JonesyWe know the Khareef Class cost 400million for 3 ships call it 135 million each but what do you expect when you take a all new design and weapons fit and only build 3 of them if you build 8 or 10 of them the cost should starts to come down.
Two points come to mind immediately:
1) Khareef was a design evolved from BAE’s 90m OPV (itself an evolution of the River class). Khareef had as much design maturity when the Omani’s signed up for it as the Fassmer90 does right now.
2) Volume build savings are mainly twofold…first is a bit of smoke and mirrors really and involves the spreading of development costs…see onerous costs of T45 when UKPAAMS dev costs etc are hung on it for an example. 8 isnt a really great number to divide, perhaps, a hundred million or so by…and you’re adding development costs with every additional complex weapon/sensor you add. The second factor is production economies. When a supplier can see a long class build-run in the offing they can optimise their supply, production and development processes with confidence…the efficiencies here can generate savings that can be passed on. 8 modest hulls wouldnt amount to a huge build run and, therefore, the volume savings wont be as dramatic as you might hope.
I feel the Fassmer 90 is a much more flexible design with its heli pad and rescue deck layout also the OPV 90 has much of the 80�s design as said Fassmer 80 costs $38mn I just feel if you can�t build the 90 for �60mn which works out to be $90mn its a poor show
Well, we’ll leave aside the point that Khareef was what you get when you put frigate sensors and weapons on a 90m OPV, and assume that your modifications to the Fassmer hull are feasible. Look at where the Fassmer80’s were built in order to realise that $38mn figure. I’m afraid it doesnt scale as simply as ‘the 90m is twice as complex so it must be be twice the price’. We would need to pay Fassmer to develop the corvette design from the OPV…then, likely, have BAE pay to license that design from them. Then BAE will have to develop and complete the build schedule with a UK workforce. At every turn there is more expense.
Bottom line Tempest I’m afraid your assumptions are a good way off target. You have picked on an interesting design in the Fassmer 90. Give it a fair-middlin 3D air/surface set, comprehensive ESM/offboard softkill and some decent optronics PLUS an OTO Strales mount forward and a Marlin on each beam and you’ve got a unit that will be just great for MSO and modest ‘gunboat diplomacy’ missions. Built in a European yard I cant see any reason why it would cost less than a Spanish BAM though and those tipped in at just over £100mn a throw for the first 4. Lets say you get some volume discount here and there and you get that down to £95mil per unit….eight hulls times that price is over £750mn…perhaps two T26’s. Anyway you play this the RN will have the two frigates thanks all the same!.
JonesyThere is partly an issue with defintion here…where an OPV (Offshore Patrol Vessel) becomes an OCPV (Oceanic Capable Patrol Vessel). If you have predominantly the former requirement Tempest has already clearly shown a winning hull….the Fassmer 80….as is very cheaply deployed, bought and being bought by several South American naval services and is analogous in every way to the Clyde. For a vessel that is intended for more frequent oceanic transits though and proper patrol taskings like APT(N), on a monohull, you need at least 90m….if only to achieve acceptable pitch characteristics in a high sea state.
So you do start looking more at the BAM/Fassmer90 or even up to the 3750ton Holland class boats and, all of a sudden, you arent looking at £30mn 80m OPV(H)’s but substantial £100mn hulls. Then, to keep 2 on station anywhere, at one time you need to have at least 5 hulls to cycle through….so your cheap OPV solution is now costing £500mn and has no other use, effectively, than the low-threat patrol tasking.
It comes down then to what we plan to do with these hulls. If, like with the Clyde, we forward deploy to theatre and ‘forget about them’ until its time for refit then we can get away with the cheap hulls Obi suggests…fit the Mk4 Bofors 40mm and you even have the ability to push these ships into a limited missile threat environment. If you want to do APT(N) and anti-piracy and ‘proper’ patrol taskings though you might be better advised to look at keeping the resources in your frigate force.
Unless of course you can make your patrol hulls do other useful things….enter MHPC or the French BATISMAR schemes!
