Still a bad bargain though. The ship is like Pamela Anderson; looks nice on the outside due to some paint on the rusty spots, but no content nor value inside.

16 in total, 4 in each quadrant can be guided for terminal homing.

BTW about the Type 45, only in the terminal phase is the Aster missile reliant on its own radar, outside that phase it needs continuous updating from the ship.

this allows virtually unlimited simultaneous engagements

Nonsense! Here read from http://navy-matters.beedall.com/paams.htm

UK PAAMS can track approximately 2000 targets simultaneously and is able to engage up to 12, including 8 in local self-defence. All 48 Aster missiles are “ready to fire”, with just a few seconds elapsing from first autonomous detection of a target to the firing of the first Aster missile, and 8 Aster’s can be fired within 10 seconds. Up to 16 Aster missiles can be simultaneously guided in the air at once, making it difficult for attackers to swamp the ships air defence’s with saturating threats from aircraft and even supersonic missiles. Maximum theoretical range against aircraft is 100km although 80km is more usually quoted (a French senate report says PAAMS can intercept up to 70 km), against missiles the maximum range is 25km. The Aster missiles active seeker allows almost instant launching or further weapons or retargeting of in-flight missile once the target has been locked-up.

So your reasoning is that one low orbit satellite makes you completely untouchable in every possible way?

Diego Garcia is a sad indictment of how human beings are sometimes treated in the name of something “greater” – can anything be worth more than the health and happiness of a human being!

Yep, the well being of 300 million human beings. Sometime nasty things have to be done for the greater good. Regrettable, but that’s the way it is and it aint gonna change.

And it could be argued that the risk today is _way_ worse. One should not forget that the president of France is now this Jacques Chirac, ie the man who made the decision to sell the A-bomb factory to Iraq to get bribes to finance his party. Without the IAF’s raid in June 1981, there would have been a problem.

I lately read somewhere that this factory couldn’t even produce weapons grade material and this stunt was more performed as an election stunt for the government at the time to boost patriotism among electors than to avoid a nuclear disaster.
And what’s this with betrayal? The only Mirages present at the time (October War) was a small number from Libya, which caused a lot of friendly fire cases among Arabs (and Israelis to paint yellow triangles on their planes). France just sold aircraft to generally everyone who wanted to take them, so what? Many other western countries don’t have a clean record either when it comes to selling weapons.

From one of the ACIG-articles:

The Libyans have ordered also huge amounts of spare parts for their Mirages, which enabled them to keep these operational until today: several independent reports confirmed that the LARAF was highly satisfied with Mirage F.1s and was also taking care about them much better than about Soviet-supplied MiGs and Sukhois.

Will the Level 1, 2 and 3 partners get export versions???

Are those displays green?