Babcock and BAE Systems ensure availability and sustainability of Royal Navy's Main Guns.

Babcock, the UK’s leading engineering support services company and the current in-service support provider for the Navy’s MCGs, has teamed up with the gun’s designer, BAE Systems, to provide an enhanced complex equipment support service that will increase reliability and functionality, and reduce obsolescence risk.

The collaboration brings together complementary and long-standing expertise. Supporting the guns from specialised facilities, the Babcock and BAE Systems approach offers the capacity, proven capabilities, and infrastructure to safely and effectively run in-service support.

By playing to the strengths of Babcock and BAE Systems to overhaul, design upgrades and manage obsolescence and in-service support, the collaborative approach will look beyond the duration of the support contract and aims to sustain up to all of the 20 in-service 4.5-inch Mark8 guns until 2039.

Babcock complements the design expertise that BAE Systems brings to the collaboration with its capability of providing more than a decade of performance data, gathered during the current in-service support contract and the experience of upgrading 13, 4.5-inch guns at bespoke facilities at Devonport.