JonesyIs that saying that the CVF will never be hit by enemy fire? Does that imply that it doesn’t need to be built to naval construction standards, doesn’t need sophisticated damage control, doesn’t need any armour etc….?
No. Just that money shouldn’t be wasted duplicating systems found in the escort fleet that belong in the escort fleet. An area air defence missile no more belongs on a CVF than a 2087 towed array and for the same reasons. There is no correlation between systems like that and basic design features like damage control and naval construction standards.
Jonesyone thing i have noticed over the past year on this forum is that any set of circumstances can be used to justify your opinion.
This mini debate is a case in point. If the UK had a suitable floating airbase then they would be less reliant on land bases. However, because it hasn’t a carrier, it has arranged for basing for its landbased aircraft, and i would be surprised if they end up operating only from Akrotiri.
I can’t help but feel we pack more punch with Tornado and Typhoon than with a handful of harriers (capable though they were).
It is actual events that shape and validate opinions though surely?. In this case, until the Italian offer was made (if confirmed?), the nearest friendly landbase we could depend on, was more than 700 miles away.
The anticarrier debate immediately pre-SDSR was, from the light blue side, that there would always be friendly local base-in. Here is case in point that, at least for a while, there wasn’t. By the time that a general accord has been reached for military action and basing agreed events have moved on, in this instance, to make the military response appear a day late and a dollar short.
The lesson is a salutory one despite the fact that, ultimately, local basing has been worked out.
JonesyPS: Jonesy – I was attentive to your ‘several hundreds of millions of pounds per ship’ figure for Sea Viper, but I’m after breaking it down into bits to see what would be applicable here, in order to compare costs of options properly.
Cheers.:)
No intent to suggest you were being denigrating to anything 52 hope it didnt read as such. I’m just trying to set a context for this to try an clarify why the overall direction of your questioning is off course.
Any figures for systems components will be subjective to the ship, customer and the nature of the deal. I’ve never seen a truly itemised listing for hardware in the fashion you are seeking and wouldn’t expect to find one to be honest. Perhaps try with SIPRI or someone like that for the costs the Singaporeans paid for their SAAM fits?. I’d doubt you’ll find anything from the Arabel/SAAM sales to the Saudi’s, as they tend to keep a lot of such things quiet, but you might get some kind of idea for a baseline?.
In reality though, even if you did find out what Heracles sticker price was (if it ever had one seperate to the remainder of the system), it wouldn’t mean anything. Systems integration and validation can cost as much as the hardware. Ship redesign, RF surveys, power/environmentals provision can weigh in with a significant amount as well. Especially if the design has already hit the change freeze point. The yards really hate it when some slick twonk comes along at the last minute and forces changes to all their nice build plans. They tend to exact revenge by making up quite hideously severe charges for the modifications….not least in order to discourage further tinkerings.
It also seems that sensor tech is in the ascendant, so emcon and LO won’t amount to much: you’ll have to actively fight the electronic battle in order to survive, so need the best systems possible… could well be wrong there (as always) and would appreciate any input.
I’d be interested in what leads you to this conclusion?. There have been no significant changes in blue-water surveillance, at least in the public domain, for the last two or three decades. Satellite surveillance has actually regressed in the face of increasing ASAT capabilities around the globe. OTH radar has benefitted from signal processing advances, but, is still fundamentally hobbled by the physics of the wave it generates. HALE UAV’s offer some interesting possibilities, but, even today only one real transoceanic HALE UAV is on the field. Passive sonar offers the most promise, potentially, but has had limited take-up as a wide-area surveillance tool and its really, currently, again only the one theatre deployable system thats really in play?.
Even today, as it was 30 years ago, finding the carrier is still the trick. Sensor tech is a lot more limited than is generally believed. You could fly an AWACS over your coast at 20,000ft and I could sail a CVN up and down a mere 200 nautical miles off that coast, conducting (albeit carefully) full flight operations, and you’d not have a clue I was there – provided I stayed quiet. Radar horizon from a 20,000ft patroller is less than 190 nautical miles to pick up a 100ft tall masthead.
