I can imagine the hulls will be built in Asia or Eastern Europe and maybe fitted out in the UK, although given the politics that’d be a hard sell for the government to justify. In my last job we were getting a lot of steelwork done in places like Romania and China to be towed to places like Norway for fitting out for offshore drilling/production, it does save a lot of money. With regards the tankers, a small commercial parcel tanker adapted with RAS gear and possibly a heli-deck may make a lot more sense than trying to go down the one size fits all common hull route. I can see the attraction of a common platform, but for this type of vessel the extra costs of design and inherent compromises in working around such a common platform may well outweigh any advantages.

the F-16’s and F-15’s were also easilt tackled by Mig-21 bison. Yes the singapore F-16’s are not neutered.

Explain please.

Last I heard they wanted a common platform multi-role hull to provide a basis for replacing the rest of the RFA fleet (except I presume the Diligence), but when the funds are available is anybodies guess. Diligence could probably best be replaced in the same way she was aquired, buying an offshore industry DSV off the shelf.

“The Truth of the Wunderwaffe” by Igor Wittkowski, an excellent book all around if I may say.

The KFT carriers discussed in Germany, principle dimensions,

Displacement-3500T
Lengh-101.6m
Beam-17m
Draught-4m
Flight deck lengh-90m
Air component-6 or 7 aircraft, probably Ju87
No details on engines or speed in my source book. I’ll try and scan the plans in when I get time, there was no island, the wheelhouse was under the fwd. lip of the flight deck with a catapult at the fwd extremity of the flight deck.

I really don’t know what these would have been useful for. The RN and USN had a genuine need of cheap, easy to replace CVE’s for convoy escort and supporting amphibious ops, but Germany had no deep sea trade to protect, was not in the amphibious assault game and no surface action groups really needing support after late 1943, and even if they did 6 or 7 Ju87’s wouldn’t be much of an air group. Can’t quite figure out why this idea was even discussed, the Navy expressed doubts that such a small ship could even operate as a carrier.

I’ll see if I can scan in an image, the ships I’m talking of were a new build proposal, not conversions, and were very small for carriers. The German Navy was never interested in them, but the SS expressed an interest and it seems at one point Himmler had ambitions on a naval counter part to the Waffen SS military units, something the Navy must have had nightmares over. By the time of the proposal German surface units were confined to Northern Norway and the Baltic unless they took huge risks, and the materials situation was too dire to support such a program and the SS dropped the idea, but it’s an interesting little piece of German naval ideas seldom remembered today.

A bigger dock would have been nice, but these are still a major capability improvement for the RFA and the UK amphibious capability. I don’t see the lack of a hangar as a big concern as in a major operation these boats will be part of a task group with aviation support vessels like HMS Ocean or the light carriers for helicopter maintenance and support.
On the current Sir Galahad, the original LSL’s had a much better reputation in the RFA, there were some serious build quality issues with the new vessel.