decide.




Right beside the new submarine, they are also in the midst of building a new cutter Haijian-15 for CMS.


At JiangNan shipyard, we've seen several really unclear pictures that we think are new DDGs for PLAN. It's really hard to tell much right now. Just have to play the usual wait and see approach with PLAN.




We've also seen a couple of new photos of the new amphibious ship currently under construction in HuDong shipyard. It looks like this ship could be ready to be launched before Chinese New Year.



And finally, the Type 920 hospital ship sailed for Gulf of Aden around the end of last month. It has finally reached Gulf of Aden and we got several pictures of its rendezvous with replenishment ship 887 and destroyer 170.