Snow MonkeyI had my last post to this thread disappear, and since it’s tone was along the lines of “can’t we all get along” and not referencing any specific poster, I don’t think it was deleted by mods – So I’d put it down to a technical error. Which happen.
Anyhow, I don’t see Jacko claiming to be the “go-to man” or any sort of authority here – HE’S ASKING QUESTIONS, i.e. appealing to those who have more info than him. So let’s chill out on the hot air, y’all…
Snow MonkeyWages, as mentioned above, probably less than the equivalent serviceman, and I don’t suppose they are incremented every year, as a serviceman’s would be. Add to this that they don’t need to be kitted out from stores for every eventuality (as we all do), don’t have to have service accommodation made available for them, and don’t have to have to be sent on courses, annual “ticks in the box” etc.
Relevant to service-men certainly, but civilian MoD employees?
Snow MonkeyTo date not, though HMS seems to be planned for the longer term (2015+). Topsight-E would be ready and could be integrated if a customer requires it. This HMD is already used on Indian Navy’s MiG-29K and malaysian Su-30MKM. For the Rafale Sagems Gerfaut had been previously selected but was canceled and the priority is placed on other items such as the RBE2AA.
I believe HMS will be on the UAE planes at the least. I’m not sure about Brazil, but IF Greece selects Rafale, HMS was one of their requirements. The system is completely ready, but France doesn’t seem to feel it’s any pressing need that has priority over their multiple other priorities, i.e. they’re getting by fine without it. UAE may also induct Meteor before France.
I don’t believe ‘towed arrays’ are anywhere on the time-line for Rafale, same as integral jamming arrays aren’t on Typhoon’s time-line. The integral arrays will likely be upgraded for F4 (2018?) though.
Snow MonkeyI think Saab is also involved with Neuron? Perhaps also the twin seated Gripen could be well suited to control them…
Yes, all the EC (incl. Typhoon) should be well compatible with Neuron/Taranis follow up (which Dassault believes will include BAe)
Re: UCAV as A2A sensor, I see jamming escort as a more viable role. Though loading a Neuron out with PASSIVE EM+IR detection/localizers could be interesting.
Snow MonkeyDo you have more details? I wonder who they might have in mind as a customer for the Mirages.
If both the UAE & Greece trade in M2Ks, there would be rather a lot seeking new users.
This is all I’ve seen.
No details on where the M2K (not -5) would go, but that would be Dassault’s problem, not Greece’s.
Like I said, it really just sweetens the deal for them to buy Rafale… Personally, I think all 3 Eurocanards have good points solely on a technical capability (+ cost) basis, and Rafale seems to also have a political-strategic benefit. Rafale + F35 seem to over-lap too much in A2G role, but Greece is also in Neuron, so F35 may well not be such a big future component for them. (if Rafale/EF are expensive compared to GripenNG, F35 will be over the top)
Snow MonkeyI might like to discuss Dassault’s apparent new offer to exchange Greek M2K BGM/EGM for some Rafale (3, obviously a sweetener for normal Rafale purchase), but this thread seems taken over by arguments over exact empty weight configurations, or rather such topic is chosen to continue a poster’s conflict with those he identifies as being against him. Is anybody actually interested in discussing the weight of Rafale in various configurations? It seems that time has rather passed on, beyond perhaps discussing heavier payloads enabled with the 90kN ‘UAE Special’. :confused:
Snow MonkeyThanks for the update as it were… Soap opera, indeed.
More substantively,
You mentioned possible new radar and Millenium CIWS (great), is HN considering the Type 45/SAMSON radar?
I wasn’t sure if the plan was only for Air-Warfare variants, or if a mix with ASW was planned? (or a hybrid?)
Snow MonkeyIt bears repeating that this ‘hugely inflated price’ mentioned is the entire life-time costs, i.e. spares, repair infrastructure, lease costs for c130 given a400M delivery delay (this would be cheaper with russian/ukrainian planes, I assume), though it’s not clear if it includes a new officer’s club as well.
It clearly doesn’t need to be mentioned that SA is shockingly poor compared to other A400M partners, and allocating more of their budget to where it does more good for their citizens than developing and buying 8 A400M’s is a pretty reasonable thing. South Africa doesn’t need to extend itself at cost of it’s citizen’s for benefit of EADS and other partners who can much more afford it. The ‘hugely inflated price’ thing IS not much more than mis-reported media hysteria, though.
The thing is, GIVEN the Rand’s depreciation vs. Euro, SA’s production costs are down, so maintaining production there even with SA no longer as a partner would help EADS in keeping costs under control, especially given refactoring production already assuming SA participation would cost more moeny. It seems like it should be possible to negotiate another agreement beneficial to both parties, even without SA commitment to purchase – their purchase was hardly ever a make-or-break part of the A400M program.
