Unlike Australia the Netherlands and India - Singapore, with its typical national efficiency, has relatively rapidly been procuring new submarines.
An expert on Singaporean Invincible-class subs has kindly provided the following:
"As you know, TKMS has been very busy in the last couple of years, with Singaporean and Israeli orders, with the start of German/Norwegian Type 212CD production in 2023.
The second and third (RSS Impeccable and RSS Illustrious) of four Invincible-class (aka Type 212SG) submarines for the Singapore Navy, were launched on December 13, 2022. These join first in class, RSS Invincible, which was launched on February 18, 2019 and has been conducting crew training from Kiel on the German Baltic. Kiel is an interesting multi-cultural place, as the last Dolphin 2 sub (INS Drakon) will also be training in Kiel till sometime next year.
RSS Invincible may be in Singapore waters in 2023. There is no ETA as to when the last Invincible-classsubmarine, RSS Inimitable will be completed (I reckon if the RSN was following UK RN capital ship naming conventions - this name Inimitable should be replaced with Indefatigable or Indomitable) [More on Pete’s Christmas Inimitable renaming competition soon... ;-]
Some sources on the two launches are:
- Singaporean Ministry of DefenceNews Release
and
- Local newspaper Kieler Nachrichtenarticle [right-click mouse if it doesn’t automatically translate]
Interestingly, Hydrogen production (for fuel cells and power generation) is a nascent/promising technology in Singapore at the moment, though there are moves to start Hydrogen supply. See this H2 Bulletinarticle."