India Navy Destroyers

[Nilgiri]

So the Navy released a vague render as part of some other video, and it seems this may be the latest iteration of the evolving Next-Generation Destroyer (NGD) design. The resemblance to Italy's Fincantieri DDX which existed in the older iteration is now completely gone. This seems to be a ground-up new design:

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DefenceDecode has made this enhanced graphic with annotations:

View attachment 76702

Keep in mind that it's still an evolving design and this may or may not be tentative. But looking at how things are, it seems it'll have a total of 112 VLS cells, comprising:

48 x Small VLS (point-defence SAMs like VL-SRSAM)
48 x Air Defence VLS (medium/long-range SAMs with area-defence & BMD capability like Kusha family)
16 x Strike VLS (for large ASuW/Land-Attack weapons like BrahMos or future Scramjet Hypersonics)

I guess they are not going to go for a universal VLS (so far at this stage anyway)?

 

[Nilgiri]

 

[Gessler]

Kuntal Biswas has made a neat 3D description of the NGD using the latest design iteration available:

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/2071914987178848414

 

[Gessler]

The MoD has apparently granted Acceptance of Necessity (AoN) to the Next Generation Destroyer program, now seems to be called Project-18A.

Next Generation Destroyers : Plan for bigger, heavier, stealthy next-generation destroyers gets defence council’s approval | - The Times of India

NEW DELHI: The long-pending next-generation destroyer programme has received a formal push with the Rajnath Singh-led Defence Acquisition Council (DAC)

timesofindia.indiatimes.com

"...The proposed guided-missile destroyers, to be designed by the Warship Design Bureau, will be bigger, heavier and equipped with advanced weapons and technologies and part of future frontline surface combatants of the Indian Navy. The project may cost upwards of Rs 75,000 crore ($7.9 billion) and the delivery is likely to start 5-10 years after the contract is signed. “The futuristic destroyers will have displacement upwards of 10,000 tonnes, making them significantly larger than the Visakhapatnam-class destroyers (7,400 tonnes),” a source told TOI. “These warships will have more firepower, more sensors, advanced technologies and systems,” the source said. A competitive bidding will happen in the near future for the building of these next-generation destroyers..."

++++

3D artist Kuntal Biswas's rendition remains the closest thing to what we believe NGD to look like:

^^ That rendition is based on the design shown by Navy in an unrelated video, though it wasn't said anywhere that this is in fact NGD:

That said, I'm confused at the "P-18A" nomenclature being used. This indicates that there was a "P-18" design on the board earlier. I'm wondering if the original P-18 was the design shown in a WESEE video years ago, which is ostensibly based on a Fincantieri DDX baseline:

Whereas the new one shown last year (with superstructure-based radar panels like on Arleigh Burke, see video above) could be the P-18A.

If I resort to a little bit of high-octane speculation, I'd say we originally did want to go with a DDX baseline. A lot of preliminary work may have already been done for it, but for whatever reason it didn't pan out (Italians quoted too high a price, or maybe that design was only made with MFSTAR in mind and couldn't support the LRMFR). This was the P-18.

So we went back to square one and decided to come up with our own design, what we now call P-18A. This would be entirely based around carrying the LRMFR arrays.

This would explain the inordinate delays and why the program was stuck in conceptual stage for a long time.