Pakistan needs them F16’s, I’d hate to see them squandering money on wateful, unimportant things like helping earthquake survivors or providing half decent healthcare to their people.

Good points by Kiel-Holthenau regarding the fact that the systems should be judged according to their suitability for the operations of their respective customers, ops which will be very different in key areas.
And if we want to get technical, why not discuss;

-which design has the best stability, with top weight a big issue on modern warships stability reserves can be very close to critical margins. Has anybody here seen a set of GZ curves for a F124 or T45? How much reserve buoyancy do they have?

-damage control, what is the sub division like, water tight arrangements, fire fighting systems etc.

-strengh, what is the hull strengh like? Are the hulls suitable for use in their intended roles? What steel grades have been used for construction, what sort of QC has been applied in construction?

-How much space for upgrading and future capability improvements?

-What is hull motion like and how do the vessels perform in heavy seas? Are they stable platforms (a totally different question to their stability in nav arch terms)? Can they maintain good speed in heavy seas or does their performance evaporate at first sign of a wave? (I’ve heard reports this is a big issue for the F100)

-What is endurance? How much fuel and consumables will they take?

-What is hull efficiency? What is machinery efficiency?

-How reliable are the engines? Are the engines installed such as to make maintenance at sea reasonable? What is the estimated mean time between failures? How much electrical capacity do they have, enough to allow for major machinery losses and still maintain full sensor/weapons capability? What is the cable and pipe work routing like? What are their vibration and noise signatures like? How responsive are the vessels to spped/load changes?

I could go on. All of this is every bit as important and critical to the performance of the vessels as a simple discussion of their radar and primary AA armament, but is almost never touched on. Why not? If people really want to discuss technical questions then why not discuss real technical questions rather than a simple discussion of radar and missiles based on PR handouts and a few magazine articles? There is one person here who seems well qualified to talk about APAR, but there is nobody here I see suitably qualified to discuss Sampson, making such a debate pointless.

PS. My comments about Nigeria are not racist,they’re based on observations over many years of visiting the country.

Isn’t some of this discussion a bit far fetched? Israel seems to take great care to avoid bombardment near the evacuation points and, from television reports and interviews with a.o. British Naval Officers and embassy staff, there seems to be good cooperation from the Israelis to allow for a relatively unscathed evacuation of foreign nationals.
Furthermore, if damage or destruction would arise from Israeli strikes, you can be sure that immediate embassy contact would clarify the situation and defuse matters; as neither Israel nor the countries evacuating their nationals are interested in hostilities.

Exactly, very well put.

If the RN evacuation vessels are seriously targetted by the IDF then they’re screwed. Their protection lies in the passage plans and agreements to allow the evacuation, and the fact that Israel knows they can’t risk a serious incident with outside powers. So, neither party will be doing anything to risk a shooting incident.

Turbinia, Thanks for the context, I didn’t know there were so many techniques

No probs, QC of buiding large structures, ships etc. is a fascinating subject. These days more and more warships are being built according to class rules with commercial classification society surveyors present to reduce the costs, and also take advantage of the class societies vast experience and knowledge.

Very unlikely that every weld is radiographed, more likely there is a percentage radiographed and the remaining NDT is done with ultrasonics, magnetic particle and other low cost methods. Radiography is excellent but very expensive, time consuming, and unless you’re testing welds that will be subject to extreme pressures or where failure would have catastrophic consequences then ultrasonics and MPI do the job a lot easier at a lot less cost. Normally radiography is required for pressure vessels, high pressure pipe welds etc. Plus the yard/contractor will have a quality system using coded welders to assist in the QA process.

I have an old edition from the mid 80’s and it’s a book anybody with a serious interest in jet engines should have, and for any students or apprentices looking for a career involving jet engines I’d put it in the essential category, if there is a better introduction to the jet engine out there I haven’t found it.