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THE Royal Navy showed off its largest and most powerful attack submarine Tuesday, a month before the over-budget, overdue vessel is due be launched.
Military officials say HMS Astute will be able to circumnavigate the planet without surfacing, and its nuclear reactor is designed to last for the vessel's 25-year operational life, meaning it will never need to be refueled.
The Astute is due to be launched from the BAE Systems Inc. shipyard in Barrow-in-Furness, northwest England, on June 8 and to enter service in January 2009, according to The Associated Press.
The sub is to be followed by two more Astute-class submarines, Ambush and Artful. Together the navy estimates they will cost about 3.6 billion pounds (US$7.2 billion), more than a billion pounds over the original estimate.
The project is also years behind schedule. HMS Astute was originally due to enter service in June 2005, but in 2002 the government said the date had been pushed back to 2006. In 2005 the defense ministry said the sub would enter service by 2009.
Nearly 40,000 acoustic tiles, designed to mask the submarine's sonar signature, have still to be attached to the ship's 97 meter hull, which is 30 percent longer than that of the submarines now in use.
It needs to be fitted with 100 kilometers of cabling, 23,000 pipes, and over 5 million lines of software code.
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