The best defence, as well as offense, potential for a carrier is always its mobility. The Soviet carriers had stupendous armament schemes because they were intended to be tied to one fixed point and were expected to defend that point against all comers. If you dont have that handicap the best defence possible is by not being where the other guy is aiming his weapons.
Anyway my point is that it isn’t about magicing money for gold plating, but that upgrading the CVFs (even if only to the level of something like a Singaporan Formidable light frigate) is more cost/effective (and cheaper) than building the more escorts that would be more desirable – especially when including all of the costs (hull multiple and extra crew notably).
Again though that hinges on the concept that Aster15/SAAM is dramatically better than CAMM. There is absolutely no evidence to support that at the moment as CAMM isnt a weapon yet. It could easily be that FLAADS is quite sufficient to the task of providing the local area air defence screen that the scarcity of T45’s will force a reliance on.
If we give the notional T26 48 CAMM and consider a group of 1 T45 and 3 T26’s as screening the duty CVF for modest intensity operations off a ‘rogue state’ you are still looking at nearly 200 SAMs in the group plus the air defence potential of the fastjets. Given that few medium level states actually possess huge invetories of air-launched antiship missiles and posses limited platforms from which to launch them (putting a hard limit on the size of any potential saturation attack) then 200 SAMs is not an insignificant number!!!.
JonesyAgreed. This is what the carrier strike mission is about.
Nearest RAF runway 700 miles+. Nearest french land base 1000 miles plus. No friendly local base-in agreed yet so no logistics ramp up even started yet. Plus a dynamic local conflict scenario that demands rapid and adaptable response. This is exactly the sort of tasking that STOVL proponents have been talking about for months. It doesn’t need a full CVN with all the bells and whistles. An LPA or a STOVL strike carrier carrying a couple of dozen competent strikefighters though would be just about perfect.
Edit: Just noticed some mentions of Italian offers of base-in?. If this is confirmed obviously earlier comments become redundant.
JonesyCheers Jonesy for the info; it’s as certain as anything in the Type 26 programme that it’ll have Artisan – so it’s doomed to not have any SAM more potent than CAMM then?
Seeings that CAMM isnt all that close to a service-entry weapon I think you are possibly a little premature with the disparaging remarks. FLAADS represents a lot more of a capability than simple legacy naval short range air defence. The CAMM round has been depicted in bespoke VLS in a quadpack format. A 20km maximum range against a manoevering target puts it close enough to the Aster15 envelope as to make the difference academic. Aster may well be the superior weapons system all round, but, you pay for that and if, as purported, CAMM offers viable local area air defence without the need for expensive AESA systems aboard ship, plus more efficient deployment options, you could hardly complain!.
Which, along with the fact that there won’t be any more Type 45s, makes it even more important that CVF can properly defend herself against high-end threats.
No. Again the carrier doesnt want to be any more emissions active than she absolutely has to be. The entire point to Carrier Strike is keeping the carrier group out of the oppositions sensor coverage while conducting flight operations. If the opposition can’t find you then you dont have to have weapons aboard to defeat them. Perversely the more you place weapons systems like UKPAAMS on the carrier the higher the likelihood that you will be found and need them in a combat scenario. Simply put you dont place weapons on the carrier beyond those needed for absolute last-ditch defence. High end threats should be dealt with farther out from the carrier every time. If a weakness exists, such that leakers could get through, you fix the problem there….not back at the carrier….its fundamentally the wrong place to focus high-end defensive systems.
Of course I agree that more hulls and planes would be better, but we’re not comparing similar costs there are we? Ignoring the radar, the missile side (say 16xAsters and 20xCAMMs for one carrier) will come to around a third to half of an F-35. With fiddly scheduling/transferring, it could cost little more than the armoured box that the silos fit into, if both carriers and escorts shared a common pool and facilities.