Snow MonkeyWell, to get back to topic: if the French were concelling their A400M order in favor of a strong partnership between Dassault and Embraer on the KC390, it’d be fine for me (and for the Brazilians I gess)
Uh… right.
But France ISN’T cancelling their A400M order in favor of “Embraer and Dassault C390 partnership”. They’re not equivalent planes – C390 is replacing the 130J which many other NATO countries are looking at further orders of b/c of the delays in A400 from MTU’s non-auditability. Further, this Embraer/Dassault partnership has nowhere been announced except in the wishful imaginations of posters here.
This whole side-trek is utterly bizarre. NOBODY denigrated the design capabilities of Dassault, but pointing out France’s industrial policy consolidating transport aircraft under Aerospatiale/EADS is for some reason taken as an affront to Dassault’s honor… !?!?!? Seriously, many of the features I mentioned that EADS could bring from C-235/295 & A400M DO NOT RELATE AT ALL to aeronautical design: Cargo management/logistics systems, air-drop rails, these type of things aren’t really relevant to the “glorious heights of aeronautics design” that Dassault may well excel at, they just happen to be what operaters want in a military transport like A400M.
If you want to say “I think EADS sucks, France SHOULD fund Dassault to compete against it”, that’s fine and dandy (and that recognizes the fact that such a move would be a complete reversal of defense industrial policy), but it’s utter hysteria to conflate that with a reality-based discussion based on actual, present day reality.
Anyways, if anybody wants to believe that EADS would absolutely, never, there’s-no-sense-to-it, be chosen to partner with Embraer on this, then I don’t really care to ‘persuade’ you otherwise*, so I suggest everybody returns to the topic at hand, and refer to ‘France’s offer to partner on C390’ without worrying about the particular company to effect that. If it manifests, the actual partner will be announced sooner or later, so then we shall see who is blowing smoke.
(and I do have to say I’m baffled at these “disastrous faults” that have occured on A350. REALLY?
is this referring to them revising their design to customer demands before real engineering work begins?
like exactly what Dassault should have done with Mercure?)
Snow MonkeyOne surely positive thing out of this, is that the new MoD is professor of Constitutional Law, so he knows his legal stuff and announced modifications to the ways the arms procurements will be done, which include that all future arms contracts, will be in greek language, will be subordinated to greek laws and responsible for disputes will be greek courts.
Sounds like a smart man.
I agree the leaked MoU is pressure tactics, but pulling that kind of stunt while in 3-way negotiations with Gov/MoD & Elefsis is a joke. If they don’t like Tavoularis’ price offer, they don’t accept it, and the government is already interceding to make all parties happy. Thyssen *IS* seriously in trouble, financially: It’s no coincidence why they sign JV with UAE sheikhs NOW and not 5 years ago.
If Tavoularis doesn’t have the money to make Thyssen happy, and the price can’t be lowered any more, the government should either extend a loan to Elefsis with terms that ensure they get payed back, or buy back the shipyards either in full, or half with Tavoularis. … It seems strange if Greece buys them back completely for the EU fine to still be in place, though…
Snow MonkeyThanks for the update.
If the MoU is real, it’s pretty amazing Thyssen is still engaged in such ‘games’ while negotiating with MoD & Tavoularis, knowing Greece has a veto over any sale. The MoU may well just be a piece of paper with no obligation, but even so it’s a ridiculous act by Thyssen. I don’t know, maybe Thyssen is worried there is a faction of government that WANTS them to stick around, and they’re trying to avoid that situation with all these riduculous games? :rolleyes:
Snow MonkeyGiven that France has clearly separated it’s own aerospace companies into civil/ military airliners (aerospatiale/airbus/EADS) and military fighter jet/ business jet (Dassault), I don’t see the rationale to insist on including Dassault on a project clearly within the competencies of Airbus.
Separating their military fighter to their business jet sectors as you do is innacurate, all Dassault design/conception staff are working on both, this allows them to transfer technologies and skills from one sector to the other, only the commercial and support are clearly separated areas.
Read what I wrote again, I wasn’t saying that. Dassault doesn’t work on A400M or transport planes was my point:
Cargo handling, ramps, etc, are not things Dassault has ready to contribute near-off the shelf. EADS does.
Sure, Dassault could participate in developing that stuff from scratch, but why would France insist on that vs. EADS?
Like I said, EADS re-cycling developments for A400M *helps* that program France is already involved in, and fits how France divided it’s aerospace industry: if they wanted Dassault to be involved in transport aircraft, why isn’t it involved in A400M or Airbus?
Nice Image, but the fact it washes away the importance of Selex makes me doubt it’s reliability, though…
But like I said, the business case for Gripen NG IS CLEARLY much better for Embraer.
