Wan,

I’ve stood inside the Schleswig-Holstein’s hangar. Was a decent sized hangar ok and the number of bikes they could fit up on a bulkhead was impressive, but, two Sea Kings would not be a sensible fit in the space. I have a recollection of thinking that it might be a bit tight with a couple of Lynxes in there?!.

Likewise I thought the twin Sea King capability on the Indian Brahmaputra’s was largely theoretical and that in practice it was one Sea King and an Alouette?.

Still I did say I couldnt think of a frigate that could embark two Sea Kings and the Indian ships can obviously do that to some extent. I stand corrected.:)

The conversion or rebuild or whatever you want to call Russia’s reconstruction of the ex-Gorshkov for India. Is far less complex than to design something from scratch like the F-35………..

Problem is Scoots that as a comparison it doesnt make much sense to be able to make comment either way?. Its like saying ‘I can design a 300m suspension bridge so I must be capable of performing open heart surgery’. The disciplines are so different as to make no sense in the comparison.

Certainly designing an aircraft from scratch is difficult, but, you will have modelling and areodynamic data from your aircraft industry from previous projects yadda, yadda. For the ship you are dealing with a hull that you have no specs on, that has seen service and then been laid up, for a decade, with inadequate maintenance that you have set inadequate time and budget constraints on yourself by agreeing to an unrealistic schedule of works with the client. In otherwords you dont know what you’ve got to work with, how it should look in the first place and your facing an undeliverable deadline from day 1.

Of the two projects I’d say the aircraft would be the easier one despite the greater technical challenge.

Which, give Russia virtually no room to cry foul now. Sorry, Russia negotiate large and complex Military Project all the time. If, they spend 8 years and are so off base not even to be on the same planet. Well, they royally screw up didn’t they!:eek:

The Russian yard has no room to cry foul and they’ve admitted their error in the form of the dismissal of the management team involved. I do have some sympathy with them, to be honest, as they are not the first yard, and definitely wont be the last, who’ve underbid to try and get work gambling that landing one big job will lead to others. Shame of it for them was it wouldve worked IF they’d done the prelim work on Gorshkov properly and realised how long the carrier was going to tie thier facilities up for.

So, if Pascagoula, MS along with Bath Irons Works seceded from the Union. (United States) The US couldn’t take a Aegis Destroyer to another yard and rebuild it……….Sorry, with all do respect that argument doesn’t hold alot of water. (no pun intended) That said, clearly Russian has lost much time and experience in shipbuilding. With that point I agree. Yet, I think you forgot the whole point I was making in the orignial post. That comparing the reconstruction of the ex-Gorshkov with the F-35 was hardly a equal undertaking………..

To be honest Scooter as bizarre as it sounds Lawrence has this right.

The Russians agreed to do the conversion work on Gorshkov without being in possession of the engineering blueprints from the original builders. Without those plans identifying all systems and structures impacted by the conversion would have to be done by manual inspection. On a ship this size – big job!.

It would have been easier and quite possibly cheaper to build a new hull from scratch rather than go through the pain of gutting this ship and putting the conversion in. The huge issue here is going to be sea trials and I’m hoping that the Indians put a running commentry somewhere in the public domain!.

Jonesy, why in the hell would Iran want to eliminate US cities with nuclear weapons? Or the opposite.

On the other hand, the US should stay the hell out of Iran, and Iran should probably have ICBMs to PREVENT an invasion. That sounds perfectly legit to me.

You’ll forgive me if I point out that you have answered your own question?. Or was that the point?.

It does beg the question of why Iranian missile ranges are increasing if, in your words, they wouldnt want to eliminate US cities?.

You manage to contradict yourself very quickly here by suggesting that Iran might want the ability to eliminate US cities as a deterrent to the US attacking Iran.

The anecdotal evidence certainly supports the conclusion. ICBM’s are unnecessary for stopping US invasion forces directly and an Iranian counterforce attack is pointless as American missiles would be unlikely to be pointed at Iran. Especially if GBI made the targetting of US ICBM’s absolutely unnecessary.

Bottom line Iran developing ICBM capability does represent a threat to the US or th Iranians wouldnt be bothering with it. If the Americans have a defensive measure that can passively challenge any Iranian ICBM without to need to resort to pre-emptively going in to resolve the situation so much the better.

Looks like you are following your own arguments not closely enough. Your point about US president not surviving launching a nuclear strike on civilian targets was used as an argument as to why the US missiles cannot be misused. This is in my eyes a very weak point of you argumentation. And that is why it’s clear that the original premise still stands and was not changed.