Tempest
so even if the new corvettes were to cost 60-100 million pounds they would be a good buy
This is the problem you arent seeing though….the kind of hull you mention exists already…its called the Khareef and they dont cost £60-100mn. They cost the Omani’s £130mn+ a throw and BAE is said to have made a significant loss on the project at that price. If each of your corvettes cost £150mn+ and start to take budget away from the T26’s do you still think they are a good idea?
JonesyTempest
With this in mind should the UK look to build 8 new cheap corvettes. If we were to start with a off the shelf design like the Fassmer OPV-90 fit it with a standard British naval gun and 2�*30mm DS30M automated guns, then remove the 2 front boat houses and replace them with 20 surface to air vertical launch systems and maybe 4 to 8 Harpoon missiles these 8 ship could take over the home waters defence , safeguarding the Caribbean and anti-piracy leaving the new type 26 & 45�s to undertake there main tasks. We know that the Fassmer OPV-80 costs $38 million so if we add $22 million to make each ship $60 million this would mean the 8 ships would cost the UK �320 million.
Who are these corvettes meant to fight?. That armament loadout is comparable to a stock frigate so your corvette will need all the supporting systems to enable the deployment of those weapons plus the crew to support them and the warfighting team to fight them. The unit cost of these hulls, especially in wholelife terms, will not be $60mn. The corvettes that BAE just built for the Omani’s were comparable to what you are suggesting and they cost £400mn (note currency) for 3…and the story goes that BAE are making an eye-watering loss on every hull!.
Seeing these are meant to be ‘cheap’ constabulary hulls there is no real need for missile armament of any type. You will have a job fitting a Mk8 mod1 to this sized hull and keeping it ‘off-the-shelf’ as guns of those calibres generally require 2 deck penetration below the gunhouse. Mk8 mod1 certainly does. In reality thats no drawback as the weapon you want on this kind of hull is the STRALES anyway owing to its effective AAW/ASuW capability.
The way to achieve the effect you want, for the RN, is to re-define MHPC. Move that project away from the systems focus back to a hulls focus, enhance the Patrol element, and build as many multirole adaptable hulls as possible from the MHPC budget…plus whatever can be scrounged on top of it.
That means forgetting about mini-me frigates for a kickoff. It means a hull more optimised for deploying small boats, AUV/UUV’s and towing various sonar arrays instead of one optimised for a combattant role. Those requirements dictate a hull designed for seakeeping, stability and on-station endurance which means, to my mind, SWATH and leads us to Abeking & Rasmussens larger SWATH hulls. The 60m SWATH Pilot hull cost just Eur50mn fitted out…has all the characteristics for sonar towing, small boat deployment etc and offers huge deck spaces for embarked aviation. Just the thing to develop MHPC off and build in numbers!.
JonesyI think you missed him pointing out that their shoes can be safety shoes without looking like USN boots, & your assumption that they missed something is therefore just that, i.e. an assumption. You don’t know whether they’ve missed it.
To be honest Swerve I think Rooivalk has a point here….granted you can get steel toecapped soft shoes….but they are just that though – soft shoes. On a ship you are forever stepping over or through obstructions, jumping off platforms or fitting yourself around, usually heavy, machinery that is spinning, bouncing or is in some other fashion just waiting to send the unwary sailor base-over-apex. Ankle protection from a decent pair of boots, or even a modest pair of boots as per RN issue, is what you want to have and the Chinese chap with the trainers on is certainly not getting that…toecaps or not. Not the end of the world, but, slightly surprising.
JonesyThe Schiebel S-100 Camcopter has already been sold to a few countries, & trialled at sea by a couple. Nice to see a competitor getting a piece of the action.
Didnt SAAB team up with Schiebel to offer a joint range of rotary UAVs?. I remember reading something about common ground stations in a comms journal a year or two back?. 40kgs is an interesting payload claim for Skeldar as, in strictly mathematical terms, that would be enough margin to lift an AN/ZPY-4(V)1 set…a set claimed only to require 600w power. A medium rotary VTUAV with 50nm+ surface surveillance radius, AIS, ISAR/SAR imaging modes and 5hrs on station. I can think of uses for that if they could put it together!.
