The warships are designed over a period of 2 to 5 years. The sister ships may continue to be built up to 15 years from the class ship (first of a kind) getting into service, with little design modifications and improvements. The requirement of a common hull design has emerged, more important than ever, in light of worldwide trend of curtailing defense budgets and increasing focus to extract maximum out of a single design through modular approach. Utilizing modular concept a single optimized hull will be designed; and the two variants will have a major difference of a plug only. The types of hullform considered are both conventional and unconventional. The common capabilities, payload and space arrangement are similar on both variant V1 & V2. Major advantages of a common hull design are reduced design & build costs, ease of personnel training, ease of maintenance and common support infrastructure including inventory management. Though the commonality of hull forms and system architecture will add design and build complexity, the advantages to be gained are numerous. The enhanced capabilities and payload are provided in V1 through addition of a plug, whereas the low end V2 variant is envisaged to have a high export potential due to marginally low cost.
