Sorry I didn’t mean Harpoon, current thinking seems to be that the role filled by Tomahawk on the SSNs should also be returned to the Frigates (and if the T45 upgrade package hadn’t been cancelled, to them as well).

Aah understand. Land attack, beyond NGS, would be a new capability set for RN frigates. It would require something of a shift in thinking as to what a LAM’s role in the RN actually is as well. At present TLAM is with the SSN’s for a reason. Its a coercion tool more than a way of delivering sustained effects…we dont have enough TLAM for the latter anyway.

Coercion is possible from SSN’s in a way that just isnt possible from a surface unit. This is, obviously, because its very hard for a potential adversary to know where our SSN’s actually are at any one time. An SSN with a dozen TLAM is actually therefore an ability to hold at-risk a high-value opposition target set almost at whim. With a move to surface ship deployment we shift that into a real warfighting role and we now need to look at a volume fire situation. Plus we need to look at the whole aspect of strike planning and C3I where we to deploy LAM’s in the escort fleet. The actual purchase of the VLS and the missiles would be the easy bit!.

And by parts of PAAMs, I meant the VLS system that C1 will need. It’ll need them to launch the FLAM and CAMM if it is quadpacked inside. This will cost money, not as much as PAAMs, but still a proportion of it, just without the radar system etc.

The cost in PAAMS is in the radar/missile development and integration. The Sylver VLS is an empty metal box by comparison and reasonably inexpensive compared to the system as a whole.

There won’t be enough C2’s to perform all those jobs and too many C1’s not to have them doing anything except escorting carriers. They’ll end up doing grunt work like every other escort in the fleet. And as a side note, the Sierra Leone stops usually occur to and from deployments to the Falklands patrols. They are a suitable task for C1.

There’s not going to be enough C1’s or T45’s to do much more than put an escort on the duty carrier and another on the available ARG, plus cover training and refit. The whole point of C2 is to come up with a ship capable of long-duration deployment in trouble spots, to fulfill the old gunboat diplomacy role, so we dont need to send a T45 or C1.

So you’re saying that if we use a T45 hull NO redesign whatsoever will be needed? No need to remove the tower used to mount the T45’s extra radar, no need for torpedo tubes, no need to alter the area and depth of where the VLS’s will go, no need to make some accommodation for TAS except to bolt it to the back and run the cables across the flight deck?

I’m saying that the replacement of the foremast with one that is more suited to Artisan than Sampson and the modification to the stern to house/stream a 2087 sonar body is not going to be anywhere close to the cost of a new build design.

STWS provision, sharing off the air ordnance magazine, has been incorporated into the current T45 its just not being fitted as yet. The VLS fit on T45 already has margin for strike length VLS cells and, if CAMM is indeed quad-packable, even the existing 48 cell arrangement will provide a home for 64 SAM’s and 32 LAM’s….do you think we could afford to put more missiles onto a boat than that!.

It’s not correct to take the costs for T45, exclude it’s specialist systems costs and then ignore the specialist systems being added to the new ships. I’m sure a larger build run will drive down costs, but not by anything over £100mn at best. Looking at the Type 23’s costs will tell you that even with a long run by British standards, costs don’t decrease by a large percentage.

That would be true if the specialist systems had to be bought in. Fact is they are already paid for in most cases. Artisan will come across, GWS60 will come across, the medium calibre gun may come across, the towed sonar will come across. The only real, significant, cost item will be the systems integration so, yes, accepting there will be a modest redesign cost and a programme fee for the integration work it still means that the C1 would still be deliverable for, largely, build cost based on the listed figures.

Look again at the cost differential between an early T23 and one built after 2000. You are looking at a price drawdown averaging 30%!. BAE tout it as one of their great success stories!. In the case of a T45-based C1 the great news is that the expensive hulls are already built – thats the T45’s themselves. Anything else we build on the same, basic, hull is automatically getting the design component for pennies comparative to a new hull…even if that alternate hull is smaller, more austere and ‘cheaper’ and the same logic extends to C2.

I’ve no axe to grind here, btw, I want to see higher hull no’s of a stretched, Khareef-based, C3 design for C2 plus a really serious 9k ton-ish DDH T45 variant for C1 but, failing that, not getting the most value possible off such an inherently ‘right’ hull design as the T45’s is lunacy!.

I suppose it was the only justice they had? So are we now saying he had nothing to do with the bombing? So it was an injustice? I do not know the ins and outs of the case, but would like to think that he had something to do with it if he was found guilty.

….and thats the problem. He may have had some involvement, but, the UK families of the victims of the bombing are of the opinion that he was not the person directly responsible for ordering or committing the act. Their view is he was so disconnected from the real perpetrators of the attack as to make his jailing an irrelevence. They certainly feel no justice from his incarceration.

As stated the unfortunate thing is that, since Megrahi was offered up as a sacrificial stooge, the real people who needed to be brought to book have escaped punishment. That is injustice in my book….not the release of a man to the joys presented by the reality of a few remaining months filled with pain and offering only death at the end of it.

Rocketeer,

You say: “I am not happy about the Lockerbie bomber being released, he was the only person that could be brought to justice and now he has been released”

What does it mean then if this Libyan wasn’t involved in a significant way in the attrocity….is that still justice for those who died in the bombing or is it a pitiful attempt to seek vengeance on someone, anyone, who could be made to pay a price?.

Jonesy, I assumed they’d thought about addition of an SSGW to T45, it was supposed to be part of the upgrade package that got scrapped.

GWS60 is really only an additional equipment rack and is integrated into the T45’s combat system IIRC – I’ll check up on that.