Jonesycough, cough…..steam catapult…..cough!.
Plus, to bring balance, where are Royal Navy personnel doing their deck training now…..where do Aeronavale pilots do a good chunk of their training?. In your view, to be consistent with your views on the Chinese, the USN should tell us both to nick off and pick it all up on our own again yeah?.
JonesyThey have “resurrected” the Ulyanovsk/Orel projects a few times this way, with various small-ish changes from the original sketches each time. This one with double islands just seems to be yet another take on the Russian supercarrier.
Interesting…wonder if now might be a good time for BAE to start talking to Sukhoi about a joint STOL support type based on the Su-80GP airframe!.
Jonesy“One lies within the constraints of modern technology an the other does not Therefore there will be no Death Star”
….why am I hearing “these aren’t the droids you’re looking for” here???
JonesyKind of looks like you are sacrificing one of the key advantage of a submarine, its stealth! A long range MPA could surely pick up the sail bulge unit sticking out of the water, also wouldn’t it have quite a significant IR signature which again could be picked up at long range.
The idea is to get near-SSN transit performance by sacrificing stealth during the part of the mission profile where stealth is of lesser priority….for example if you are Australia going to deploy a boat into the Persian Gulf does it matter if your boat isnt that discrete before you round the coast of India?. It harkens back to the old days where a conventional submarine would transit on diesels, on the surface, to an operational area before diving and going discrete. New SSK’s cant do that very well as they are not optimised for surface transit as boats like the old O-class were.
The concept recognises that few states out there actually have enough MPA capability to provide significantly tight surveillance coverage more than a couple of hundred miles off their coast. If the UK, for example, had a few of these in place of an SSN or two and dispatched one to patrol, say, off the Syrian coast…if it transited to the Med semi-surfaced and ‘went discrete’ just off the Italian coast would the Syrians be tracking it at that point….unlikely….but it would halve the deployment time to station compared to a normal SSK.
I’m not wholly convinced by the argument to be honest, and a part of me thinks NoCuts’ term ‘bonkers’ may be dangerously accurate, that is the basic idea though!
JonesySanem
that depends high tier aircraft, like an F-22, a Su-35, a Typhoon… they have great range and speed, meaning they can fly into range, fire off their missiles, and run out of range before the UAV can react the problem here is cost.
Not really an accurate picture is it though?. Werent the Armenians knocking down Hermes drones with missile-armed L-39’s in their last little skirmish with the Azeri’s?. I believe L-39’s are commercially available for US$300,000 in the States presently?. Theoretically a fourship of even a very modest fastjet, say legacy MiG-21’s with a clutch of ‘cheap’ R-60’s, would be able to massacre a squadron of your ‘airborne SAM sites’ for a fraction of the cost of a single Su-35!.
the Avenger would be a gamebreaker (asuming it can carry missiles internally) because it’ll reduce the enemy’s detection range and thus be able to shoot back GA estimates it’ll cost $15 million. if it’s facing off against manned jets between 3 or 10 times that cost, the manned jets have a serious problem
That is a completely different premise to what you were talking about with AIM-9/Predators though. You are now talking about expensive UAV’s in an expensive multi-sensor covered C3 environment. With the directed-energy weapon option for Avenger maybe you have an ability to soak inbound AAM’s and form an air-air barrier. Fully tooled up though the UAV is going to be costing a good ways north of $15mn a throw, will in NO way be expendable, and will be reliant on that, even more expensive, surveillance and management back-end. Hell of an expensive way to ‘just’ provide point air defence of a discrete location.
Myself I probably go with layered SAM’s with mobile and dispersed, passive IR queued, active/passive SAM batteries. Something like mobile VL MICA or FLAADS-G batteries augmented with dispersed Mistral ALBI and with S-300’s forming the area envelope. Hell of a lot cheaper to deploy and every bit the distraction for the other side!.