How am I having problems?. All you did in that paragraph was tell me what I said and then stated you believed it weak – without a shred of justification for your comment?. I repeat the fact that you have suggested an Iranian President would be as put off by the likely reaction of his electorate, to launching of nuclear missiles, as the American one would. You have followed that up by clearly stating that the Iranian population is far more heavily controlled than the US populace is. The two comments are absolutely in contradiction?.

And here we come to the very core of the problem about why UN is necessary and why its mandate needs to be higher than a mandate of any respective country. If you got two countries bickering over a piece of dirt (take no offense, please), then you need a judge with higher approval.

Absolutely no offense taken. By your account, International Law should’ve been enough to prevent Argentina from walking into the Falklands all by itself?. Oh, it didnt, hmmm. Maybe that means International Law is a fantasy conveniently ignored by any nation who sees it in contradiction of their goals.

If you find this system as absurd, then you basically condemn the whole British legal system, as well. Law is above you and you can bicker until your last days, nobody cares.

Of course the law is absurd – because its not absolute. As with ‘international law’ it only applies to those who have no recourse other than to accept its dictates. Those with the resources and skills to defeat and circumvent ‘the law’ laugh at it as the joke it is. Its a better system than any alternative anyone else has come up with but to hold it up as a shiny white light of the everlasting truth is naievete of the highest order.

You are getting more and more absurd.. You have no mandate to pursue your interests outsde of your borders.

Of course we do. UK Parliament has the paramount authority over the course of UK policy. IF UK policy, passed by Parliament, is to go and paint all the houses in Andorra purple then our personnel are acting within the bounds of their legitimate chain of command when they go and do it. The UN can issue resolutions telling us to stop and generate a mandate for an intervention to make us stop. What they cannot do is exercise ANY authority telling our personnel to cease their actions. National authority supercedes international the world over and it will never be otherwise.

But if he starts talking about having any ‘rights’ to pursue his interest and begins moving furniture, talk in to what my girlfriend should wear or how much should I spend on my hobbies, then he gets smashed out thru a closed door. International law is no different, the sooner you grasp that, the better.

That analogy doesnt work in context though. You would be obviously within your rights to choose a window for me to leave by. The true analogy would be whether I have to listen to your neighbour, stood outside, telling me to stop. I am not obliged to follow his instructions unless I so wish to. If I suspect that his motivations are simply that he wants me to stop interfering with your furniture just because you bought it off him and haven’t paid for it yet I might not be too bothered about listening to him!.

Irrelevant to whom. ICBMs provide enough flexibility to be a threat to anyone. Iranians have right to develop whatever missiles they see fit and they do not need to ask you about that. They are not obliged to explain you why they need more range than just to Israel…

Still trying to wriggle out of this one?. Its the old ‘they dont have to justify themselves to you’ dodge now is it. Hackeyed and tired that one Flex. Expected better from you. Of course they dont have to explain it. The missile range is being developed to threaten W.Europe and the US. The GBI’s in Poland are being sited to mitigate that threat. Seeings as you offer no cogent rebuttal of any kind anymore can we settle this one now that the US has a legitimate cause for the interceptor missiles in Poland?.

As I said, that is an internal Iranian matter. I don’t care why..

Or care to know why either it would seem?.

Yes and I stick to my contention about states continuing development of missile ranges beyond the range of the target set. Those who want ICBMs often have no explicit targets set, they need to have as great flexibility as it gets. You can call it absurd as much as you want.

Cool – its absurd!. Those who want ICBM’s do so to meet a threat. India has a legitimate reason to pursue ICBM tech. China is big, has ICBM’s of her own and is a strategic competitor. China, as nascent-superpower, has much the same situation to its north with Russia across the Pac with the US and the ‘developing’ threat with India.

North Korea needs missiles able to hit Japan and South Korea to eliminate US force entry and escalation. It only needs ICBM’s to kill US cities as N.K will never be likely to have enough launchers and warheads for counterforce. Iran fits the same category. The ONLY value in Iranian ICBM’s is to threaten to kill cities. If the Americans have a way to mitigate that risk, that doesnt present the President with an impossible decision, its deployment is only common sense.

The software side of this problem is protocol related I always believed. I’ve never seen it on aircraft systems but it is something I have seen with TDL’s.

