I think you’d stand a better chance of persuading them to build a greater number of significantly cheaper ships such as you’d get by starting the MARS programme. They would be cheaper than 2 costly destroyers but would probably take longer to build thereby safeguarding more jobs.

Don’t get me wrong though, I do want more T45s.

I see what you mean but the problem with MARS is the only industry supported is that of the associated metal bashers inc. MARS can be built cheaply almost anywhere and really, while it would support UK PLC somewhat, we want the ‘stimulus’ to be spread wider than that.

Follow-on T45’s accomplish the latter as they support the tech sector as well as shipbuilding and would come, if ordered about now(ish), in time to get economy-of-scale rewards from the current build run of hulls.

BAE have already stated that the costs of the T45 builds are coming down so hulls 7 & 8 for reasonable money, keeping the work going at BAE Cowes on the radar side, keeping RR building a few more gas turbines etc and keeping countless jocks merrily bashing steel can only be considered a good thing!.

Not going to happen of course….but to my way of thinking its a pretty fair approximation of win-win!!!.

Appreciate what you are saying of course Swerve and you are, naturally, correct. I was looking at it as more of a ‘donation’ of a surplus vessel rather than an outright export.

If it where to retain some service life the chopper capability would certainly be beneficial in the expanding multinational MIOPS/Anti-piracy mission in the western IO region. Certainly be of more value there than beached at a breakers somehwere in SE Asia!.

Just an idle thought exercise anyway!.;)

Jonesy, as I said, I was here then to just show you it’s possible, with last intention to convince you to buy the story, I know your belief is based on that you should know every detail of a systematic and complicate system, which is no any individual is cable to fully understand it even he can research solely on the ASBM from detection to tracking to guiding for his whole life. However, because the scale of such a system, China is impossible to hide such a project, so there’re tons of research papers on this project only written in Chinese.

So how to different UAVs from manned planes? More detailed techniques can take care of more detailed scenarios. Those are payrolls’ job to take care of those details. At least I would bother myself into it further.

OK Good answer. What I am trying to do is illustrate the, very substantial, difficulties in undertaking even the most fundamental steps in this kind of operation.

I am not trying to say that a notional ASBM is utterly impossible. I can see a few ways in which it could be made a very, very dangerous system. Just not on the basis of the evidence indicated so far from the material thats been presented as substantiating the threat.

There are too many components missing for the all-up system to work as advertised and the components that do exist, by themselves, are either flawed or appear make little sense. Especially when there ARE systems that China could develop which WOULD make more sense in support of this kind of weapons system that seemingly little effort is being made to get into the field.

Anyway I’m happy to draw the line at that point.

So Pinko. This all distills down to the fact that you see a 150knt plus target on OTH from a cell thats 400km sq. at 1500km downrange and is shared with a 20knt surface contact?. Thats it for you then is it…..there is an aircraft carrier in that cell and you would be willing to report up your chain of command that your space assets should be requeued to that area.

At 1500km off a carrier is not launching a fighter every 5 minutes. More like a CAP pair every couple of hours and an E-2 at longer intervals. You have a contact plotted thats travelling at 20knts, rough minimum, to blend in with all the other 20knt merchie traffic.

You have a space imaging asset that might get a 40km strip depth at the resolution necessary to posID a CVN from a 100,000ton supertanker of which there are plenty in those waters. If a satellite is oriented correctly for an overhead that is. Even if a satellite is just an orbit away, say a 90 minute interval, the carrier has moved 55km and is back to being just another contact in the pack until there is another flight deck event.

That is giving you perfect operation of the OTH platform and a very dumb USN who just steam straight on in and dont take advantage of the glaring weakness of the OTH platform. That being that any air target pretty much looks like any other.

Well, I don’t get you why u want to know it’s B-2 or F-18 or E-2?

Look at the above photo and think about it!. Lets see if you can connect the dots as to the implications?.

Jonesy mate, your entire argument is based on a few foundations that may well not hold true.

The waters around China are very busy normally, but that is not necessarily going to be the case in the event of war.

A simple declaration of a military exclusion zone of 5-600km around Taiwan will sort that out pretty easily. If you are civilian and want to pass through that area, there are pre-set, 5km wide channels you can use. Deviation from those zones will result in an unholy number of AShMs coming your way without warning. Sink a couple of stubborn merchants and the rest of will fall in line neat as you please.

