Royal Navy Type 45 Destroyer Manual: An insight into operating and maintaining the Royal Navy's largest and most powerful air defence destroyer ... Manual) (Haynes Owners' Workshop Manuals) Hardcover – 5 Jun. 2014

If ever there was a book that had the potential to restore one’s shattered faith in the ability of a dysfunctional Ministry of Defence and a private monopoly defence industry to deliver what the Royal Navy needs, then this would have been it. Of course, it’s not the fault of the book that fewer vessels were constructed than originally planned. Nor the fault of the book that no more can be built because BAe Systems owns the rights to the hull design (despite it having been paid for by the taxpayer and adds insult to the injury of vast sums of public money being invested in private dockyard infrastructure to enable the ships to be built in the first place). Nor is it the fault of the book that HMS Dauntless, after just three years in commission, has now been reduced to a harbour training vessel due to problems with its propulsion machinery which are unlikely to be rectified before 2020. Problems that have afflicted the rest of the class in varying degrees.Although very interesting and informative from a technical point of view, one is led with the nagging impression that this is a thinly disguised PR exercise on the part of the builders. And the fact that the author was employed by BAE Systems to work on the weapons integration aspects of this ship does little to assuage that impression.The presentation is visually rich, with many explanatory diagrams. However, there are details in these graphics which make life difficult for the reader – for example, the numbers on a diagram relating to the key are rendered as though they’re in water bubbles (see pages 61-63) which is just plain irritating and unnecessary. Further difficulty in reading graphics is made by the unnecessary graduated backgrounds which distort the foreground colours and make black text difficult to read against a dark colour (see pages 64 and 69). CAD drawings have been used as basis of technical illustrations, with cast shadow areas masking detail, and the same old mistake of them being drawn on screen and then printed in ink on paper, so that reflected rather than transmitted light renders darks too dark. Being derived from CAD drawings, some of these illustrations are impossibly complex to interpret (see front cover and pages 66 and 91).Now, this may sound old fashioned, but it’s not – nautical distances are never, ever measured in kilometres as used in this book – they are measured in nautical miles. A nautical mile represents one minute of arc measured along the meridian in the latitude of that position and for all intents and purposes can be regarded as 2000 yards. Hence speed in knots being measured as the number of nautical mile travelled per hour. Nobody afloat uses kilometres for distance, only metres for depth. So nautical miles or yards are always used to describe a ship’s range or radius of action, or the distance its weapons can fire.Overall, and despite the perhaps harsh criticisms above, this is a fascinating book giving a deep technical insight difficult to find elsewhere into the features of an advanced modern warship design.

Lots of good, detailed and well illustrated information about the design of the class and its systems. The book brings together a pile information that no amount of googling could produce - and that is a key test these days for a reference book. The big negative is the overly positive nature of the read - problems and issues are avoided. For example when describing Sea Viper, there no mention that the early T45's spent years without a working system due to development delays. A lot of space is devoted to the propulsion system, which quickly proved to have fundamental problems - the complex WR21 turbines are unreliable (particularly in the tropics) whilst the 2MW diesel generators aren't powerful enough to act as a backup. Net result - ships adrift at sea with no power! The availability of the T45's has also been far lower than the 70% (including over 127 days at sea per year) expected - in 2017 only two of the six destroyers reached this level. All the above problems were already obvious in 2013/14, when the book was presumably written.

A fascinating insight into the modern workings of a fighting ship. Unlike some book in the Haynes series, this has excellent technical balance - plenty of detail, but not too overpowering. I was actually surprised to see the amount of information of the inner workings, assuming it would be classified more.

This must have been a dificult book to put together because of course this is a warship class newly come into service of which so much is classified. Having said that, this is an excellent description of the ship and its systems, speaking from the point of view of someone who works on a system on board these vessels, I thoroughly recommend it, in fact I have recommended it to the rest of the team I work with!There are only two issues I have problems with, one is that the cutaway drawings are coloured which to my point of view makes them less clear than if they were left as line drawings. The other is that the large drawings go across two pages so detail is lost in the gutter. They would have been better on fold-out pages, but that is not just true of this book, it is general to all the otherwise excellent Haynes technical manuals.

I'm a big fan of the Haynes Manuals for things like this and historical things - the only real drawback to this is that it was published a few years ago and so doesn't have the details of the problems the Type 45 has experienced in recent years but it does inform them a lot by providing the background

I liked the detail - a lot and for those into Naval matters or modelling it's a nice reference. My real concern was that upon reading I realised that perhaps too much information was being released.Now, BAE systems and the UK Govt were involved so, the really secret stuff is hidden, but still, you don't get books like this in China - about Chinese submarines.Our enemies must wonder if we are bonkers !

I do rather like this series. Being a ship I'd had a little involvement with, it was inevitable that there would be less detail than I'd like in some areas, and a lack of technical precision in some parts familiar to me. However, overall, this is a really useful book for the shelf, providing a good high level study of a relatively new warship, and that's a fairly rare thing, when you think of the ages of the vessels in the fabulous "anatomy of the Ship Series.Good volume, well happy with this.

Very detailed ad makes a great gift for any engineer