The Swedish Navy is conducting sea trials of its new Visby corvette. The Visby is interesting in that seems to be the first plastic warship. The ship represents a new generation of stealth using materials designed to provide a very small radar cross-section. The hull material is a sandwich construction comprising a PVC core with a carbon fibre and vinyl laminate, which provides high strength, low weight, as well as low radar and magnetic signature.

What is also interesting is that the vessel’s combat management system, called 9LV Mk 3, uses the Windows NT operating system.

My only comment is that I’m not sure that I would be willing to go on patrol in a plastic boat, let alone one that uses a six-year-old operating system.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 11th, 2004 at 6:57 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.