Cape Town - Equipment of more than half a billion rand which will eventually form part of the new corvette's advanced combat suite have recently been shown to the media in Simon's Town.

According to Mr Doug Law-Brown, manager of African Defence Systems (ADS), the testbed helps to test the components built by various subcontractors before they are installed in the corvettes.

ADS, the main contractor, has spent more than R1 billion on subcontracts.

The various components will eventually [are they not already doing so?] communicate with each other and will also be connected to a central combat management system. [indeed]

The system will analyse the information it has gathered and will provide a summary of the conditions on the ship to the operators.

If ADS finds faults in the testbed system, the identical equipment in its stores will be corrected immediately.

According to Law-Brown, currently the equipment for the fourth corvette is in the testbed, while the modified duplicates are to be installed on the first three corvettes.

The reason for this is that the various combat suites (sic) must be able to communicate with each other and the testbed will be used to test the communication between the combat suites (sic) [mean "systems" not "combat suites"].

According to him, ADS has been testing the combat suite for the past year. They should be finished by November when the first corvette is delivered.

"Naturally the environment on the ship will differ slightly from that on the testbed. This means that further problems can arise. But at least by that time we will know where to look for the problems in the system." [indeed]

With acknowledgements to Carel van Dyk and Die Burger.