I don’t want to be rude, but your reply is completely irrelevant. Mackinaw isn’t a corvette, & she’s half the tonnage being discussed.
My point (& a very simple one) is that 6000 tons is not corvette-sized, unless inflation in warship classifications has suddenly risen to Zimbabwean levels. A few years ago, corvettes were in the high hundreds of tons. More recently, they’ve crept up towards 2000, into what used to be light frigate (& before that, destroyer) territory. Ships of 6000 tons are either frigates or destroyers at the moment, inflation having removed light cruisers from that size class long ago.
With all due respect your point is pretty irrelevent too. Most warship classifications now mean very little at all, as virtually all capabilitys have trickled down the scale.
Take the RN system for instance, AAD warships are refferred to as destroyers whilst non AAD vessels (ie type 23s) are frigates. The French and Italian Horizon class vessels, which the RN would call destroyers are more often than not called frigates.
The waters are becoming even more muddied, with vessels like the new Singapore vessels, described in some quarters as corvettes yet being the same size and having the same capabilitys as most frigates, if not some destroyers as well. Then there are the ANZAC’s, it is planned to fit them Standard SM-2 capability, so what are they?
Frankly I think corvette is a reasonable designation for these canadian vessels as it highlights the patrol rather than combat nature of their role and the limited combat capability they will have. Indeed ignoring the displacement the term corvette probably applies better to this class than it does to some others that use it.
I have seen definitions for the term ‘corvette’ which describe a vessel upto 100m in length, so the new canadian vessels just fit into it.
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