“KONGSBERG and Salt Ship Design to design Norway’s standardized vessels” / for Lithuania and maybe the UK too

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KONGSBERG and Salt Ship Design to design Norway’s standardised vessels

Norway has begun a program to replace ten vessel classes including their Coast Guard vessels, with two classes of standardized hulls to be tailored with modular systems.

Wikipedia indicates Norway will build ten of the larger ships (90 meters and 2,000 tons) and 18 of the smaller ships.

Naval News reports Lithuania has joined the program and the UK may also if Norway chooses the UK to build replacement frigates.

Norway and Lithuania sign a historic MoU at the NATO Summit, making Lithuania the first partner in Kongsberg’s Standardised Vessel Programme as UK interest looms.

Lithuania will probably use the smaller hull to replace four Danish built Flyvefisken-class patrol vessel and three British built Hunt class MCM vessels. They will probably want no more than three of the larger vessels.

British OPVs are relatively new, so I don’t see them being replace, but they are planning to introduce large numbers of unmanned vessels and they will need tenders and support vessels. They may also replace smaller patrol vessels which are also used for training and mine countermeasures ships.

No specifications are currently given for the smaller ships, but I will make some guesses.

Norwegian Nornen class Coastguard ship KV Tor, a Norne-class coastguard, in the inner Førdefjord, 25. July 2008.

Particularly for the smaller ships, I see some relationship to the existing Nornen class patrol vessels pictured above, with their raised foc’sle and superstructure over the full width of the hull. These are relatively large for inshore patrol vessels being less than a foot longer than the Webber class WPCs, but displacing more than twice as much. There crew is only 20. The Nornan class was built about 20 years ago so will likely be replaced by the smaller of the two hulls.

The Nornan have a 1C ice class rating, meaning,

“AI Overview–Ice Class 1C is a structural and mechanical rating in the Finnish-Swedish Ice Class system assigned to vessels designed for independent navigation in “easy” or light, first-year ice conditions ranging from 0.1 to 0.3 meters thick” (about one foot–Chuck)
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I would expect the smaller hulls to be about 800 tons and retain the 1C ice rating. I do expect them to be faster than the 16 knot Nornan class but probably not much over 20 knots.
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The larger ships include a helicopter deck but no hangar.
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Earlier, I might have suggested that the larger ships might have filled the need for cutter X, but with an increasingly hostile world, I think we need something more war-like and probably faster, with a hangar for an ASW helicopter.
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