In its current guise, Top Gear, a Bafta and Emmy award- winning series, is being shown in the US on the Discovery Channel. The programme is estimated to have more than 350 million viewers worldwide, including eight million in the UK.

Formulaic and tired? – perhaps.
Successful? – beyond any shadow of doubt!.

Another one to file under genuinely interesting. Thankyou for that number crunching, I had honestly not looked at the situation that way.

Quite welcome.

I still think that NATO skimmers should have man-sized fish (with the added advantage that the tubes can be used to deploy Cruise Missiles and AShMs leaving the VLS for SAMs and giving a nice uncluttered groundplane up top) but you have shot a big hole in my assumptions.

The beauty of VLS is that you dont need to touch it very much when you are underway. 21″ fish, and similar cannisters intended to be fired through the same tubes, are remarkably awkward things to shunt around a ship. The tubes/launchers bring in a fair amount of ship impact as well. The Russian Neustrashimy’s have a fairly tidy setup in this regard but its still a significant installation and, you wonder, if the ASW Klub round had been mature and available when the ship was designed whether they would have kept the angled torpedo launchers?.

* I hope against hope that AEW is not going to disappear again only to be replaced when its lack is shown to be so dangerous

I think we stand on the brink of a considerable revolution in naval battlespace coverage and that is the move to long endurance offboard sensors. Now we are all fighting the littoral fight UAV, USV and UUV’s, even at the modest capability levels available today, become significant value platforms. US programmes in USV/UUV ASW as linked to LCS are case in point. The other relates to what you state about AEW/ISTAR.

Above is the A-160T UAV (seen here trialling the DARPA Forester overland tactical radar system). This is a high endurance, 12hrs+ on-station, platform with decent onboard power generation capabilities. Its value in providing persistent look-down radar coverage to an extended fleet assembly area is obvious. It is also the kind of platform that could be deployed from an LPD, escort or even an auxilliary attached to even the most modest of ARG’s.

Coupled to CEC/SM-6 shooting capability in the escort force you could envisage shooting sea-skimming inbounds 50 miles or more over the horizon from the group – without need of a specialist aviation ship. IMO this kind of distributed and scaled/interlocking AEW/ISTAR – starting at the Firescout/A-160 level, through MALE/HALE UAV platforms to the peak at Hawkeye-level for Fleet/bluewater ops – is achievable and very much the way forward.

If TG has to have a female presenter I cannot think of anyone better off the top of my head. She knows what she’s talking about and her looks do her no harm either.

Problem there is that she left under a cloud when her, Tiff Needell and a couple of others split off to form Channel 5’s woeful 5th Gear. Bringing anyone in that changes the mix in the presenting team of TG would be hugely destructive though – they have achieved a very good balance in personalities with the three lads they have and it would be disappointing to see that sacrificed on the altar of political correctness. Especially when those of a PC bent would be the last people ever to watch an episode of the show!.

IMHO the first piece they did on ‘amphibious cars’ was a classic of BBC television on par with the Fawlty Towers Cleese/Austin/branch scene or the Only Fools and Horses episode where Del Boy falls through the bar. I still cannot watch Clarkson and Hammond waiting by a GATSO to get in shot on someones speeding ticket without tears of laughter forming.

The success of the show, and its format, is manifest. Hopefully someone knows the old adage ‘if it aint broke…………….’!.

It was a rhetorical question 😉

I was highlighting the way articles such as this start by leading you into thinking one thing but then trickle out the real facts later in the story which show how they exaggerate. But you’d spotted that hadn’t you?

The problem is that it is not just mothers who cannot cook meals from scratch. Amongst the young people I’ve met, those who cook nice food from raw ingredients are regarded as unusual. Fortunately they are held up for praise rather than ridicule but where will their children’s future lie?

