INS Delhi which enters service next month is the most powerful warship ever built in the region.

By Manoj Joshi

For thousands of years India was invaded from the north, over land. It therefore failed to recognise another area of vulnerability -- the sea. And Indian kings, including the great Mughals, could offer little resistance to the most predatory of conquerors, the Europeans, when they came in warships over the sea. It is a lesson that leaders of independent India, beginning with Jawaharlal Nehru, have said the nation should not forget in a hurry.

Just as a reminder, next month, Captain Anup Singh of the Indian Navy will read out the warrant issued by Chief of Naval Staff Admiral Vishnu Bhagwat commanding him to commission INS Delhi, the biggest and most powerful warship ever built in an Indian Ocean yard.

The 6,500-tonne warship, says commanding officer-designate Singh, is the 50th birthday present to the country from the Navy's Design Directorate and Mumbai's Mazagon Dockyards Ltd (MDL). He also emphasises the contribution of the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), Bharat Electronics Ltd (BEL) and scores of private-sector companies.

The source of the new warship's power -- both for propulsion and destruction -- is Russia, which has played a unique role in building India's defence capabilities. "Russian assistance helped us integrate their weapon systems into our design," says Vice-Admiral R. Nath, chief of the Delhi-based Directorate of Naval Design. "Delhi rides on water so effortlessly," he adds. Standing on the deck of Delhi at India's premier naval base in Mumbai as she readies for the big day, it is difficult to escape a sense of history. She is successor to a distinguished ship of the same name which became the flagship of the Indian fleet in July 1948, retiring in 1978. Naval historian Rear-Admiral (retd) Satyindra Singh, who served on it, fondly remembers the VIP cruises with Nehru, his daughter Indira and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel.

Power and Punch

Tethered next to Ranvir, a Russian-made Kashin destroyer, the young Delhi's good looks and power stand out. It is only a little heavier, longer and wider than Ranvir. Yet, it has four times the number of anti-ship missiles -- its main armament -- as well as equipment that gives it a generational jump in electronic warfare (EW) abilities. There is additional space for fuel, food and water to enable it to operate greater distances without touching base.

In simple terms, platforms like Delhi's "sustainability multiplied by reach will help effectively establish the country's presence in the Indian Ocean," says Commodore C. Uday Bhaskar, deputy director of the Delhi-based Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses. Executive Officer Commander S.S. Jamwal points out that the task of linking sensors from various manufacturers into a coherent display and action sequence is an awe-inspiring achievement. "This enormous steel fortress is also a precision war machine," he says. Thousands of tonnes of special-strength steel, hundreds of thousands of miles of cable, transducers, transistors, valves and pistons, located in 437 compartments of various sizes, are all integrated into a platform which can launch a volley of missiles and, with some luck, send a dozen ships to Davy Jones' locker.

After the ship leaves harbour, the captain and his team shift to the operation, or ops, room located deep in the bowels of the ship. This is the ship's centre of command and control. The action information system here, according to Captain Singh, "takes charge of all the sensors and the information they bring in, analyses it, displays it on terminals and indicates the most threatening targets". Thereafter, he and his team take the critical decisions to launch their weapons.

With seemingly little effort and practically no sound, four powerful M-36 gas-turbine engines turn two shafts that spin propellers which provide the thrust to move this 6,500-tonne hulk at 65 kmph. Its main weapons are the 16 Uran (nato ss-n-25 Sapless) ship-to-ship missiles -- dubbed Harpoonski by market-savvy manufacturers -- stored in four quadruple containers clamped on either side of the ship. They can home in on ships well over the horizon, more than 100 km away, skimming over the waves at speeds close to that of sound.

Self-defence

This T-Rex of the seas has powerful enemies -- missiles and torpedoes. They are most effectively tackled by destroying their launch 'platforms' -- submarines and aircraft. The outer defensive screen of Delhi must prevent intruders from coming within 300 km of the ship. This distance is defined in a sense by Pakistan's Harpoon missiles which can be launched from submerged submarines or P3C Orion aircraft and have a range of 110 km.

The outermost screen is provided by two Sea King 42B helicopters, equipped with a radar, dipping sonar, British-made Sea Eagle missiles and depth bombs. These helicopters can fly up to 400 km around Delhi and have electronic data links to download what they see or hear to the combat information centre in the ops room.

Targets under water are tracked by sonar, a device which sends out sound waves that rebound off the metallic hulls of enemy ships or submarines. This is not as simple as its sounds: temperature, salinity, currents and pressure alter the speed and direction of the returning sound wave. In addition, as in radar, other sounds clutter the readings. Processing the signals to filter these out and give the accurate range and bearing of the hostile intruder requires sophisticated software, while the accuracy of the readings themselves requires hardware of great sensitivity. The Navy and the DRDO have designed and engineered Delhi's sonar, based on the success of their earlier apsoh system. The BEL-manufactured unit is called HUMVAAD. It has one sensor mounted on the hull to detect submarines near the surface and another towed, going down deeper to ensure that no vessel is lurking in depths where varying salinity distorts the sonar beam. Once detected, submarines are immediately attacked by anti-submarine rockets within a range of 5 km, and beyond that by torpedoes, mounted on a quintuple launcher in the middle of the ship.

Incoming aircraft or ships are also picked up by a BEL-made early warning radar and then tracked on a planar-array radar, which provides information on the location of a target in three-dimensional form. This radar can track multiple targets, be they aircraft or missiles and identify the most threatening ones. As the object comes closer, it is "illuminated" or locked on by another radar on which rides a Cashmere (NATO SA-N-7 Gadfly) surface-to-air missile that is fired from an automatic launcher at the front and the back of the ship. Missiles pop out from two launchers, each with a 24-unit carousel, and are fired automatically. The warship's designators can lock on to 12 targets at a time and engage the six most threatening ones simultaneously.

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