Page 58 - Australian Defence Magazine Nov 2020

58 C4I SUBMARINES
NOVEMBER 2020 | WWW.AUSTRALIANDEFENCE.COM.AU
LEFT: An enhanced communications facility will benefit all parts of submarine operations.
“We also wanted to insert that into the BYG-1 combat system, because we considered it to be a lot more progressive than the GUI that the US was then employing. The US Navy did not initially show a lot of interest, so we elected to per- form the work as an Australia-unique undertaking. We in- corporated it into what was then called the Weapon Control System, now Payload Control System, as an interface which allowed us to control all the functionality of employing the Mk.48 torpedo from one screen, rather than the three dis- plays the US Navy needed,” CAPT Lindsay explained.
“We’ve had that at sea for quite a long time and when US submariners gained exposure to it during collaborative exer- cises, they realised in was a great capability and lobbied the US Navy to adopt it. Today it is a feature of the common system.”
HARDWARE DESIGN AND INTEGRATION
Prime contractor for hardware selection and design in the US is DRS Technologies (Leonardo-DRS), on behalf of
PMS-425, which effectively ‘builds’ a notional hardware baseline, known as a ‘stack-up’ for each submarine variant involved in the ACP. This ‘stack-up’ becomes the proposed hardware for each tech insert, but each shares common components, such as processors and network switches, which allows Australia to leverage the USN’s larger scale commercial contracts.
Raytheon Australia is responsible for packaging the hard- ware into RAN cabinets, integration testing of the APB software with the wider RAN combat system and instal- lation of the new system onto each submarine during its full-cycle docking interval in Osborne, or mid-cycle dock- ing activity at Henderson in Western Australia.
As part of TI18 development, the Collins submarines will receive a replacement for the current weapon data con- verter, which translates combat system solution outputs di- rectly into the weapon interface and also supplies power to it prior to launch. The original equipment, installed in the
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