After that, anything outside of the civilian lanes are considered hostile and sunk on sight. See how easy it is to take a key weakness out of the equation?

‘Wolf

“Sink a couple of merchants and the rest will fall in line”

What happens if those are Japanese supertankers or South Korean car carriers…how wide do you want a conflict to spread?. Knowingly attacking non-combattants of a neutral country is called an act of war or a war crime depending on who’s view you take. You really want to have the entire Japanese and SK Navies to deal with at the same time as the US 7th Fleet?. Not smart.

Merchants dont tend to act as you seem to want to believe they do. Tanker traffic still sailed the Gulf during the Iran-Iraq War and it was deliberately targetted there!. Merchies sailed though our TEZ around the Falklands in 82 – the RAF even tried to get us to sink one telling us it was the Arg carrier!. Wishful thinking will not get around the abiding issue that the South China Sea is not an environment that is permissive to long-range antiship missile fire be it cruise, aeroballistic or ballistic in nature.

You still arent getting this Pinko and, as with last time, I’m not going to take up this thread educating you on the real world operational capabilities of OTH radar.

Suffice it to say that its quite normal, with OTH radar, to know that there is a contact with a specific doppler but not know its position beyond the rough angular and range resolution possible with the equipment as set by several well-established laws of physics with regard RF propagation.

If you have a fixed, known, point within your radars field of view, like an island, have good intel on when shipments of drugs are being prepared and get a velocity hit on a contact thats launched from that island, staying below conventional ground radar coverage, then you have a fairly good idea that the contact is a target of interest to be chased up by additional assets. How that is relevent to the China/Anti-carrier scenario I have no idea but I have an unfortunate feeling that you will try and explain it.

That is a very even handed approach TP. Seeings there is actually no substance to anything mentioned, apart from what you say about the potential existence of a suitable seeker – something I am willing to take your word on, its a sensible position.

Problem is that much of what is written focuses entirely on the technology without thought to the employment.

There is a reasonable mention of the limitations of OTH though the repeated comments of ‘algorythms’ that can get 3000yd resolutions out of the systems are fantasyland at any range beyond about 300km. There are processing techniques being written about now that allow for better bounce modelling and better wave clutter rejection but these do more for actually achieving contacts than improving resolution at theatre-entry ranges.

So the theatre search problem is by no means solved. You have contact and velocity within a couple of degrees angular resolution and 20km or so range res. passed to you by the OTH ops team. Problem is that there are a lot of contacts in the patch of water that you are trying to find an enemy carrier in.

Using OTH to cue in a targetting asset is the natural answer, but, how many contacts are you going to have to have your targetting assets interrogate and clear before one of them resolves as an aircraft carrier?. 200 perhaps 300 in the OTH coverage zone?. Team tactics will help but every link is extra latency in the engagement cycle. Latency is bad news when you want to drop an RV within seeker capture of the target.

Anyway all of this furore intimates that there is anything really new about trying to hit carrier groups with ballistic missiles. The Russians had it sorted back in the bad old days. Get a wide area fix on a contact then re-enter half a dozen high-yield MRV’s from a couple of steerable bus stages in such a pattern as to saturate the potential transit zone of the surface group. If you had your targetting solution right in the 1st place then you remove a carrier group from the board. They were using OTH, spaced-based radar and serious MarPat 3 decades back and they knew that picking out a single ship and holding it through the whole engagement cycle, however big the ship, was a mugs game – hard to see whats really changed that makes people think this is now possible!.

Well Jonesy
You ignored my point about how much land the ‘Wales’ family control…Do you know exactly how much ??
If you want to believe ‘official’ figures then dream on boy…they are at best usually misleading or more usually ‘terminological inexactitudes’.

Not so much ignored Baz as acknowledged but didnt see it as relevent to the bottom line. However much the royal estates bring in that money goes to the Treasury…unless you want to get into conspiracy theories about money squirreled away into offshore accounts etc.

For the money they get it seems they are obliged to have their lives lived in a goldfish bowl and every personal conversation, even amongst old and dear friends, subject to the court of public opinion and the scorn of the chattering classes. You know what, to live my life like that, I’d want more than £12mn!.