The MIL spec dictates electrical connectivity, i.e the size and shape of a common jack, and digital compatibility i.e the transition of signal in the wire from -5V to 0V is taken as one state change or a ‘bit’….8 in sequence equalling a byte of data. At least that is my understanding of what the Spec’s cover.

What I dont think it determines is a set communication protocol to be employed over that universal connection?. With different weapons requiring different levels of communication with the systems on board the carrying aircraft that only seems logical. Why face the need to put in a ton of data encapsulation, framing checksums and all the rest when your IR missile just needs to instruct the weapons processor to display lock-on symbology on the HUD?.

Likewise if you are getting realtime imagery from a PGM and need to take the utmost care with the weapon hitting point of aim you really want a robust protocol with lots of retransmit resilience and error-checking on the datastream to prevent the image suddenly seizing up and your missile inadvertently hitting the orphanage that always seems to be sat next to the terrorist club house.

Getting these protocols to talk together, if the weapons are developed in isolation of each other, can be extremely difficult. Even if differing algorythms do the same job they can sometimes just refuse to talk or, and this is a common one, get into whats called a race-condition. This is where two devices basically both shout completely different types of messages at each other each believing they are doing the right thing. These can be a nightmare to diagnose as error-checking software will often not flag up any errors owing to each device claiming its blameless!.

The simple analogy is that I call someone, by phone, in Russia. The communication channel may be perfectly operational as the phone systems operate on common technology, but, if I only speak English and the other end only speaks Russian the interaction will fail.

The time it takes to test, analyse and resolve issues in data transfer and protocol translation like this can be unreal and you do need some pretty good kit to help with the work. You also need some pretty good people to do the work and I think I’m right in saying its still considered a fairly ‘dark art’ so finding the people who can do the work competently can be a challenge. All adds up to an expensive process.

Much as I am enjoying the direction Wan has taken this and now have an interesting new present idea for the wife this christmas I think there is a vast under appreciation of the value of the DDH here.

Far from ‘worthless’ the ability to operate a 3 chopper airgroup gives this one vessel the very important capability to set a permanent air patrol slot for the duration of embarked aviation stores and aircrew. For MIOPS, force protection, ASuW, SAR and numerous other missions that ability is extremely valuable for the obvious reasons. For ASW the 3 chopper airgroup also allows for the dispatch of a hunting pair with persistence to back it up off the third airframe throughout a protracted prosecution.

What you end up with, with the DDH, is a vessel that offers much greater flexibility and an expanded sphere of influence over a conventional escort and be cheaper, adding the ability to self-escort, over a through-deck CVH.

Looking at the Shiranes, and my deepest appreciations to Wanshan for giving me good reason to do that again, you have to be impressed as to the packaging job they pulled off with that ship. So much so that it may well be the optimum hull/superstructure design for the airgroup embarked at those dimensions/displacement characteristics. Certainly if I wanted a monohull DDH I dont think I’d try and reinvent the wheel too much.

The same basic hull form. Dual WR21 prime movers with aux diesel gensets feeding an IEP propulsion setup. Primary air/surface search would be something like a Thales Herakles, with a full EO suite backing it up. SONAR2087 towed array plus handling for a pair of Thales Spartan ASW USV’s for the subsurface sensor fit.

Weapons would be in line with the sensor fit and largely European in nature the way I would want this as a general export hull. ‘A’ mount replaced with a new OTO 127mm LW. ‘B’ position and the ASROC deleted in favour of a raised deckhouse for 48 Aster 70 tubes. VL MICA, Aster and SCALP-N carried as appropriate. I’d have inclined launchers for MILAS between the deckhouse and bridge superstructure to round out the capability. For a service using US systems predominatly these, as well as the principle above-water sensors, would naturally change. APAR at masthead. 64 cell Mk41 for ESSM, SM2, VLA and TLAM as dictated by mission profile. Airgroup, by choice, would be 3 NH90 NFH’s with FLASH pinger mounted. MU90/Stingray LWTs and NSM in the air ordnance magazine.

Anyway you cut it that would be a very flexible and powerful unit. As I am developing it mentally this would seem to be an ideal unit for the Indian Navy as centrepiece/leader for a group of ASW corvettes on SSK hunting duties, as a carrier group component with two or three of these hulls forming the outer ASW screen or even as a standalone patrol unit for actions in higher potential threat waters.

If you were building Shirane today to the same rough length and displacement you would have to look very long and hard at how the US progress with LCS-2. That kind of trimaran layout simply offers so much potential as an aviation platform you could not ignore it if time was with you to evaluate how mature the technology actually is.

