Buy small series of specialised ships from local industry and that’s you end up with. No economies of scale like FREMM, or reducing cost per unit through export orders. Mind you, against some other projects my tax dollars (well, ££s) are funding now this still looks like a bargain.

It is arguable that the best deal would be to simply give BAE the contract to build three bare carrier hulls, and then hand them over to Thales to be fitted out!

If we go with the rough estimates for how the cost for modern naval warships break down we would have 1/3 building the hull, and 2/3 outfitting, systems, sensors, armaments etc. I don’t think BAE/VT would be entirely satisfied with this, even with 3 hulls. And that again completely ignores the fact that expertise, capacity and opportunities to reduce cost exist abroad in the hull construction segment. I fear this whole debate is going to roll around before too long when MARS gets under way, somebody is bound to propose building some of those in a yard in the far east, for outfitting in the UK.

For now, I wish, agreement of any sort, on actually getting to work.

I was under the impression that any investigation concluded that the missile warhead did not detonate after the impact near the hangar, while the missile fuel did burn in several compartments and the hangar (causing the loss of the embarked aircraft). The image of the ship post-damage came from open source (newspaper), so should still be out there.

Kinda makes sense to put them internally were you can, given their propensity to fall off ….. as long as they are dry or contained in some way e.g. in a sandwaich as Austin mentioned. Otherwise, potential to fall off and end up floating/bouncing around – cannot imagine that would be popular!

I heard a story once that at one point the Soviet tiles were so heavy, they “bolted” them onto the hull – may have kept them on, but must have degraded their performance. I would assume they’d have tried to cut down the size/weight of them since then.

Its difficult to conceive (for me anyway) of a material you could use that wasn’t a polymer…..

As far as I can tell anechoic tiles are, and need to be mounted where they can actually intercept active sonar before it bounces of the steel hull, and they form the outermost layer of the submarine hull. Most (?) submarines these days are thus coated with plastic or rubber based tiles or panels that are bolted/mounted on to the pressure hull. And they do fall off… close up of this appears even worse.
http://www.royal-navy.mod.uk/server/show/ConMediaFile.20090

Malaysia has placed an order with South Korea for the production of a multipurpose warship that can also be used as a hospital ship, a news report said Sunday (March 11).

No it hasn’t. Not even a proper project under way yet. This report comes under the same category as the recent announcement about “amphibious” XK2 (K2 really) main battle tanks, which are also certain to be chosen by Turkey…

It has since been dragged off and sailed to a nearby port (or base?) for inspection.

Due to steel-hulled nature and shock resistance requirements that MCM entails the damage may be not that bad. However, that non-magnetic steel may be tricky to repair and weld.

It also plays to one of the core idea’s with the Armidales. They are not being built for a 20-25 year life. 10-15 is more likely, and the RAN is planning to replace them with another local design, short-life vessel.
Unicorn

Quite sure I read something about a design life of 20 years though. Let’s return to this question in 2015…