Two frigates from the same production line, built to the same design, and one of them has a visibly bigger hole in the deck. Turkey's Anadolu Shipyard put TCG İzmir to sea for the first time on August 10 for Sea Acceptance Trials, and the photographs released alongside that milestone show something the lead ship in its class doesn't have: a forward vertical launch compartment that sits noticeably deeper than the one on TCG İstanbul, commissioned as the first of Turkey's new İstif-class frigates.
Both ships carry a 16-cell indigenous MİDLAS launch system, so the missile count hasn't changed. What's changed is the volume available in each cell. İstanbul's VLS is built to the tactical-length standard, sized around the HİSAR-D family of short-to-medium-range air defense missiles. İzmir's enlarged, strike-length version opens up space for genuinely longer and heavier weapons, Turkey's developing SİPER extended-range air defense interceptor, the GEZGİN land-attack cruise missile, or a vertically launched version of the ATMACA anti-ship missile that currently fires from angled deck launchers on both ships. Neither the shipyard nor Turkey's Defence Industry Agency has confirmed which of those actually gets loaded, or released the cell's dimensions, leaving the specific capability upgrade a matter of informed inference rather than official confirmation.
The infrastructure argument matters more than any single missile choice, though. Once a shipyard commits to pouring a deeper VLS well into a hull, that decision is effectively permanent, retrofitting a tactical-length launcher into a strike-length one after construction is a far more disruptive undertaking than simply choosing which missile to load into a cell that was already built oversized. Building İzmir with room to grow into GEZGİN or SİPER, even before either weapon is confirmed to arm the class, is Turkey installing future strike and layered air defense capacity now, while the ship is still on the slipway, rather than betting it can retrofit that capability in later at greater cost and disruption.
That fits a broader pattern in Turkey's naval shipbuilding this year: heavy reliance on domestic content, İzmir is reported at over 80 percent Turkish-built systems, paired with an unusually distributed production model. The lead ship came out of the state-run Istanbul Naval Shipyard, but the three sister vessels, İzmir included, are being built simultaneously by private industry under an STM-TAIS partnership, spreading the class's four hulls across multiple yards rather than queuing them one after another through a single production line. Combined with the sensor suite carried across the class, an ASELSAN AESA radar, indigenous infrared search-and-track and electro-optical systems, sonar, torpedo countermeasures, all built domestically, the İstif class reads as much like a demonstration of what Turkey's defense industry can now build end-to-end as it does a straightforward frigate replacement program.
The class exists to retire Turkey's aging Yavuz-class frigates, themselves 1980s-era MEKO 200 hulls built under license, and İzmir's own trials will spend the coming months validating propulsion, seakeeping, and the ship's HAVELSAN-built combat management system before it's cleared for delivery. Whether that oversized missile silo eventually gets filled with a domestically built cruise missile, an extended-range interceptor, or something Turkey hasn't disclosed yet is the detail worth watching once these trials wrap and the Defence Industry Agency finally says what İzmir's deeper VLS was actually built to carry.
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