To be honest, the Anglo-French relationship is a very healthy love-hate relationship! The best deal for the carriers would arguably be to have all of them built as the French CTOL version, with the hulls all built together in the UK or France, then have them all completed with a mix of British and French systems, which is what will happen anyway, due to Thales involvement. It is arguable that the best deal would be to simply give BAE the contract to build three bare carrier hulls, and then hand them over to Thales to be fitted out!

Concerning the systems: BAE Systems has managed to get most of their systems onto CVF. The radars for example will be BAE Insyte S1850 and perhaps the BAE Insyte Sampson radar.

Don’t get this wrong. The plan does not envision the French building the UK hulls. The plan sees the UK building 2/3s of three CVFs and the French 1/3 of three CVFs. The savings are not big. They are apparently 120 million euros for each ship. That means about 5% of the 2.7 billion euro ships or so. I’d prefer having enough work to go around for Barrow too (the French would apparently build their section). With such small savings I think it would be good to have these ships built completely in the UK. It might be a big factor in gaining more recruits for the RN and engineering in general. In that sense it’s always better to have a fully British product. 🙂

25 kilometres is correct for Brimstone 2. Considering that they didn’t change the propulsion between Brimstone 1 and Brimstone 2 25 kilometres should probably also apply for Brimstone 1. The second source gives the range as 32 kilometres for Brimstone 1.

Boeing
Unofficial Eurofighter website

I am not sure about this, but wouldn’t the AASM compare to the Paveway IV? With this booster kit it seems to be part LGB, pat missile.

The situation is far from perfect, but always look on the bright side of life, so:

The Royal Navy will have a very capable fleet if it gets at least the “reduced” promises:

2×65000 tonnes CVF carriers
8×7350 tonnes Type 45s
13×4400 tonnes Type 23s
4×5000 tonnes Type 22s (replaced by then by large Absalon like OPVish ships?)
8×7800 tonnes Astute SSNs
4×16000 tonnes Bay LSLs
2×16000 tonnes Albion LPDs
1×22000 tonnes Ocean LPH
4×17000 tonnes SSBNs (by 2017 or so: still Vanguard class)
Other ships (OPVs, survey, tankers etc…)

What’s important is that the programmes continue, so that hopefully a more sensibly government orders more frigates, submarines, destroyers etc… . By the way, would the “funding crisis” exist without Iraq & Afghanistan? I.e. will the MoD’s finances imoprove when in the, let’s say, next 5 years British troops withdraw from then two hopefully stabilised countries (i.e Iraq and Afghanistan)?

P.S. The tonnage figures are just iirc and might not be totally accurate.

I’d expect the order for the two CVFs to be a prominent part of Brown’s “100 days high profile spending spree” to get the opinion polls up and create a general “feel good” feeling.

The other myth being : the typhoon is better in A2A and the joust simulation proves it.

I think we should just wait and see who is actually better in air superiority and who is better in ground attack, in the years to come we should know.

I agree with Jack in the sense that A.C.M. Torpy is extremly unlikely to not praise it publically.

2bn £.
Very chip for 2 ctol+stovl aircraft carriers of 70000tons and catapult.

“The Sun” says 2 billion pounds for each CVF. This price is in line with earlier estimates. I like the image, obviously they’ve made the CVF look enormous, but as usual “The Sun” is a good laugh. 🙂