I always wondered how did they justify development of a completely new assault helicopter because of 12 machines..

Maybe because at the time development started SAF had no other option but domestic development as no other nation would supply attack helicopters to South Africa.

72 cells … that’s 9 VLU’s, or 3 more than currently carried. Where would they go? Two immediately forward for the superstructure and another infront fo the present VLU farm? Both liturally and figuratively, 9 vlu seems an odd number. Only other example of uneven number of VLU is de Zeven Provincien class (LCF) with 5 vlu (and space/weight reserved for a 6th)

The choice of the RN to continue their AAW-destroyer programme with a S-band configuration was chosen purely from defence-industrial reasons.

2. In the start of the T45 programme it was intended that SAMPSON would deal with both surveillance as target acquisition/fire control. BAe always claimed, and still does, that it is perfectly capable of doing both jobs. But for some reason still the SMART-L was chosen to fill the gap of the LR surveillance.

So SAMPSON was developed to be a generalist, but still a LRR was needed… So wouldn’t it be better to use a specialistic radar for target acquisition/fire control also??

From Navy Matters:

BAE Systems have also claimed that the SAMPSON eliminates the need for several separate systems, but this is rather an other simplification – and ignores that any system will (unfortunately) still have to abide by the rules of physics. Some tasks are difficult to combine. One such task is (long range) volume search. This takes a lot of radar resources, leaving little room for other tasks. Or, vice versa, combining volume search with other tasks results either in slow search rates or in low overall quality per task. The driving parameter in radar performance is time-on-target, or observation time per beam. There is no way around it.

This is a the key reason why the Royal Navy has selected the S1850M Long Range Radar NEXT to SAMPSON on the Type 45. It is also the reason that NATO, in the NAAWS study, defined the preferred AAW system to consist of a complementary Volume Search Radar and MFR. This, as NATO pointed out, gives the added advantage that the two systems can use two different radar frequencies; one a good choice for long range search, the other a good choice for an MFR (which is especially nice, because in this area also physics makes both tasks difficult to combine).

BAE Systems say that SAMPSON should be regarded as a long-range sensor, its software-programmable search range (depending on which surveillance domain and update rate is selected) extending out to “several 100s of kilometres” and being described by the company as “significantly more than the 150km-range of APAR” – a performance that is directly related also to the chosen frequency band (E/F-band for SAMPSON as opposed to I/J-band for APAR). In fact, BAE Systems maintains that on the Type 45 destroyer, the Alenia Marconi Systems/Signaal S 1850M long-range 3D radar that is designed to work in partnership with SAMPSON “really is superfluous and is not needed to perform the mission of the ship”. The company suggested that the reason the large volume search radar has been incorporated in PAAMS is “more of a historic nature, associated with work sharing issues” that were such a problem during the trilateral Project Horizon.

Sorry, but I don’ understand.
The BPE has the same role (carrier of F35), then why Italians throw their money when they can do the same job with a cheaper ship as well as BPE?

Just maintaining the capability.

The S-3 Viking is a far more complex aircraft than the old S-2 Tracker.

Despite negligable acquistion cost, the operating costs of a S-3 would hardly be less than a regional airliner.

Agree, but how many regional airliners are there that have an MPA variant with a weapons bay and a similar ASW/EW suite AND that could fit into a hardened shelter?

What about Cavour?

What springs to mind is what the USN used to do with fleet oiler tankers: jumboize (cut and plug)?

SOC, can you help me here? You seem to know more about the S-300 systems best.

What do you think of this picture? Does it look familiar to you?

Got this from Sinodefenceforum.

The snow is a dead give away. Here’s the original (taken on board Pjotr Veliky)

This one’s from MAKS 2003 for comparison

You seem to be confused again. I would suggest that the T45 and the F100 are relatively closely matched but that the T45’s ability to take future upgrades gives it the edge (and possibly the sampson radar as well), but both are far better ships than the F124.

If you consider how NFR went, Type 45 probably has more lineage with Franco/Italian Horizon program and F100 more with F124 and LCF.