March 15, 2012: A decade after construction began, Poland has cancelled work on the first, and still incomplete, Gawron class corvette. This 2,000 ton ship was a modified Meko-100 class design. The first ship was to enter service in 2003 and a second one in 2005, with five more to follow. The government was never able to muster sufficient cash to complete the first ship and it was finally decided that there would never be enough money to complete all of them. The hull of the first ship was complete, but the cost of finishing the ship would be over $300 million. The original cost estimate, of $79 million per ship, kept rising. At the time of the cancellation each ship was going to cost $470 million and just the hull of the first one had cost $150 million.
Each ship was to be armed with a 76mm gun, eight anti-ship missiles, eight surface-to-air missiles, six 324mm torpedo tubes, and a helicopter. Another problem was the difficulty in selecting which manufacturer to buy the weapons from.
