Holland class OPV
Crew 90 (50 ship crew and 40 non-listed persons including a helicopter detachment, a platoon of marines or a medical team. Approximately 100 evacuees can also be boarded.)
Displacement 3,750t
108.4m x 16m x …

Doorman class frigate
Crew 154 (170 including helicopter crew)
122m x 14.4m x 6.2m
Displacement 3,300t standard

You’re saying crew number for Type 26 should be higher of lower, e.g. compared to current Types?

I’m saying that the Doorman class frigate probably represents about the minimum safe level of crewing you’d want aboard a warfighter. Doorman has all the combat elements that need to be manned in a watch and has to be capable of staying closed up at action stations for a protracted period.

Some elements of the newer designs doubtless do allow for crew reductions IEP must be easier to keep an eye on when compared to conventional powertrains. VLS’s have nowhere near the intricacies of mechanical-train launchers etc so the weapons engineering department may be able to lose a few bodies, but, you are looking at losing 80 or 90 hands when you compare an F124 to this concept T26. Compared to USN Burkes, albeit bigger ships, that discrepancy is even more stark. 80 or 90 is a lot of manpower to lose on a ship even for routine stuff like storing and putting teams ashore for disaster assistance etc.

FLAADS isn’t really a point defence missile system though is it, it’s just a short range missile system same as Aster 15 (but supposed to be cheaper). ***removed by moderator***

Correct in every important way there Kev. The clue being in the FLAADS name i.e the LA standing for ‘Local Area’.

Its absolutely legitimate to base your air defence on an inner and outer missile engagement zone. The outer zone based on a smaller number of expensive, long-range, missiles cued off cutting edge MFRs and the inner ‘goalkeeper’ zone based on large numbers of salvo-fired cheap short-range, active seeker, missiles. If you look at a ‘future RN’ carrier taskgroup with a pair of T45’s and 4 T26’s, even if you give every ship ‘just’ 48 missiles, you are still presenting an attacker, most likely owning at best a couple of modern strike-fighter squadrons and a modest MPA fleet, nearly 300 SAMs to get past.

Given sub-TLAM and carrier-based Storm Shadow attention to the airfields those strikefighter squadrons will use those few squadrons will have to work exceptionally hard to overwhelm the fleets defence potential before they are rendered mission ineffective themselves.

***Removed by moderator***

This is a college b-ball match up, so the correct designation is CVNCAA 😀

Looks like your with me in the corner Dan!. 🙂

Even after FLAADS is ready to start being deployed as an operational system, itself a somewhat indefinite waypoint in the RN’s future vision, it will take a few years to get all the Dukes refitted with it so finishing the 23’s SeaWolf block upgrade is sensible. In inventory management and logistics terms one missile type, deployable to any ship, is the plainly better position to be in than trying to make sure you have the right stocks of specific missiles in place to cover the appropriate deployed units.

Meanwhile, training materials for operators and maintainers are under development for delivery through the Royal Navy’s Maritime Composite Training System.

Then we see the exercpt above from the Type 997 radar piece Swerve posted up and you do wonder. Here we see a radar, that is actually being installed in the fleet next year, that doesnt have a complete set of technical docs yet. Here’s hoping the O&M course for 997 is one of those ‘2 weeks with coffee and sandwiches’ jobs covering just ‘which hot-swappable modules to switch out to get the thing working again’ otherwise we might have a bit of a job getting the trainers up to speed and then a few lads ready to support it when it deploys the first time….which would be a shame!.

At least while checking out the latest on FLAADS I saw this from RUSI: http://www.rusi.org/downloads/assets/Keith_Garden_Part_2.pdf

Page 2 having the first ‘manufacturer’ confirmation I’ve seen that FLAADS will be quad-pack compatible with Sylver A43 onwards.

Very likely the exact same number that could afford a 25-30k ton CVL with 14 fast jets and half a dozen support types and rotary’s. The cost difference wouldnt be so great to prohibit the bigger carrier if there was deemed a national requirement to acquire the smaller one.

IIRC BAe is no longer involved with Gripen.

Happy to stand corrected on that one Swerve.

….size of aircraft to be carried, or the take-off and/or landing distances required, or the deck parking area, or hangar size?

All of the above as metrics for size of the carrier. The roles required of the carrier dictate the size of the airgroup – you need to cover a flying programme of x sorties undertaking y number of simultaneous or streamed operations and that will result with a number of aircraft as a bottom line….contingent on the predicted supportability of the aircraft.

If the calculus to undertake the required sortie rates, to support the operational requirements, arrives at 36 fast jets plus 4 support types then you need to scale your vessel to support the sorties for the requisite length of time with the resources onboard and available in your fleet UNREP capacity. That support includes ordnance, spares, consumables and things like workshop area and hangar space to keep the airwing operational and allow for practical support onboard.

Is it aircraft design – bigger, heavier – that has been driving the size and therefore the cost of carriers? For example, how would carrier design be affected if light fighters such as the Gripen or Naval Tejas were to be used?

Simplistically the answer is yes. That doesnt tell the whole story though – increasing aircraft sized drove the expansion to supercarrier Nimitz territory. The evolution of true swingrole capability with the birth of the F/A-18 Hornet and the development of ‘cheap’ PGM’s has arrested that expansion. At the height of its fast jet CAW the USN ‘Alpha strike’ had medium penetration bombers, supporting light strike/suppression platforms, electronics support/recon, fixed-wing ASW and a couple of squadrons of air superiority aircraft. You just dont need all those types in the airgroup anymore. So the carrier doesnt have to be big enough to support them all.