Visby-class corvettes HSwMS Härnösand (K 33) and sister-ship HSwMS Helsingborg (K 32) at the Swedish Navy Base at Karlskrona. (Photo: E. H. Lundquist)
Posted on 12/22/2010 8:40:24 PM PST by sukhoi-30mki
Visby-class corvettes HSwMS Härnösand (K 33) and sister-ship HSwMS Helsingborg (K 32) at the Swedish Navy Base at Karlskrona. (Photo: E. H. Lundquist)
The modern equivalent of the Viking Long Boat.
damn I clicked on it thinking it was a car!
There is absolutely no way that the Rats would allow the US to build such ships.
They don't know...got a friend, naval Architect, working on design of a stealth composite attack boat now.
I thoght it was a car also! At least there’s post three. ;)
Not sure we would want to anyway. They don't look very big, and that's fine for the Swedish Navy. Maybe not so good for ours.
How many tons do these stealth ships displace? How do they handle heavy weather? How long can they stay on station without resupply and refueling?
Smaller ships tend to be less stable and more susceptible to wind and wave action in the open ocean. They also tend to have shorter range. Not a problem for the Swedes, who are rarely far from a Swedish port or convenient fjord. The US Navy has ships in every ocean, and ships can be stationed thousands of miles from a friendly port.
There may be a place for such vessels (littoral combat, maybe) but not as front-line vessels.
The car was named for a class of sailing ship.
“...points sittin’ way up high...”
“...points sittin’ way up high...”
#####
Bjourn Seeger.
BWAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHA! Um... sorry...
My point is that the Rats wouldn’t allow us to get an advantage because that wouldn’t be fair to our enemies.
They could be used to interdict smugglers coming in from Baja, the Gulf or the Keys; to chase down pirates in the Red Sea, and/or to escort in or to patrol in short to medium length commercial channels e.g. from India to the Suez, or from the Suez to Sweden. The stealth part I don’t really figure as critical but maybe it’s got a future in the front line of a sea-based landing, or maybe it is just one version proof of concept for future, larger ship with a different purpose.
A stretched-Visby class ship would have been perfect for the littoral role which the USN is buying the hugely expensive LCS, which is currently plagued by performance and equipment issues.
Those points in #3 are covered with a light absorbing stealth material that makes it impossible to see them.
Unfortunately, everything the US tries to build ends up costing far too much. The Zumwalt Destroyer class will have a ship in the water in 2013, I think. It’s a very advanced 14,000 ton stealthy destroyer. Closest thing to a battleship that any nation has built in decades. It’s darn cool. We were originally going to build 32 of them — imagine! Thirty-two stealthy ships capable of doing serious damage in a land attack scenario! The range on these ships is very high so anything near the coast becomes a viable target. But the cost was too high and we are going to end up with only 3 of these.
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