I appreciate you are very sold on the promise UAV’s hold out. For some things, ISTAR, AEW, Commo Relay etc so am I. The idea of air-air UAV’s as you predict above though is at best an answer to a problem that already has a solution.
JonesySorry Sanem but thats still nonsense. These UAV’s that are capable of gaining position on a manned fighter and employing a dogfight AAM are not going to be expendable. You are talking about a system like GA’s Avenger. France is, just now, paying over a billion for little more than a dozen Reapers…any one of which would be outmatched by the most basic jet trainer out there. The price for a similar number of more advanced drones would be such that a loss would be lamentable at very least.
For what you are talking about the only concept that has yet to come close to achieving that aim would be the US MALI derivative of the MALD decoy…that program was discontinued and nothing similar has reached anywhere near as far along a development path.
JonesyI’m sure the Russians are looking at it and are like
damn, why did we go for a French LHD when we could’ve went all the way for a French designed carrier.
CVF?. That was designed by Thales but at Filton near Bristol….only a few hundred miles from Paris, but, very much on the wrong side on the English Channel for it to be classed a French design.
JonesyI can see both sides of the argument and forgive me, I was using uniforms and paint as an example. The cost is having a completely disparate force structure not because they necessarily need to be (unless FAA staff are somehow genetically different to RAF staff), but because tradition dictates it. Come to think of it, navy types probably do have extra chromosomes 🙂
Its disparate by nature of the environment though. That cannot be avoided. Supporting an aircraft type aboard ship is not the same as it is on land…the aircraft may be the same but the maintenance routines will be different…perhaps even the support equipment….its absolutely certain that RAF support crews wont know naval DC procedures etc. Flying from a ship is also a different discipline than from a land base. Even with such a basic premise as the fact that your airbase is never in the same place when you come back as when you left it!.
As has been described core skills in maritime operations MUST be retained. Those skills can not be sacrificed so the question is how are they retained?. With RAF personnel who likely joined up for office hours jollies and 5-star hotel expeds or with people who joined up with the intent of deploying in big grey ships?.
JonesyI’ve got to say I’m kind of with Scooter on this. From a purely economic point of view the very act of having a seperate FAA squadron will incur costs, irrespective of the fact that the number of aircraft operating from the carrier will be the same – from admin staff, basing through to having seperate uniforms and paint jobs for F-35’s.
This falls into the same ‘awkward question’ bracket in my mind as to why the US Marines have their own seperate air power.
Incorrect. Even if every man in the Fleet Air Arm changed uniform overnight to an RAF one there would still be logistics and support costs for keeping a permanent FJ detachment afloat. You cannot simply do away with the Fleet Air Arm people as they are the ones who have the training and experience supporting the aircraft aboard ship. Basing and ashore support is already jointed with the RAF so no extra costs there. Seperate uniforms and paint(?) are inconsequential against the additional training and retention costs that would be incurred trying to make people who wanted to join the RAF pretend to be in the Navy. Seriously there is no more efficient way to achieve multi-squadron surge naval airpower than the way we plan to do it.
JonesyScot
Clearly, you could save money by just having RAF Pilots. Not something I would personally want to see.
What makes you think ‘just having RAF pilots’ would save money???. You’d still need the same number of pilots to fly a given number of aircraft so, by making all RAF, you would introduce the need to re-learn shipboard operations from scratch every time we deployed aircraft afloat…probably from foreign training sources. That actually increasing training costs to deploy the capability. Alternately you’d have to permanently allocate RAF aircrews to naval tasking to form and retain the core skills cadre…replicating what we’ll actually be doing with the Fleet Air Arm….just with pilots who joined up to serve ashore not afloat!. That causing morale and retention issues and also having training cost impact as we have to replace pilots leaving the service prematurely.
The most efficient method to deploy naval air, without incurring the significant costs of supporting dedicated and permanent fastjet naval air squadrons, IS the way we are intending to do this.
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