Continental Defence Corvette

[Colin Parkinson]

A cautionary tale of going to cheap

 

[suffolkowner]

Self Defence length Mark 41 was never actually produced for a customer, and seems to have been entirely discontinued by 2026. Mark 56 VLS is also a legacy Cold War system that specializes in placement aboard very small vessels/ships without space, it is a sub-optimal system and likely will not be fitted aboard a larger and bespoke design like CDC. I think tactical length Mark 41 is a likely choice however, fitting a limited bank of strike length missiles could be done on a sufficiently large design, which CDC seems to be moving to. You could also circumvent this concern by carrying Mark 70 containerized launchers in addition to the already present VLS on either the flight deck or the mission deck, which many CDC concept designs seem to incorporate.


The Australian Adelaide-class frigates in their last refit were outfitted with tactical length Mark 41 VLS cells which jutted out of the deck a fair bit, although this is relatively uncommon and sub-optimal for many reasons.

It doesn't seem like recent renderings of concepts require that tradeoff, and fit basically everything. We're seemingly out of an MCDV sized vessel and looking at a real combatant.


ASROC takes up valuable VLS slots for a system which is dated and has questionable range, foreign models of similar systems are superior but its still not ideal compared to a helicopter. We don't really know what ASW capabilities will look like in the future with unmanned systems, so it's a bit hard to say at this point. You could perhaps fit torpedoes to unmanned aviation assets and fit them aboard.

On the SD Mk41 i found that interesting with respect to the RCDs. Thinking that was an option to put an 8 cell where the 2 seaceptor VLS are on the UK version