Oldgateboatdriver said:
I would have phrased that a little differently, and would have said, they are fully mature designs - from a construction point of view - with the kinks worked out.
As far as being "proven" design, we are currently in a bit of a lull similar to the one that followed the battle of Trafalgar and lasted until the arrival on the scene of HMS DREADNAUGHT.
At that time, the various navies of the world switched from sailing ships to steel/mechanized ones during a period of peace at sea (Pax Britannia) and many designs were tried - but mostly various navies just followed the lead of France and the UK, which built relatively similar warships (Admiral Popov's round battleship being a famous, or infamous, exception ;D). None of them were ever "proven" in combat, and then Dreadnaught arrived on the scene throwing everything into chaos.
So, now, we are in a similar situation: The last lessons in warship design were learned as result of the Falkland war, more than 30 years ago, and none of the current warship designs have been tested in naval combat, and thus are all unproven designs. For all we know, someone will come up with a new "genius" idea in warship design in a few years and make all current design obsolete. You just never know.
You need a blue water navy to operate across the globe as Canada does; but, in my opinion, a blue water navy would have a very bad day in battle against a green-water navy comprised of dozens of small attack craft carrying numerous modern anti-ship missiles. It always blows me away when I compare a CPF/Tico/Arleigh which weigh between 5000- and 10,000 tons, and carry only 8 Anti-ship missiles, against a a Type-22/Skjold/Comabttante II missile boats which also all carry 8 anti-ship missiles, but which only weigh 250 tons. You can produce, crew and replace far more missile boats than you can full size warships. A swarm of these ships could fire more missiels at a task group than any task group could possibly defend against.
We don't need a ship to be able to counter this threat, because we don't have any real expectation of having to get into real combat, and we don't have the money or willpower to try and really prepare ourselves for that eventuality. Either we are going to avoid that conflict all together, or are we are going to expect the USN Air Wings to obliterate these vessels before they even get in range of our ships.
So, we don't need a ships that's optimized for modern combat, and there does not yet exist an HMS Dreadnought that has fundamentally altered the face of naval warfare (although I have a few design ideas in my head); what we need are vessels that can continue to dot the kinds of missions that we have been conducting (and conducting admirably I might add), and therefore, the tried and true DZP is, I think, the way to go.
If we go with the Type 26, we might, eventually, get a a more capable combat platform, but we will spend so many years working out the kinks that we'll have to skip out, for a few years, an all the overseas deployments and exercises that we're known for.
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I also haven't had coffee yet today, so take this all with a grain of salt.