You misunderstood. My contention was that the danger of misuse of Iranian missiles for purposes of a group of local radicals is roughly comparable to the danger of misuse of American missiles for purposes of local US radicals. Of course, each group might do it in a different way but the outcome is the sme. I repeat, this has nothing to do with political system of private liberties of average Joe in either country.

So now you are changing the premise of what was said. The point originally made was that a US President wouldn’t survive launching a nuclear strike on civillian targets. You suggested that an Iranian President would likewise not survive such an act the other way round. I made the point that its much easier, given the nature of Iranian society, for the Iranian to get away with it than the American. The previous post you made referring to the Pasdar would seem to support that assessment. I follow current affairs fairly solidly and I havent yet seen the Iranian news pieces condemning Ahmedinejads’ stance?.

An absolutely invalid argument and comparison. Falklands were British territory in 1982. Iraq in 2003 was not.

Ahh but ask an Argentine whether the Islands really were British and you get a different answer and, if you stand in Buenos Aires and say that, probably, a smack in the teeth!. Just because you dont share their perspective does it make their perspective invalid?.

BTW, nobody gives damn about your national interests. You claim Britain as sovereign state while completely disrespecting sovereignity of others at the same time. Only an arrogant fool can think he can talk about having any ‘rights’ to take whatever action on foreign soil.

Idiocy. You have already stated that only international consensus can underwrite a state taking international action, in your view, yet you have agreed that the forum for the derivation of that consensus is effectively useless. Your point is elusive and your words meaningless. What you are saying is that no state has the right to do anything. An utter absurdity!.

This load of trash belongs to middle-ages. Sorry to inform you, but your obsolete thinking is at least 200 years behind schedule. The world is not your colony and does not give rat’s fart about what you believe is necessary. Your ‘rights’ to pursue your own interests by force outside of your borders are zero.

What makes you think there is any alternative?. The UN is suddenly going to sit hand in hand round the chamber singing songs of peace and unity are they?. Tell you what Flex when that happens I will stand in the middle of any square, plaza or street on this planet you name and declare that I’m living 200 years in the past. That offer extends to the end of my life as well and I’m mid 30’s now.

You are talking nonsense… UK parliament only has the highest mandate on UK territory. Nowhere else. Outside of your own borders you are nothing more but a guest – so behave like one.

The UK has the mandate to direct its forces, its diplomatic or economic efforts as it sees fit. No different to anyone else. That mandate takes precedent over any outside organisations mandate to cease. In the Falklands example the UN could have issued a mandate for us to cease our military actions to recover. It would have been ignored. The UN could then act to censure us as result, but, the ‘international mandate’ would be just so much meaningless paper in terms of the military action.

This is the same what I stated, only using different words. I said that the most evident reason for Iran trying to possess ICBMs is deterrence. That of course means to present a threat – big enough to scare off potential enemies. Where’s the difference?

A THREAT TO WHO THOUGH!!!!!. Think about it man you have just stated that the ICBM’s would be developed to threaten. The one country that Iran would need an ICBM developed to threaten has the ability to reduce that threat with BMD. Why therefore is it imprudent for that nation to deploy it?.

Every sane person who spends 20 minutes studying Iranian political system can safely be assured about Ahmadinejad’s impotence regarding military.

So you can answer the question of why Ahmedinejad is allowed to make the press claims he has then?.

With this style of thinking, you can start building GBI sites against Iran, Korea, and another 25 states. Good luck paying that.

Iran is being achieved with the Polish site that is being discussed here. Nice to know after all these posts you finally accept that!. Korean missiles are covered IIRC I dont know who else is actually trying to develop full ICBM capability?. Pakistan has its local threat and is content to address that. India has nuclear capable states east and west and is more than justified in its approach to ICBM development. Likewise China. The other 22 states you indicate seem a little bit of a stretch to imagine, but, I’m sure you’ll illustrate further.

You are getting off reality. We are talking about potential ICBM exchange between Iran vs USA, so what Russian ASAT are you babbling about? Those subs wouldn’t even need to be submerged, what means would Iran have to attack them, anyway?

No we are discussing the absurd contention of yours that states continue developing missile ranges beyond the range of the target sets they were developed to service. Then you went off on the tangent of SLBM’s in ignorance of the roles of SLBM’s. THEN you went off to bring GPS into the equation…which is were Russian ASAT comes in…we were discussing the range issue here and trying to get you to substantiate your absurd position on the development of missile ranges in isolation of target set. This is apparently something else you are trying to squirm out of?.