As far as I can tell, Large commercial diesel engines as fitted to Ocean have similar up front buying costs to Gas Turbines the reals savings come in running and maintenance costs, requiring far fewer engine room personnel to look after them. Hence Super Tankers and other large merchant ships needing only a handful of engineers. Compare Ocean’s complement with an Invincible (upon whose hull Ocean’s design was based) and the difference is significant. Efforts to keep Oceans costs down at the design and build stage are generally agreed to have gone a little too far, and many of these problems have been remedied now, but the choice of engines was a sound one IMHO.

I’m sure that I read somewhere that her Crossley Pielstick 16PC2.6 don’t lend her the best of peformance.

Not to mention that the UK is already totally committed to buying 232 Typhoons which it can’t realistically back out of, which means it would have to flog off these ‘too expensive’ aircraft presumably at a loss so that it can buy replacement aircraft that are even more expensive.

:confused:

Its even more complicated then that, what these guys don’t seem to realise is we would have to pay extensive penalties to the Eurofighter partner nations if we tried to sell them on to a third party. Effectively we would end up paying for them three times, once to buy the Eurofighter, once to sell the Eurofighter then a third time to buy F16 which we would have to get into line to get. Also what would we use whilst we wait for these F16’s, the F3 are nearly out of service so we would be using Typhoon whilst waiting for the F16.

Carlo Kopp and co have utterly no credibility!

It happened on the Jag’s last TLP. The Rafale pilot got complacent and became a film star. The Rafale was caught bang to rights in the Jag’s HUD video.

For a time, anyone visiting ****ty Six couldn’t help but see the picture….. :diablo:

It looked as though the pilot could have got a guns kill on the Rafale, it wasn’t just a fleeting opportunity.

There were other kills on the exercise, but those achieved using the Jag’s helmet and off-boresight nine lima didn’t result in nifty HUD video, so were overlooked by us journo types!

I don’t think they bagged a Typhoon though – at least not without its gear down.

Jaguar with ASRAAM could have posed problems for enemy fighters, given the right RoE, but generally speaking, she wasn’t an A-A aeroplane.

Ah this is probably where I got my spurious thought about a Typhoon kill, obviously was this instead.

Should Britain ask the United States for the F-22?

08:38 GMT, February 24, 2009 The F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter is designed to defeat threats that will have been superceded well before this aircraft enters operational service. The performance of the F-35 is suffering seriously from the conflicting design requirements that it was intended to meet. As a result…..Blah, blah, blah, blah, yawn, yawn, yaaaaaawn, falls asleep*……

So sorry, I got bored after reading just that little bit, what happened? Did he finish talking or is he still making noises?.

About a decade ago the F-22A Raptor was proposed as an alternative to the domestically built Eurofighter Typhoon

This is the very first I’ve heard of anything like that. Jesus…..:rolleyes:

And even if we did have a chance to buy the F-22, I very much doubt we’d give it a look with a twinkle in the eye let alone think about it. Too expensive to buy and maintain, just an air superiority that can drop 2 or 3 makes of bombs, well whoopy frikin doo, thanks but no thanks, you keep your expensive toy, we’ll stick with the Typhoon which suits are needs even better. Ta-ta.

If you think that little report is five shades of bonkers have a look at this article on Carlo Kopps own website by a Dr Kenneth Freeman:

http://www.ausairpower.net/APA-2008-05.html

Basically he advocates the UK ditches all its Eurofighters and buy F16’s, the report is an utter load of tripe and bunkum that seems to ignore that quite aside from the logistic and cost implications of such an exercise doesn’t seem to get the concept THE MONEY IS ALREADY SPENT!!!!!!

On another note here is a report that looks into Carlo Kopps tosh:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/01/16/f35_controversy_kopp_latest/

Fedaykin,

Where did I once say EADS or even EF GmbH?

Again: Not with BAE Systems.

Who says that reports are correct in every detail?

Fair you didn’t say EADS but why get tetchy?

Again Bae Systems has been reported more then once.

Well the C-17 line lives to fight another day!