Nobody in South America is going to buy Rafale in the forseeable future,
though Chile and Argentina may be eventual prospects in the timeline of F4+.
If Saab wins it will be because of capability and price, not because of better tech-transfer. IMHO 😉
Snow MonkeyWell the Rafale is merely ready and Brazil couldn’t gain much more than the licence for local production. The Gripen NG is certainly higher risk, but it isn’t ready yet and there’re still opportunities for the brazilian industry to get involved in the development process, not just in production.
Dassault and SAAB designs fighter jets since the 50s Embraer are not going to learn how to do a 2020 front-line fighter in the time frame of one collaborative programe.
50% participation in all Gripen NG exports probably IS more attactive to Embraer profit-wise than a 100% licence for Latin American Rafale exports, but I hardly see that participating Gripen NG will in fact mean substantial capability development of Brazil’s indigenous defense industry:
The structure is being re-arranged in a minor manner to allow more internal fuel, but the basic structure of Gripen is being retained, so “up to minute advances in state of the art” aren’t in the cards, which would increase the development cost considerably. IF Saab is talking about co-development of IRST, MAWS, counter-measures, etc, that would actually be substantial, but I haven’t seen anything suggesting that – what I have seen is talking about co-develoment WITH EMBRAER: Embraer doesn’t do IRST, counter-measures, etc, those would involve other Brazilian companies doing defense electronics work, which has never been mentioned to my knowledge. So from BRAZIL’s perspective (not Embraer), Gripen NG development doesn’t really seem to have any advantage in advancing indegenous self-sufficiency.
If Dassault can’t improve KC-390 design with some in-house technologies no one else can.
I have seen nothing connecting Dassault to the C-390 deal. They may well like to produce certain structures, but the entire point is this is happening in the context of government-government negotiations/partnership, not as a purely commercial sales endeavor by Dassault. Given that France has clearly separated it’s own aerospace companies into civil/ military airliners (aerospatiale/airbus/EADS) and military fighter jet/ business jet (Dassault), I don’t see the rationale to insist on including Dassault on a project clearly within the competencies of Airbus. Not to mention EADS Eurocopter/Helibras co-operation is always mentioned in the same sentence with the French/Brazil stratetic co-operation this whole topic is associated with.
Speaking in generalities is one thing, but specific technologies like cargo management systems, cargo bay & ramps, air-drop, and other military-cargo-specific requirements, all developed by EADS for the A400M would obviously be transferrable to C390 (which would obviously help EADS in balancing the books for the A400M program if they can ammortize their development costs by sharing such tech with the non-competing C390.)
Snow MonkeyThat could be (90% chance) a pretty inaccurate and brazen statement.
Do notice I used the phrase “may” and asked for corrections if anybody had specific information otherwise.
I’m not claiming to be an insider or expert.
( from an easy google search, which I don’t claim is reliable: F-22 = ~25%, Tejas = ~45% , which isn’t surprising )
But my main point was not comparing Tejas to F-22 (% of composites is ultimately not the most important factor), but comparing the state of the art & knowledge AT THE TIME F-22’s design was fixed to the state of the art & knowledge NOW (or rather, when PAF-FA’s design is fixed): The US obviously pays the price for pushing what is at the bleeding edge. Many new general aviation aircraft now have 100% composite structures. Almost 20 years advances would seem to make the development time in fact significantly less than what F-22 required – And that’s NECESSARY if the schedule is AT ALL going to be met. 🙂
Snow MonkeyHowever the Russians and Indians don’t need to there is enough open literature to glimpse which way the US went to produce parts for the F-22. all open source!
As to what is transferred that will depend on how they do the moulding etc. for the structures, you will have to excuse me here my discipline is composites, electronics and AESA blah blah bore me, If the PAKFA consortium or FGFA goes towards RTM etc. then India can have all the fun in learning how to produce 3D woven/stitched structures and also how to inject them. From this alone there is a lot that India can learn. tooling/injection strategies etc. etc..
Of course it’s not just “open source” info on how composites were used in F-22 specifically – the entire industry has moved forward on this, civil aviation included, and indeed India’s experience with Tejas has give it much experience here that PAF-FA will only build on top of. Correct me if I’m wrong, but Tejas may have a higher % of composites than F-22, which isn’t surprising given the advantage of time. Further, it isn’t so much a manner of “transferring” this technology from Russia, as much as the joint project funding local industries to develop their capabilities towards a concrete product.
IMHO, the negotiations over India’s requirements has very little to do with structural issues – two seater variants are pretty standard in modern fighter aircraft – but more with regards to weapons accomodation, both physical and software-wise, as well as modularity in computers and sensor/countermeasures to allow India to easily swap in it’s own preferred sub-systems (either indigenous or 3rd party).
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