Shipbucket

Hood

I love your take on the Vosper Hoverfrigate. I must try and dig out the
drawing made at the time of it working together with a Lynx and a Nimrod.

I think Vosper were hoping that with the expansion of coastal limits in the early
70s and the growing amount of offshore oil exploration that their various Hovercraft
offerings would find customers. However, even Iran, who did buy a large fleet of BH7s
could not be persuaded. Brown/Moore's Rebuilding the Royal Navy is adamant that hovercraft were only useful as MCM or assault craft.

However, in the land of what-if a Royal Navy version seems quite reasonable. At about this time the RN purchased the one-off private built HMS Mermaid (fomerly built for Ghana I think)
to augment its frigate force.

Looking forward to more stuff in your alternate Postwar RN (perhaps a hunter killer with 8 Polaris tubes?)

Correct, but the RN had no choice, as the Mermaid was difficult to sell overseas. IIRC the ship was eventually sold on (cheap) to Malaysia.

Perhaps Iran did want a different variant.What else can be done with this concept?Any suggestions? I thought about an attack variant with Exocets.

Here is a link to an excellent site about hovercraft. At the bottom is an artists
impression of an FPB version with Exocet

http://hovercraft-museum.org/vt1.html

Interesting site,I will take a look.Thank you.