No afraid you cant quite spin it that way. Had we designed in UKPAAMS from the start we would have had the design and equipment costs of incorporating it at that stage….see earlier comments on what UKPAAMS did to the costs of the T45’s. Now it may be that the R&D costs have been amortized across the T45 programme so BAE may be willing to provide Sampson arrays for cost plus a bit, but, IIRC the Sampson production run is either finished or winding down so would have to be kicked up a gear. Then you would have the redesign costs to incorporate UKPAAMS in the ships at this late stage. Its a lot more than torching a hole in the decks and dropping in a few VLS modules and any attempt to say ‘just ignore the radars’ is missing the point completely.
Again, I fully take the point that she would be better off with more escorts, but they should be Type 45 class (not Type 26, as far as AAW is concerned), which cost vastly more than moderately upgrading the CVF. Yes, ideally she should be keeping electronically quiet but that might turn out to be a luxury against some threats, with only a single Type 45 in the BG (plus a bunch of stuff with Artisan and CAMM).
Dont underestimate FLAADS as a concept or, by the same token, over-estimate Sea Viper. My view is that Sea Viper offers, at present, the most advanced capability to engage tactical strike fighters, playing radar horizon games, at area defence ranges. Its ability to track form on a single sweep and to get a missile in the air with very low track-to-shoot latency is as good as it gets right now. All that said false alarm rates, RoE’s and the normal operational pressures of shoot/no-shoot on fleeting targets will always open a gap in what is technically possible against what is operationally possible.
Bottom line is that long-range shots, until CEC is more mature and established, will be measured. The shorter range ‘local area’ is going to be the permissive environment. Its always the idea to ‘shoot at the archer and not the arrows’ but, to the defended ship, whether an inbound missile is stopped on the rail with the destruction of its launching aircraft or shot down 10km away by a FLAADS ship is largely irrelevent. Provided the effect is that the defended ship doesnt take the missile hit everyone is happy. With quadpack, seemingly, intended for CAMM the ability to pack a significant volume of ‘cheap’ missiles is feasible for the FLAADS ship. If every escort that doesnt have Sea Viper has this FLAADS capability to ‘missile soak’ the actual defensive potential of the group is very high. This is significant as it will raise the ‘virtual attrition’ potential of the RN carrier group and give a potential adversary a much harder time constructing a workable attack strategy without disproportionate resource commitment.
JonesyJonesy: I know they’re only concept pics and the commentary is merely extrapolation (at this stage), but don’t the latest Type 26 pics show CAMM, Aster VLS and Artisan?
Sylver VLS doesn’t have to mean Aster even if the artwork was reliable. The basic fact is that the Artisan team are building a TI capable 3D air/surf search set and not an MFR. The difference is considerable. Artisan is giving enough data to align an active missile on tipover and give it a bearing, elevation and range. The missiles it will work with are short-range only and will go seeker active straight out of the hole. All that is needed from the TI radar, then, is to give the missile a cue where to point its seeker with enough accuracy to get target capture.
An MFR, like Sampson, is a different beast entirely. It is providing guidance update to multiple Asters through the midphase of an engagement cycle. This means pinging the target(s) and holding the track, in 3 dimensions, with a high enough datarate to continuously vector the assigned missiles to an optimum seeker activation point. The missile is nose cold until that point and absolutely dependent on the guidance feed from the MFR. A whole LOT more demanding than what a VL MICA type active-seeker PDMS requires.
Jonesy1 Given that there’ll be only two (hopefully), with a maximum of one deployed, would the cost of the missiles be that great?
Yes. UKPAAMS/Sea Viper has added £several hundred million to the cost of each T45 hull. It would do so to the two carriers as well.
They could be transferred from ship to ship as needed?
The missiles yes. The radar and ancilliary equipment no.
2 Given the shortage of top-class escorts, would it not be best to give the carriers more defensive capability?I can imagine a time when there’ll only be one Type 45 available, and if she has a failure it’s all over (I assume that the Type 26s won’t get Aster 30s?). This isn’t the USN, after all….
No. The answer is to have more escorts. In an ideal world you do not want your carrier to emit anything that is easily recognisable on an opposing ESM screen. The very last thing you want is a Sampson radar that the opposition can watch make a bearing change into wind periodically!!!. You might as well make clear voice broadcasts giving your carriers position every now and again. The effect would be the same!. If a vessel has to emit let it be an escort and, by preference, one a good distance upthreat from the carrier!
