The ships were delivered starting in 1990 and they therefore had the technology of the 1990 to 2000 timeframe incorporated into the original build. It was a wonderfully capable technology in that era. You can imagine, though, the computers were fairly big and they ate up a lot of room and demanded a lot of air conditioning. That's just one piece that changes with modernization. There's a considerable amount of miniaturization and with it space and volume liberation in the ship. That volume liberation in a fairly large ship can go to other uses.
I'll give you three pieces of modernization that came with this technology change. One is liberation of space and so the four lead ships of the modernization can be made into flagships for the force so that we can bridge across the period where we don't have a Canadian surface combatant, where we don't have the Iroquois-class which gave us our task force command capabilities. So we've got volume and we added that volume to the operations room of the ship. We put in the command and control consoles and now we have a bridging capacity to the future.
Another element of modernization is in the old ship damage control. Keeping the ship afloat and fighting fire and flood was a separate capacity from running the engines, the auxiliary equipment, and the air conditioning. The fact is, in a warship that floats on the sea the two of them are actually one and the same. You want to fight against fire and flood at the same time that you operate your machinery. In fact, a lot of the machinery we operate contributes to the fighting of damage. We've incorporated in the modernization those two inherently related systems into one integrated platform management system. It is a wonderful interactive system where people stand in front of major computer screens that demand lots of electricity, but they can intuitively direct the battle against the debilitating damage of battle. Our job is to fight, survive the damage, and win the exchange.
The third element is we increased the sensor, radars, and weapons system functioning and capacities of the ship, especially in the above-water domain. We've upgraded a missile system, added a three-dimensional radar, have much more precise fire control radars, and modernized elements of the gun and electronic warfare system so that the ship can actually confront, survive, and win in an exchange with, let's say, fifth-generation missiles of potential adversaries. We're in the full-up development of this new combat suite right now.