Wouldn’t that depend on the circumstance? Perhaps he didn’t have a phone to call from? Perhaps he didn’t want to leave the gun unattended as he went to report it.

It sounds like he’d been working in the garden and he may have been hot and tired and his judgment may have been affected so he may have not made the best decision. He may have panicked or been scared or may have been excited by the find and the emotion may have also contributed to him apparently not making the best decision. Do you always make the best decisions? I don’t know of anyone that does.

I’m trying to work out if this is perverse spin or genuinely the most illuminating piece of naievete that I’ve seen in a while.

Perhaps, where you live, shotguns are found casually discarded in peoples gardens regularly. We dont tend to get a lot of it over here….the odd crisp packet, chocolate wrapper etc sure…..12 gauge shotguns not so often though. Finding a discarded shotgun would be considered a big issue to the local Constabulary as the reasons for firearms being dumped in this country are usually few in number. We dont enjoy the ready access to guns that others do so people dont tend to pitch them over the neighbours hedge if they dont quite match the new decor etc. They tend to be dumped after being used in the commission of crime.

So we have a suspect firearm in the possession of someone known to have come to the attention of the authorities and, instead of alerting those authorities so that a proper investigation could be made as to how this weapon came to be where it was ‘found’ it is moved from its ‘surprise’ resting place, transported through a public area and plonked on the desk at the local cop shop. Nothing here is just sounding the slightest bit dodgy to you ATFS?.

By picking up the gun he was breaking the law; however if he would’ve left the gun unattended and it fell into nefarious hands because he left it unattended then wouldn’t that be worse? It was probably a bad decision to pick up the gun because it could possibly be considered tampering with evidence. However to leave a gun and ammunition around unsecured and unsupervised could be considered public endangerment. So there necessarily isn’t no perfect answer.

Perhaps the very simple expedient of warning those neighbours who had access to the garden to prevent their kids entering and touching the bag would be sufficient to ensure security of the weapon for the minutes it would take for plod to arrive on scene. Then having a neighbour make the phone call or even wander off to a local phone box (if no-one in a mile radius had access to a phone – you never know do you?!), while he kept a watching brief over the weapon, would address that issue – anything but the wholly idiotic process of ‘innocently’ carrying the weapon through a public place.

That is, of course, IF the weapon was ever in a bag at the bottom of his garden and wasn’t, in fact, passed to him to ‘innocently’ hand in to the local force as a way of getting rid of a weapon that his associates may not wish to be have been found with!. Cant get much in the way of ballistics off a weapon that has no rifling can you?.

The only monumentally stupid thing in this case is to perpetuate a society where ‘doing the right thing’ can get you into more trouble than deliberately flouting the law.

That is the point though. In this case it isnt very clear he ‘did the right thing’. The right thing was clearly to leave the damned thing where it was, call the police to collect it and, perhaps, investigate the surroundings in the hopes of finding some clues as to how it came to be there.

In this case, as an ex-soldier, he may have had enough firearms knowledge to be certain that the weapon was in a safe state to transport. What happens the next time if it happens to be some muppet, clueless about guns, picks a weapon up that is loaded and cocked and decides to ‘do the right thing’ and carry the weapon on the bus with him to hand in at the local station. Is he still doing the right thing if it accidentally goes off and blows away poor old Mrs Scoggins from number 27???.

Doing the right thing has to be tempered with doing the smart thing for it to be of value to society. This guy got halfway there.

So let’s see now, somebody throws a bin liner into your garden…

…are we to phone the police just in case there is a firearm inside it? :rolleyes:

Bit of a difference between opening and peering into a bag containing a dumped firearm and carting the thing off up the High Street to the local cop shop!.

And if there is, doesn’t the fact that it is on our property make it ‘in our possession’? In this case I don’t see how this man could have avoided prison.

If a car is parked on your driveway, on your property, does it automatically become yours?. No of course not. By contacting the police you are making a clear expression that the firearm isnt yours and should not be on your property. By picking it up and carrying the thing with you through a public area you are changing the situation….you are carrying something on your person and you are, undeniably, responsible for it being there!.

However morally wrong the outcome the guy did something that is indeed best described as ‘monumentally stupid’.