6 How much more expensive is Sampson than Artisan?. Artisan can direct Aster 30s, right?
Dramatically. Sampson is a highly capable AESA MFR built off 20 years of research and produced in single-digit numbers (in full system terms). Artisan is a conventional mechanical azimuth/electronic elevation 3D search and track set that will be built in numbers over a couple of dozen for the fleet. Artisan is, allegedly, to be capable of directing an active missile like VL MICA or CAAM…it will not be enough to guide Aster.
7 (Sorry if this has already been gone into, but I’m doing my best in my mountain of research, and want it right) Is she intended to be armed at all, already?
Standard RN light guns and upgraded Phalanx-1B’s going by released artwork.
9 By the way, her GTs will follow the very efficient model of the Type 45’s, right? So a bit more than 50% efficient at best. How does that compare to diesels? [I’m having a hell of a time getting straight numbers on that one, but the sources I’ve found have the Type 23’s DGs only a sliver more efficient than the Type 45’s GTs, which are much lighter.
GT’s generally have higher power density than diesels. Diesels are generally cheaper to run than turbines. The current layout provides about 70MW on turbines and about 40MW on diesels. Presumably when routine cruising, in temperate conditions, and not conducting intensive flight operations she will run on a mix of a single turbine and some number of diesels to maximise efficiency.
JonesyNo, I’m trying to explain that there is no STOVL-only training program and one would have to be established. Right now you send them to the Carrier track or the Helicopter track. There is no RAF-style land based track to send them to. Then after you’ve spent money on activating a Marine STOVL training wing that is basically the intermediate and advanced jet programs without carrier field landing and shipboard training,
Why does there need to be a STOVL only training program?. Currently USMC fastjet pilots go through USN pilot training and then convert to STOVL – if I understand it right?. So they learn in a conventional type before converting. If they are never likely to need to undertake CATOBAR ops why not train them in the USAF F-35A stream and then do the STOVL conversion when they reach their OCU?.
Hell of a lot cheaper than needlessly chewing through Goshawk and -35C cycle lives and, with an all F-35B force, the USMC pilots shouldn’t need to gain familiarity with the Fleet carriers because they dont belong there and wont be operating off of them anyway. STOVL deck quals, even for the tricky Harrier, have proven to be achievable by land-based pilots with no maritime flight operations experience whatsoever. Anecdotally F-35B is a far more benign beast in the hover so the need for protracted qualification periods at sea just isnt there.
if one of the STOVL pilots ever switches track to the Charlie or decides to go into naval test pilot training, you have to send them back to T-45s to be trained on carrier operations before reporting to the fleet replacement squadron or USNTPS.
If an F-35B pilot wants to fly a CATOBAR type he does exactly the same as a USAF pilot does at the moment. He goes through the Carrier Qualification course from scratch. Better to train a few pilots for CATOBAR when they do need it than all pilots for CATOBAR when they dont!.
JonesyNot when you consider you’d need a completely different training syllabus for the STOVL pilots.
You are trying to compare the overheads of a STOVL training program with that needed for CATOBAR deck qualification and continuation training?.
JonesyThe STOVL crowd seem to forget about the 2/3rds of Marine strikefighter pilots flying hornets and that even the ones flying harriers had to do conventional carrier training to get their wings of gold. Its an inconvenience, not a show stopper. It gets canceled, they probably have to develop new lightweight deployable field cats and arresting gear systems.
Sounds like a good deal of training overhead saved by STOVL if suddenly you dont need to CATOBAR deck qualify 60% of your pilots doesnt it?!.
JonesyYip, it seems on the way out.
The USMC has 7+1 Harrier (T)VMAs, and 13+3 Hornet (T)VMFA/AW. Could that move be the first step to replace Hornets with F-35C, and only the ~130 Harriers with F-35B? That would be more than 60% down from the original 340.
Why would they opt for a course of action that would give them the very worst possible outcome?. The cost of the -35B’s they WANT would skyrocket and they would end up not only reinforcing the big deck carrier dependence they dont want, but, tying themselves into the CAW for the next two generations.
