THE glittering canyons and soaring edifices of London’s Docklands formed the perfect setting for the overseas debut of the pride of the Dutch Navy.

HNLMS Tromp is more than just a big, powerful frigate – she is a glimpse into a future in which a number of maritime forces, including the Royal Navy, hope to have a share.

Calling her a frigate further blurs the definitions in the maritime lexicon, because as a state-of-the-art air defence ship she is firmly in the realm of the destroyer.

But whatever her owners choose to call her, she is setting new standards, and her Commanding Officer, Capt Michiel Hijmans, and her crew were understandably pleased to be showing their ship off in London just six days after her commissioning in Flushing.

Tromp (F801) is the latest of the de Zeven Provincien-class, displacing some 6,500 tonnes fully loaded and designed to provide cover against air and missile attack for an expeditionary amphibious force – one of the central planks of Dutch defence strategy.

She is also one of the first of a new breed of air-defence ships which are appearing throughout Europe, including the German Navy’s Type 124 frigate, the Spanish Navy’s Alvaro de Bazan-class frigate, the Italian and French Horizon-class destroyers and the Royal Navy Type 45 destroyers.

Tromp has a ship’s company of less than 200, and is powered Wartsila cruising diesels and Rolls-Royce Spey booster gas turbines.

The capabilities of her sensors are spectacular.

Her Smart-L 3-D long-range radar is capable of keeping 1,000 different tracks in the system, and in tests, according to manufacturers Thales, the radar could detect and track a towed target the size of a tennis ball at a range of 60km.

She will carry the heat-seeking Sirius long-range infra-red search and track system, which gives no signal to be picked up and is effective against sea-skimming and ballistic missiles.

The Scout surface surveillance radar, with a power output as low as a single watt, can be particularly useful during covert operations as it is almost impossible for a target to detect the radar signal.

The threat of attacks by small craft, such as in the attack on the USS Cole, is addressed by a Mirador electro-optical observation, tracking and fire-control system with daylight and night-vision capabilities.

And if the enemy gets through all that, there is always the Goalkeeper seven-barrel Gatling gun, firing up to 4,200 30mm rounds a minute, to blast a missile out of the equation.

The ship’s defences and weapons are controlled in the Combat Information Centre, an airy operations room in the heart of the ship which features banks of multi-function Windows-style consoles – a combination of readily-available industrial hardware and specialist Dutch Navy software.

Plenty of thought has gone into the design of this room, and not just in terms of electronic wizardry.

The desks are positioned to allow unbroken lines of sight across the room; a warfare officer pointed out that in the heat of battle, eye contact can be vital.

Even tiny details, like space at each console for personal belongings, add incrementally to the efficiency of the warfare team.

And it is worth remembering that these Dutch sailors fight their battles in a foreign language – much of the text on their screens is in English, which makes their performance all the more remarkable.

Parts of the ship would be familiar to a member of the RN, such as the bar in the Wardroom, but then you turn a corner and see an example of modern art, such as a bas-relief on the wall.

Although Tromp is fitted with an electronic charting suite, the system is not yet fully certified, so although the electronic version is proving well up to the job, she is actually navigated on paper charts for the time being.

Ship control systems are also electronic; one operator said the automatic responses programmed into the computers to deal with situations are so fast that by the time a warning pops up on screen the problem is likely to have been fixed.

Tromp would normally carry a doctor on board, and when she deploys with a task group a dentist also joins; as one member of the crew observed, with so few people on board they each end up with about five appointments a week to keep the dentist busy …