On the point of the chap with his shotgun-in-a-bag how many of us would go and pick the thing up, on discovering what was actually in the bag, and go tootling off up the High Street with it slung over our backs?.

Me, I’d be a bit more concerned with contamination of evidence and I’d call the police to come and pick the thing up themselves – whilst keeping a close watch on it to make sure it stayed put.

5 years inside for the ‘offence’ mentioned is plainly absurd and, one would hope, an appeal could be fairly easily mounted on the grounds that the gentleman in question is no threat to the public at large and therefore is undeserving of a custodial sentence. That said though it would seem that the message does need to transmit not to do bloody stupid things like picking up dumped firearms and wandering round town with them!. 😮

Yes, except that your STOVL strike carrier idea doesn’t have a viable airgroup until 2017 at the very least, at which point CdG will be past her mid-life point! So the austere strike carrier option was rather academic for the French…

What do you mean by viable though?. We did ALLIED FORCE with FRS1, we did PALLISER with GR7/FA2 embarked?. What requirement has there been for us to deploy anything more than those types since 1991?. This is what I was saying – up until now what operation have we undertaken that demanded a CVN embarking Fleet capable AEW?. As there have been none why be jealous of that capability in another service?. Especially when that capability has come at such a price for modest performance.

In addition, the whole point of investing vast sums of money in a carrier capability is to cover yourself for the worst case scenario: high-end warfare.

Why?. If that high end warfare is not about to happen where is the return on the investment?. A Fleet Carrier is great for sea control, but, who has a powerful blue-water fleet to oppose us?. China might be able to put something competetive out one day….probably twenty years from now. Who else has the ships and can deploy them?. Go forward 10-15 years who is starting a build up in their seapower now that will be completely in service and worked up by 2025?. You want to cover the ‘worst-case’ you go down the American route and build a dozen Nimitzes!. Not a middlin halfway-house like CdeG!.

IMHO, the idea that you should optimize your carriers for high-probability but low-importance conflicts is an example of rather muddied strategic thinking. From that perspective, a well-protected fleet carrier with fixed wing AEW and longer ranged strike aircraft is a much better insurance policy than the tactically more efficient (in terms of sortie rates) but strategically less relevant CVF.

We dont need nebulous capabilities that are ‘nice to have at any price’ the money just doesnt stretch that far. We have soldiers in combat without proper ballistic protection and vehicles scarcely fit for purpose. We need a relevant platform capable of supporting forces ashore with high-intensity, high duration, tactical airpower and to provide forward-based support infrastructure for UK Joint Helicopter Command elements. That is what we define as Carrier Strike. There is perfect clarity in purpose and design there.

IMHO, the MN’s 75 sortie target includes Hawkeyes and helos, which would leave 60-65 sorties for Rafale. With 30-32 Rafales, which I’ve shown is a reasonable upper limit in wartime, that’s 2x sorties per aircraft.

Are you certain of that?. The RN figure is quoted as tactical sorties i.e strike operations. We dont classify support operations in with the total. I didnt think the USN did either?.

The 24 Rafale figure mentioned for CdeG’s group came from an MN Captain. Nominal airgroup of 40 aircraft – 32 Rafale, 3 E-2 and choppers is as I understood it. I also understood it that the MN had had to acknowledge that the carrier would never be able to embark its maximum ‘theoretical’ airgroup as it lacked the size to safely undertake the deck reconfigurations for a group that size.

HK

Romeo/Juliette was a conventional design proposed by DCN in 2004, AFTER Chirac’s political decision in favor of conventional propulsion…..notional 55,000t conventional carrier was initially costed at 2.3B euros in 2003. Romeo/Juliette was the direct descendant of this design. However, by 2005 the cost had apparently been revised higher than CVF’s and it was ditched (i.e. >2.7B euros).

I stand corrected thankyou. I understood that the split between the two projet was propulsion – Romeo the nuclear and Juliette conventional. I see that is not the case. From what you are suggesting though little was done to progress the case of a 55k ton CVN?.

