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Sunday, July 6, 2014

USS Fort Worth LCS-3

Here are some images of Bronco's 1/350 scale USS Fort Worth LCS-3 Combat Ship.

From Wikipedia"
USS Fort Worth (LCS-3) is a Freedom class littoral combat ship of the United States Navy. She is the first ship to be named after Fort Worth, Texas, the 16th-largest city in the United States.
Her name was announced 6 March 2009. This was after a long public relations campaign by United States Representative Kay Granger, former Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon R. England, and others. The ship was built by Lockheed-Martin. Her keel was laid on 11 July 2009 during a ceremony at Marinette Marine Shipyard in Marinette, Wisconsin.
Fort Worth includes additional stability improvements to deal with issues found on USS Freedom (LCS-1).
The 80% completed ship was launched by its contractor on 4 December 2010. The vessel underwent sea trials in Lake Michigan during late 2011, with the completion of these trials announced on 24 October 2011. The ship successfully completed its acceptance trials, which also took place on Lake Michigan, on 4 May 2012. The inspectors only found ten severe deficiencies during the trials, an "exponential" improvement over Freedom.
The improvements to the ship include a lengthened hull, which makes her faster than Freedom and ten percent more fuel efficient. Fort Worth was commissioned in Galveston, Texas 22 September 2012.[16] She will set sail on a 16 month deployment in the late fall of 2014.
The Fort Worth will rely on automated sensors to perform "conditions-based maintenance" and hopefully avoid the greatly overworked crew problems that Freedom had on her first deployment.
In November 2013, the Fort Worth conducted live-fire tests of its 57 mm and 30 mm canons against small boat targets conducting swarm attacks. The Fort Worth was moving fast through the water and assisted by an MH-60R helicopter. The ship's fire control system locked on to and fired on the small maneuvering boats in day and night situations with optical sights. The helicopter provided radar targeting which was passed on to the ship's fire control system. Test firing were successful, with additional evaluations of the complete surface warfare module scheduled for early 2014.
In November 2013, Fort Worth became the first LCS to test operations with the Northrop Grumman MQ-8 Fire Scout a critical capacity for the LCS program.

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