Skjold-class Surface Effect Ship HNoMS Steil

Hard-hitting Norwegian Navy combatant is hard to detect, harder to catch.
The small, stealthy, Skjold-class “coastal corvettes” such as HNoMS Steil can quickly sneak into the fjords along the Norweigian coast.  But when they strike, they pack a lethal punch, and an enemy might never know what hit them.

“We can go from engines at full idle to full speed in less than one minute,” says Lt. Cmdr. Johan Reinboth, Steil’s commanding officer. The Pratt & Whitney Canada engines – the same as found in commercial turbo-prop aircraft – provide the push, while diesel-powered lift fans maintain the air cushion that the ship rides upon.

Steil was built at Umoe Mandal shipyard, and launched in 2008.  She and her sisters are homeported at Bergen. While the Skjold class are essentially what would be known as fast attack craft, or missile boats, the Norwegian navy considers their seaworthiness to be in the corvette class, and therefore calls them kystkorvett (coastal corvettes), built for littoral operations among Norway’s many rocky  fjords and expanses of shallow water.  “This ship was made to hide,” says Lt. Cmdr. Tor Loddengaard, chief engineer of Steil.  “We hide anywhere we can, and move between our hideouts.”

Steil is very heavily armed for such a small ship.  She has the Oto Melara 76 mm gun, which can engage air, surface and land targets and has a burst-firing rate of 120 rounds per minute.  Steil also carries the Kongsberg Naval Strike Missile (NSM for Nye Sjoemaals Missiler, or Norwegian strike missile), carried on launch ramps that elevate in the aft end of the ship for firing.

NSM can be launched based on targeting from a different source, and fly based on GPS, inertial navigation, or a terrain reference system for contour following.  The missile can attack in sea-skimming mode, or fly up, over and around landmasses. It can also independently detect and recognize hostile targets at sea or ashore with its onboard target database. The IR seeker is used in terminal phase. The random terminal-phase maneuvers make it very hard to defeat.  “This missile is very sophisticated,” Reinboth says.

Steil can be hiding in one fjord, receive targeting from a different source, fire its missile and hit the target, which may be in another fjord, oblivious to what’s about to happen to it.  “We can hit targets at up to 150 kilometers with third party targeting,” he says.  “We can plan the trajectory so the enemy has a very short reaction time.  If they are anywhere close to our coastline they should be nervous.  Our missile could pop out of anywhere.”

Steil carries the MBDA Simbad portable system incorporating infrared-guided Mistral short-range surface-to-air missiles for air defense.

For sensors, Steil has the multirole Thales 3D radar and the Saab Ceros 200 fire control radar – which includes a Ku-band radar target tracker, optical video camera and tracker, thermal imager and laser rangefinder – along with the Rheinmetall MASS decoy system.  The sensors and weapons are integrated with the Senit 2000 combat management system, a product of DCNS and Kongsberg Defense and Aerospace.

The vessel displaces just 275 tons.  To reduce weight, corrosion and magnetic signature, virtually all piping is made of titanium or glass reinforced fiberglass.

“It’s noisy, and it rides hard.  That’s the price of being fast and lethal,” Reinboth says.

Edward Lundquist is a retired U.S. Navy captain and a principal science writer for MCR in Arlington, Va.