The only online source I can point you towards right now for the 29knts issue is from Richard Beedall’s site (quoted below):

Additionally, the Marine Nationale was very unhappy about the reduction in speed and subsequently sought an increase to close to the 29 knots it had originally specified for PA2. The suggested mechanism was a change from two conventional shafts to a single centre shaft plus two high output propulsion pods – a fairly significantly design change

…where he cites MOPA2 and MN sources. I do remember this being a debate from about 2006 as well though as many were disdainful of the 26knt speed for CVF until it was pointed out that a STOVL carrier has little need for real WoD!.

I smell a contradiction in your argument. CdG isn’t relevant because no one needs fleet carriers or Hawkeyes anymore, so presumably a smaller STOVL carrier is quite sufficient. But then you turn around and say that CdG is too small and modest a design, so presumably you’re arguing for a larger fleet carrier?

The presumption is faulty! :). A small STOVL carrier isnt sufficient as, even in modest intensity operations, sortie generation rate is the key metric…especially where the carrier deck may be the only source of available tactical airpower. Bottom line airgroup size matters!. You could make the case for multiple small STOVL carriers, but, we get into efficiency issues there!. Rather a larger, more austere, cheaper Strike Carrier would have been a more cost effective solution than a 3bn Euro CATOBAR Fleet Carrier with modest fleet-level performance.

On that basis, what makes CdG less relevant than CVF, and is she really too small for the low-to-medium intensity warfare you seem to expect?

Again the key metric is sortie generation rate and sustainability. I remain to be convinced that CdeG with a, say, 26 Rafale airgroup is going to get to 75 sorties per day in any sustainable sense. Even with that aircrafts impressive turn-around figures there is a serious amount of work there to generate 3 sorties per airframe, assuming all airframes serviceable, per day.

For a narrow hull with commensurate internal volume I similarly find it difficult to believe that AVCAT bunkerage, aviation spares and air-ordnance stowage can be as extensive as that we determined we’d need a 65k ton hull to accomodate in order to sustain 75 sorties per day with a larger airgroup. Even with the availability of space otherwise taken up by ships bunkerage.

As for CdG’s cost is wasn’t out of line given her being a first of class. Had 2 carriers been built, the total cost of 5b euros would be comparable to CVF UK today, despite the artificially low pound and higher specs of nuclear CTOL carriers with a high-end weapons system.

Fair comment, but, what capability has that higher spec delivered. This is my point. For the same money as we are likely to get a pair of CVF’s for – what would a pair of CdeG’s deliver?. No real speed advantage, lesser sortie rate, lower unsupported air ops sustainability offsetting the nuclear propulsion advantage. The only meaningful advantage is conferred by Hawkeye and my personal opinion there is that high endurance UAV’s will soon turn E-2 into little more than an airborne comms relay/offboard control node anyway.

I agree with your point about the CVF FR option not being signficantly cheaper than another CVN, due to the support costs. However, the acquisition costs of CVF FR were certainly cheaper, and that carried the day. Today the choice is up in the air again, and as I said many people in the MN and the French always preferred the nuclear option to CVF FR, and were willing to pay extra for it.

You are forced to query that one as well though HK. Projet Juliette was an in-house design based on the extant CdeG hull. It would be reasonable to anticipate that some design pull-through from the earlier hull could be achieved. Systems integration should have cost very little at least….then we have the real killer for carrier funding…life-cycle costs these could not be anything less than dramatically lower for the Juliette vessel over CVF-FR for the reasons we’ve agreed on. If CVF-FR was being listed as a Eu2.5bn vessel just how much was DCN expecting Juliette to come in at?.

There is no technical issue with the reactors. CVF’s speed was going to be 25kts anyway, and IMHO it’s very likely that if the CVN option is chosen the propulsion configuration will remain almost identical to CdG’s, which would still give you a speed of 26kts for a ~55,000t CVN.

Hmmm slightly misleading facts there though. 26knts wasn’t sufficient to meet the MN’s requirements for CVF-FR and they were demanding 29 for understandable reasons. The displacement uplift on CVF-FR from CVF from 65k tons to 74k tons, as acknowleged by the Ministère de la Défense, was going to drop the vessels maximum speed by about a knot and a half. I’m not sure that Springsharp is accurate enough to determine that a purposefully narrow-beamed hull like CdeG would lose only a knot with an extra 15k tons of dispalcement….that is even if the hull length to beam ratio was maintained.

