Shipbucket

After much procrastination and starts and stops, I'm finally getting around to posting something I've had on the back-burner for awhile. The M165 is from a report which presents the final result of a series of designs for a 70 Knot Large Hydrofoil by Grumman made during the 70s. There were a few other designs including the larger M163 which carried a helicopter. (I've started on a drawing of it but I scaled wrong so it's sorta been sitting there for awhile.) however the M165 represented the culmination of all of these. The design while large for a hydrofoil was for a warship small, compact, heavily armed and very fast.


Main armament was a a 22 "Vertical, universal launchers" arranged in a row of 11 on the outside edge of each side of the super structure. Fore of these cells was a tube for Mk48 Torpedoes, each fed by a 5 round magazine (For a total of 10 Torpedos). Close in defense was handled by a 76m,m Oto Melera and a pair of twin 30 mm Emerlec guns.

For sensors the first choice for radars would have been the "Type I configuration, AN/AWG-9 from the F-14, with the AN/APS-116 from the P-3 as the air search radar. A number of alternatives to the AN/AWG-9 are mentioned in the report including the Mk92. In addition it would also carry either AN/SPS-49 or AN/SPS-58 ( and AN/SPS-55 for surface surveillance. (And yes I know /SPS-49 and 58 are Air Search, the report explicitly udentifies them as such but only refers to them as being for surface surveillance and makes no mention of them for air search.

Two Sonars were to be fitted, a dipping sonar deployed via attach in the bottom of the hull and towed variable depth sonar at the stern. Space was allocated for a third sonar to be mounted on the foils as part of future upgrades.

Very interesting entry, and well done!
(maybe just the bridge could be made more smooth, I'm not convinced about showing the panel lines - after all they are not usually shown in this scale, esp. on never-weres, where it's a total guess, the shading of the "legs" suggest they are very, very thick and last but not least there are some stray orange lines over the funnel and a grey one forward of the bridge)

You wouldn't consider trying to draw her with the foils "up" or to add the top-view (if there are any sources for it)?