King Sejong the Great

It’s time for another random glance at the arms race on Saipan’s back yard. I’ve got a cool warship to look at today: South Korea’s King Sejong the Great-class of guided missile destroyers. Three of them have been built, and more might be on the way.

Though South Korea is geographically small, this ship is no mere coastal-patrol rubber-ducky. This is a blue-water ship to be sure, and it just might be a world-class warship.

It's a big destroyer, displacing about 8,500 tons. Yes, that's how ships are measured: tons of displacement. It’s sort of a squishy benchmark, depending on how loaded-down the ship is, and on how the class evolves, so any figures I throw at you are ballpark.

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