I’m not sure what your point is. Are you saying that CdG is an awful carrier? Or are you saying that it’s less effective than a 55,000t+ carrier?

I’m saying that its a compromised design no more no less. You liken it elsewhere on this thread to Tornado ADV…a flawed but generally workable design. I’d agree with that save for one major issue. ADV was built as a compromise design from the outset intended to save money for us by turning an existing design into something new. Charles de Gaulle cost 3bn Euro’s and was designed for purpose from scratch.

I’m not saying that it is an awful carrier per se. It does work and its a more potent multirole platform than anything else afloat that doesnt fly the stars and stripes. In fact it will still be a better Fleet Carrier than anything non-USN after the CVF’s hit the water. Problem is that whats been needed so far and going forward isnt a Fleet Carrier. There have been no Backfire regiments for Aeronavale Hawkeyes to plot intercepts on and this state is, happily, unlikely to change for the forseeable future.

The point was made, by another poster, that he was ‘jealous’ of the CVN and its capabilities. My point was that, for the 3bn euro’s without the costs of the airgroup, the CdeG hadnt really delivered all that much of relevance and was technically a modest design at best.

The fact is that aside from the propulsion problems CdG has performed quite well within the constraints of its size

So, phrased slightly differently, apart from the fact its slow and a bit too small its done fine!. 🙂

However, I have noticed that French parliamentary reports stated even quite recently (in 2003) that CdG can carry about 32 Rafales, so that would tend to confirm that the 24 number was more fiction than fact (possibly it’s a peacetime limit). CdG’s airgroup has been slowly building up over the years (the last deployment was 12 Rafale, 16 SEM, 2 Hawkeyes plus helos, with room to spare), and IMHO we won’t see maximum sortie rates until SEMs are retired around 2015, since a one type airgroup will enable significant efficiencies in terms of sortie planning and hangar operations.

I guess the question is, regarding the last deployment, how much room there was to spare!. SEM has a significantly smaller deck footprint than Rafale, by virtue of the wingfold, plus if you wanted to keep up 24hr coverage you would be looking to embark the third Hawkeye. I wont dispute the ultimate, practical, airgroup size with you as I haven’t done the work and I’ve never seen how MN deck handlers perform. That said I think, off a quick scan, I’d be suprised to see a 30 fastjet airwing on the ship.

Swerve,

Would it be practical to install more reactors in a larger carrier, & thereby achieve the required power level to propel it faster?

I’ve read that they looked at this for the Project Romeo design and rejected it – HK seems to suggest that may have been for political reasons though?. Regardless of those considerations adding extra reactors will take up a lot of space, even in an enlarged hull, as you are adding not only the reactor vessels/shielding but the heat exchangers, turbines, gearboxes and associated plumbing. Then you have to ensure there is access for refueling etc, etc. Not impossible by any means, but, damned awkward.

CDG has some inherent design flaws IMO (I’m still jealous that our nearest neighbour has a nuclear flat top in service and a proper AEW mind)

Why are you jealous?. Its unkind on the French but if there is a good example of how NOT to do carrier acquisition CdeG has to be the finest in show!.

The got it horribly wrong from the outset. Fine and dandy that you want to have nuclear propulsion…..if you have a powerplant suitable for purpose. If you don’t then swallow the pride and buy American or forget nukes and go conventional. They did neither and tried to make modest submarine derived units do the job forcing significant design compromises to extract any kind of useable performance.

They take this option, end up with a compromised design, and force the follow-on vessel to be conventional in order to get acceptable performance. This means all the investment made in nuclear support infrastructure ashore will only ever service one ship and the MN will be obliged to step up its conventional UNREP capabilities as well to support PA2 – the one area of saving that nuclear powered boats are supposed to deliver!.

As for AEW Hawkeye is a blue water Fleet asset. Against that ASaC7 has proven extremely useful in the conflicts we have engaged in. E-2 is a great capability but yo have to ask the question as to whether it is a true value-for-money system at present in today’s threat environment.