Additional renders

Yes they can be fitted later but given experience in the Red Sea and the utility of having autocannons for use against USVs and UAVs for point defense, you would expect the ships to have them fitted by default instead a potential refit later.

So I'm gonna be ranting about 1 aspect of the ships here and that's point defense.

Each ship is armed with around 10 medium to heavy machine guns. This would be fine if it wasn't for the fact they were all on manned gun mounts. This is despite the fact the ships could easily fit 2-4 Mk38 Mod 3 or 4

No we aren't

we are jumping into the lava lake

The British are running into issues with getting more MLRS in general. HIMARS is an option but it only is able to carry a single pod. GMARS is probably the better choice due to its two podded setup and also common chassis with the British logistics fleet.

So Rheinmetall and Lockheed both held a recent conference to discuss one of my favorite MLRS systems in the world with representatives of 14 countries. This system is GMARS. It’s basically a wheeled M270 with a slightly more narrow launcher and on an RMMV HX2 8x8.

Now there does exist a single pod version that the UAE does use with just 18 missiles if space is a concern.

(Image from Naval Analyses)

So this is the Low-Cost Guided Imaging Rocket, specifically this is the ROKMC variant called Poniard. It's basically a 70mm fire-and-forget rocket. Basically APKWS but it's guided by thermal imaging. Now I'm not here to talk about its history. Instead let's talk about how this could augment the USN.