Thin blue and yellow line: Sweden's surface strike force finds its niche

摘要

Developed in the latter stages of the Cold War, the Royal Swedish Navy's (RSwN's) Visby-class corvettes were conceived as small, agile, and highly survivable multimission surface combatants, optimised for operations in the cluttered, crowded, and largely shallow-water arena of the Baltic Sea. The end result was an ambitious, innovative, and inevitably complex design that attempted to package multiple capabilities - an antisubmarine warfare (ASW) suite together with either mine coun-termeasure (MCM) or anti-surface warfare (ASuW) payloads - into an angular, low-draft carbon-fibre sandwich platform, cleverly engineered for all-aspect stealth.