Stern Landing Vessels for Australian Military

Sea Transport Corporation has proposed a militarized version of their Stern Landing Vessel (SLV) for use as a heavy landing craft for the Royal Australian Navy (RAN). The SLV design has been used for civilian passenger ferries. The vessel has a conventional "V" shaped bow at one end and a ramp at the other. This way the ship can travel efficiently in heavy seas and need only back into the beach to unload.

The 65m vessel depicted would have a payload of 400 tons for the ADF Landing Craft Heavy Replacement (Phase 5 t JP 2048 Phase 3 of Amphibious Watercraft Replacement). The 2000Kw propulsion would give a speed of 15 knots and range of 2600 n miles with 83T fuel. This is about twice the capacity and speed of the current Balikpapan class LCH (Landing Craft, Heavy), over a similar range.

The SLV design has an open vehicle deck, typical of military landing craft. However, landing craft of the RAN tend to be used for general duties and rarely for beach landings. It might therefore make sense to build them with a covered vehicle deck. There would be space for a passenger deck behind the bridge (as with the JHSV) and a medium sized helipad above the rear vehicle deck. This would restrict the view from the bridge when beach landing, but video cameras could be used, along with large format high resolution flat screen displays to provide virtual windows on the bridge (also providing some protection for the crew).

The covered vehicle deck would be able to hold ISO shipping container sized equipment modules, as used on littoral combat ships. This would make for a versatile general purpose ship.