Glad someone else spotted the ‘non-sensational’ little details like….feeding the babies proper baby-food and just giving them bits of her fast food. From personal experience I can tell you, as a father of a 9month old and a 23 month old, that a baby’s favourite food is what is on your plate not in their bowls!. The nearly-2yr old has a liking for chicken nuggets and has had the odd happy meal as a treat when we’ve been out. She has, shock horror, even shared the odd chip with her little sister.

With all the guidance coming from the government-which-shall-be-obeyed, as to what is safe and appropriate to feed infants, preparing food from scratch for them is far from easy. Balancing salt, fat and vitamin content can drive you crazy – we do it!. Even the relatively balanced diet we eat is not necessarily going to provide everything stipulated that babies need. Giving them the nuritionally balanced, regulated, meals that the prepared ‘jar’ foods provide is a good safety net for those occaisions when you dont think they’ll benefit from the bangars and mash that mummy and daddy are going to have that evening!.

I also love the derogatory comments about piles of washing ‘strewn’ about the house. Children, especially small and in the plural, generate lots of washing. My wife works her tail off looking after our two and we still get piles of washing that await whichever of us gets to the ironing detail first.

Lots of righteous fury from a gutter rag that is far from having the moral high ground for its pontification.

Here’s some more trivia for a Sunday morning. If your house was on fire,obviously you’ld save kids,pets,maybe even the wife/husband first.But what one inanimate object would you take too ?By the way,you’re Superman/woman,so you can carry an entire CD collection if you have to .

Thought this was going to be some reference to Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy! 🙂

What inanimate object would I save?. The filing cabinet – its where the home and contents insurance docs live! 😀

Well, the all Gtu plant helped. The propulsion machinery is very quiet. The whole engine installations are insulated against the own noise and that promotes the ASUW and the operation of the sonar installations. Also, IIRC they had the PRAIRIE-MASKER hull and propeller bubbler systems installed to enhance their quietness.

The Spruance class as was commissioned between 1975 and 1983. It was the first U.S. ship class to use gas-turbine propulsion and advanced self-noise reduction technology and a high degree of automation. By contrast, the first Type 23 was commissioned in 1989 and preceeded by at least 2 classes of Gtu powered ships! Thus unfair to compare to the much later Type 23.

The later Arleigh Burke destroyers are powered by the same drive train as the Ticonderoga cruisers and Spruance destroyers, namely four General Electric LM 2500 gas turbine engines (LM 2500-30 gas turbine engines in the case of the Flight IIA ships). Propulsion is provided by two shafts with variable pitch screws. They too have the PRAIRIE-MASKER system.

Indeed Wan I was not attempting to compare a Spruance with a T23 and wouldnt do such a thing. The point I was making was that a ‘big GT propelled destroyer’ could not compare with something modern and discrete (in today’s terms). That was the reason for the comment that in ASW terms an Arleigh Burke was not a great platform for todays littoral ASW battlespace as its a fairly sizeable accoustic target.

The comment is meant as no criticism, Arleigh Burke is a blue-water hull – the USN know this and is the reason for LCS, simply that if you were in someone elses littoral facing an SSK threat you would choose to be on something more like a Duke than a Burke given the opportunity!.

While I do think that the Type 23 is more silent than the Spruance (or at the very least, has more silencing measures in place), I don’t quite understand how length of the array is supposed to correlate with platform discreetness? As I understand the Type 2031 is more than twice the length of TACTAS, which, along with the excellent silencing of the Type 23, gave it its outstanding performance.

Sorry YF that was intended as a tongue-in-cheek response and not serious. Obviously there are many parameters that dictate the length of a towed array and ownship noise only being one factor.

The RN’s NEST project is down to give AEHF to the CVS’s and two SGS’s.

Skynet 5 is more capable than you are assuming. There are IIRC 8 20Mhz channels plus a couple more 36Mhz bandwidth and a couple more at 40Mhz. Those are not there for a couple of fiddling little kbps range circuits. They have other narrowband channels configured for that.