Norwegian Missile Patrol Boat (Late 80s)

[that_person]

I was looking at Combat Fleets of the World, 1988-1989, and came across this entry. I can’t find anything else on it. Anyone know what’s it’s referencing? If they where planning 24 of them I can’t imagine they’re very big. I don’t think it’s the Skjold either, according to Wikipedia they started development in the mid-90s, after the first of this class should’ve entered service.

 

[TomS]

This did actually evolve into the Skjold. Nothing was ordered in the early 1990s thanks to the end of the Cold War, but an SES design was one of multiple candidates. The subscale demonstrator Njord was build with private funds in 1993. The full scale prototype Skjold was ordered in 1996, but getting from there to the rest of the class was a lengthy process, due to funding issues.

You have to remember how much the end of the Cold War massively disrupted Western defense spending plans -- a lot of projects from the late 1980s that were supposed to come to fruition in the early 1990s just stopped or got severely delayed.