IF the F-35B makes it into squadron service at all why would the existing plans not be pursued?. F-35B is still the USMC platform of choice.
JonesyThat would make too much sense.
You can tell CVF was designed by a team who put naval aviation as second priority to looking spiffy during a sail-by review on the Queen’s birthday. If your primary mission is to fly airplanes, then get rid of the topside clutter and make room for airplanes! Alas, INS Vikramaditya has the same problem.
Or, back in the real world, designed by people who knew that they were designing a ship first and foremost. However good your carrier has to be at operating aircraft it has to be handled at sea, in tight waters as well as the wide blue, and being able to actually see out of a bridge where you can conn the vessel from is a real bonus.
The primary role of the ship is not to fly aeroplanes…its to get those aeroplanes, their support infrastructure and personnel, to the optimum position from which that force can be employed as an integrated unit. The next priority of the vessel is the efficient operation of aircraft. Hard to undertake the second if you mess up on the first and I dont, for one second, envy Fords deck officers trying to handle her from that daft little island structure back aft if the cameras go on strike or get spray obscured at an inopportune moment.
JonesyWell I have no doubt that they are going to add more gas turbines to support the EMALS/EMCAT setup and I see a strong argument for going with an updated variant of DAX II from Mactaggart Scott in respect of arrestor gear. DAX II uses water rather then electricity but offers many if the benefits of AAG in respect of performance and running costs.
They are going with an update of DAXII last I heard. Also the CVF EMALS is half the setup of the Fords. If there is an installed power shortfall, if say ship hotel load is higher than expected, space has been left in the design for additional generating capability. Presently its not expected that there will be ANY impact on ship performance from running EMALS and the prime mover motors.
JonesyIt’s a question of priorities and affordability as well: what type of vessel is needed now, and can we afford it? A less sophisticated ship, carrying helicopters and boats and basic sensors and weapons, would be a lot more useful and affordable for the next ten years at least, than a very expensive high-end frigate. RN frigates very little of their time escorting carriers at 25 knots these days.
Absolutely incorrect and a lesson, I’m thankful to say, we’ve already absorbed in this country.
T23 was originally intended to be the austere hull you allude to above. A bare minimum hull, sporting Sea Wolf for point defence, principally intended to operate choppers and tow a 2031 array. Same financial hand-wringing was given as the reason for such a limited design being chosen.
Then the Falklands brought back the glimpse of reality that a general capability level was required for all the other tasks that warships are expected to undertake that fall outside of its designed primary function. Bring that lesson forward to today – witness HMS Cumberland laying off a potentially hostile coast. Had she been an earlier batch T22, without the Mk8 forward, would she be as valuable in providing coercive presence in her present duties?.
Whether the frigates spend more or less of their time actually escorting carriers (and this is something that they very much have been doing as a matter of routine) is utterly irrelevent. They are the assets that provide that capability. You have/want the carrier then there is no choice other than to get/maintain the fast frigate screen for that carrier. Simply put this is not a debateable issue – anyone who disputes that basic fact doesnt understand the way that ships are deployed.
In terms of the rest of what you said, that a more affordable ship is needed for the undertaking of the routine patrol taskings, I agree. A vessel similar in concept and size to the Danish Thetis class boats, leveraging off BMT’s Venator multimission capability, would be perfect for the RN’s needs. The important thing you have to understand is that such a hull does not replace the requirement for the fast frigate. It would allow for breathing space and lower optempo’s to stretch the lifespan of the current frigate force out though….T26 would still absolutely be needed….just not as soon as it would be otherwise.
JonesyA couple of the Royal Navy’s high profile missions – anti-piracy off Somalia and the Caribbean Patrol – have recently been carried out by RFAs with helicopters and RHIBs embarked.
So?. You cant screen a carrier doing 25knts, on a run, with an RFA-style hull that can sustain 18 at best.
Is there room for an austere vessel that can do MIOPS and patrol taskings cheaper than current frigates?. Yes – many of us have long been clamouring for a real oceanic patrol vessel for exactly that purpose for the C3 requirement. Doesn’t mean we dont still need fleet capable escorts though.
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