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The Military Sealift Command’s much-delayed new ocean survey ship, the Maury (T-AGS-39) was delivered on 31 March. When her sister, the Tanner (T-AGS-40), is delivered late in 1989, Bethlehem Steel’s Sparrows Point Shipyard will have ceased building ships and become a repair facility only. In operation, nearly half of the Maury's 15,281-ton (full load) displacement will be in ballast water, necessary to provide sufficient draft for operating the hull-mounted AN/SQN-17 bottom topography survey system (BOTOSS).
The 11 remaining 34-year-old Royal Netherlands Navy Dokkum-class minesweepers, including the Abcoude right, will be replaced by ten new coastal minesweepers built as part of a joint program with Belgium announced in late April. Belgium will receive ten minesweepers as well. Built with U. S. funds, the Abcoude and her sisters must serve on until their replacements begin to arrive in the mid-1990s.
The Royal Australian Navy’s River- class frigate Swan sits high and dry with the submarine Oxley in February on the new shiplift facility at Australian Shipbuilding Industries in Western Australia. The RAN has expanded its Western Australia-based operations and is lease-purchasing the British Royal Fleet Auxiliary replenishment oiler Appleleaf to provide for extended operations in the Indian Ocean.
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Draped in deperming cables is the Military Sealift Command’s third Henry J. Kaiser (T-AO-187)-class oiler, the John Lenthall (T-AO-189). The first nine ships are to be named for people who contributed to the development of naval technology; the second nine are named for rivers. The fate of the Benjamin Isherwood (T-AO-191) and Henry Eckford (T- AO-192), begun by Pennship but left uncompleted, is uncertain. The other 16 were built or are on order from Avondale.
A close-up of the after superstructure of the third Soviet Ai'rov-class nuclear-powered guided-missile cruiser, the Kalinin, shows one of the ship’s six new combined cannon/ surface-to-air missile (SAM) point- defense weapon mountings, each equipped with two probable 30-mm. Gatling antiaircraft guns, positions for as many as eight missiles, and an integral radar-control system. The missiles racks can presumably be reloaded from magazines beneath the mountings. The well-defended Kalinin also carries the normal Kirov complement of SA-N-4 and SA-N-6 SAMs.
The bluff but yacht-like Paluma, the first of four catamaran-hulled coastal survey craft for the Royal Australian Navy, is seen here on builder’s trials before her name was applied. Intended to work in pairs, the 120- ton Paluma and sisters Mermaid, Shepparion, and Benella will be based at Cairns, on the Coral Sea coast of Queensland, Australia, to conduct surveys of the Great Barrier Reef area.
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