Willy wrote:The idea for going in for two sub lines aside from building up the numbers was to assimilate as much of different tech as possible and then to design an indigenious submarine.The initial idea was to go in for one western and one eastern(Russian) so as to have the best of both worlds as it was put. Isnt this so? There was even news that L&T had tied up with the Russians to build the amur.Dunno whether the second line is going to be russian now.Maybe the RFP is going to be just for formalities sake to fulfil defence procurement requirements.
That idea is flawed , conventional submarine building has reached a state of very high level of maturity and technology advancement , so you buy U-212 , Scorpene , Amur they are by and large similar.
So there is nothing great to learn by building Amur , that you cannot learn by building Scorpene or U-212 , but the long term logistics burden and expense for such luxury is very high with very little tactical advantage.
IMO its better to work with DCN and develop a larger version of scorpene with built in AIP and VLS capability in design stage , and integrating maximum possible Indian designed and built components like Sonar , Sensor , ICMS , EW/ESM and Weapons.
We should not go back to the early 80's approach of going for western and eastern submarine which takes us no where but adds burden.
The Amur is a good sub no doubt but there is very little for us to gain from it , except for perhaps making Rosboronexport richer.
Indian reactor.
Why not when its possible , but its technologically complicated and expensive to build and maintain a SSN.
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