However, as I said, part of the PAAMs cost wil be needed as the VLS launchers are a part of that, and we’ll need more for C1 than T45 and possibly 2 different types. We will also need to purchase a new SSGW (Tactoms/SCALP-N) for use in them since the only ones we have are of the sub launched variety and they won’t want to split a stock among 10-12 new ships.

Why do we need a new SSGW we have plenty of Harpoons to port over from the T22B3’s and the Dukes?. Adding in Sylver launchers does not entail bringing across any element of PAAMS(S) its just adding a VLS. The publicised documentation suggests that CAMM will need no more cueing than VLMICA does and that an Artisan 3D set, i.e a fairly standard TI-capable mechanical rotator/electronic elevation unit, would suffice for the task.

There will obviously be a cost associated with the development of CAMMS but that seems to be a seperate issue with the intent for CAMMs to replace GWS26 on the Dukes before it ports across to C1/C2. There should, therefore, be no PAAMS-hangover for C1.

I know some costs will be avoided as CAMM/radars/TAS will be reused but I still think that £400mn is too low. Going by the numbers in #603, it would be £520mn just to build a T45 with no redesign or addition or any extra equipment on top of the basic T45 fit (excluding PAAMS). Some of those costs are liekly to go down, but others need to be factored in. C1 is going to be the workhorse of the fleet, the jack of all trades by necessity, so it is only fair to assume that it will come in at under half the cost of a T45, even with its fancy radars.

Not so. C2 and C3 are going to be the workhorses – these will be the ships that are always deployed. T45’s and C1’s will be the glory hulls doing the multinational exercises and task force deployments with the duty big flat-top. That being entirely appropriate as well. Why would you want to dull your fleet warfighting edge doing runs ashore in Sierra Leone having the ships company build toilet blocks for orphaned Orang Utans!.

The figure of £520mn also includes a value for design costs. These are now paid. Subtracting them and you get down to, by that lists figures, £440mn. THEN, again, you remember that those values are across a 6 hull run – triple that hull run and see how far down the ‘combat mission systems’ value and ‘management’ value per hull come down. You would be confident, by those figures and with a long build-run, of seeing a low-mid 300mn’s unit price for a minimum-change T45 based C1.

Classic case of cherry picking on display here Bubbles old boy.

You’ve stated that Megrahi was convicted of the murder of the Lockerbie victims and thats final. This is deliberately ignoring the protests of the UK victims families that the trial was a sham, that Megrahi was not the man directly responsible for the attrocity and that they couldn’t care a whit whether he was in jail or not.

Yet you ignore the fact that it is established legal practice in Scotland for a prisoner to be granted early release on grounds of imminent bucket kicking.

If you want to cite the set of laws that gave you the, at best debatable, conviction of the man you cant whine at him being granted his release, under a specific set of well established criteria, based on those same laws.

The real travesty here is the dropping of the appeal. You can accept the view that the man may not have actually lived through to the end of it, but, the ability to cross-check and verify the details provided by CIA etc at the original trial would likely have been instructive. The US families are up in arms now Megrahi has been released to die?. Imagine how much farther stoked up they’d be if they found out that the evidence against the man was as unsafe as the UK families claim it is and they didn’t, in fact, get any justice whatsoever!.

The T45 hull is expensive, unfortunately, because I think it’s very good. If C1 costs are to be kept down, it may be too expensive, making a smaller, cheaper hull* necessary. Then, it makes sense to also use that hull for C2. Published articles suggest RN thinking is on the lines of a common hull of maybe 6000 tons. That should be big enough for both.

I’m not so sure on the point that the T45 hull is all that expensive when you look in terms of whole-life cost…which is the key criteria used for budgetary purposes. The range/fuel-burn charateristics of the hull contrasted against the earlier, smaller, COGAG DDG’s are well publicised and the ease of maintenance of the IEP system is similarly well documented.

Upfront costs of the T45 hull minus the R&D and Sea Viper costs are in the £370-400mn bracket which, it must be remembered, is just the price for 6 hulls. Push that out with a 1.5 hull-per-year long term order for 18 ASW/GP variants to cover C1/C2 and, just as happened with T23, you are going to see that build cost drop significantly. Average around £300mn per unit for an economical, roomy hull with single-design supportability benefits across the escort fleet?. How much better are you going to do than that one wonders?.

You’d still have to place a lot of responsibility on the C3’s for routine oceanic patrol taskings as even 8-9 C2’s, by the nature of the tasking, isnt going to cover many slots. That equally likely to be the case with a 6k combattant-based hull or a 7k one.

Doc

The Britsh Armoured Carriers proved themselves during WW2 may surviving attacks that would sunk their US counterparts.

I am at a slight loss here as to what point you are reaching for?. Certainly the armour helped minimise damage in WW2, but, there is little comparison between the complexity of flight deck operations then and now.

SOC is perfectly accurate with what he stated earlier about a large ‘cluster munition’ warhead being a perfect anticarrier/antiship weapon. My choice would be something bussing out a slightly smaller number of Viper Strike type munitions programmed to go for sensor masts, deck parks, lifts, ammunition hoists, fueling pits, catapult tracks etc. The carrier hull is very tough but the components that it carries most definitely are not. Degrade enough of those key points and a carrier is out of the air operations business and no amount of armouring would be able to passive-protect all of those components.

Edit: 25 de Mayo was tracked in the end, by Spartan IIRC, but after she had turned for home and was observed departing the operational area. There was a political decision, after the idiocy that the Belgrano sinking had brought out at home, that sinking the carrier might not be considered ‘playing nicely’ so the order to fire on the vessel was never given.