What does it cost to decomission a CVN? All the RNs old attack boats are still around being maintained long after the navy have finished with them. How long do they have to be in storage untill their safe to dipose of? What happens to the old reactors and who pays for that! You don’t just put them in the dustbin, the spent fuel and irradiated reactors are going to be around for a long time, like hundreds of years. Put that in your through life costs and see how cheap nuclear powered ships are.

I guess you could encase them in concrete and dump them in the ocean, that would be cheap!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Oh dear god. Actually the high radioactivity waste would be around for closer to 10,000 years. Fortunately it can be disposed of along with the civilian stuff in the same sort of way. Irradiated material is irradiated material.

And it isn’t ocean dumped, it’d buried and encased in concrete.

I don’t know how long they have to be kept around (the boats), I assume it has something to do with waiting for fuel to be fully spent or short lived radioisotopes to decay. Either way the costs are factored in.

And if you factor in the rising cost of oil and possible insecurity of supplies, nuclear may be cheaper than you think.

Pardon Me! What payload do UK SSBN’s carry?

Trident SSBNs with up to 10 warheads, why?

Whats UOR/s?

I’d wager the treasury/or ministry of finance in every nation has a spade to poke into any acquisition. What impressed me is that the procurement went through nonetheless, and the Javelin is not a cheap weapon.

Urgent Operational Requirement. A system that allows a fast track procurement with money direct from the treasury. Thinking through all the gear the guys are using out there, the vast majority has come through UORs. All our MRAPs, etc.

The Javelins will have come through that. The problem is the treasury effectively has final say on them. So when they question their usage, if they decide they aren’t being used cost effectively, they may not fund them properly etc. They don’t have any idea of what a warzone is like or how to fight one (they’re accountants after all) which creates issues.

I actually have a question, what influence does the treasury actually have over government spending if the government in power decided one day that they wanted to order 500 Typhoons and 50 Frigates etc.

Could the Treasury turn around and say, no, you can’t have the money.

If not, blame the government, not the treasury.

The govt. could simply increase the defence budget to accommodate them, which the treasury would only have a say in via the Chancellor, who in turn answers to the PM. So no, the treasury couldn’t really stop them, except when they go through the UOR process.

“Another option under consideration is to only equip one of the carriers with aircraft, leaving the other to only operate with helicopters, which could save more than £3bn. Alternatively, the two carriers could share one complement of planes. The original plan envisaged equipping each carrier with 75 new US-made Joint Strike Fighter planes, but the cost has soared from the original price tag of £18m each.”

Obi Wan mentioned the numbers of planes being wrong, but look at the prices quoted! If we could get them that cheap i’d buy 500. At what point did they ever think an F35 would cost £18m????

I made this point in the IN thread. If India (thats a big IF) purchase this big ship what are the planes she can operate from it. It doesn’t have a Ski Jump or EMALS/CATS does it ?

Would it need F 35B/Harrier ?

It is designed to operate the F35 and Harrier with a Ski Jump, but it is the only (as far as I know) carrier in the world to be designed to be easily refitted to use Cats and/or traps. Given enough warning during building/refitting it could be configured to take just about any carrier capable aircraft. One of the good points about the project, they’re thinking of the future.

UAVs are not being used for COIN missions, for COIN harriers and A10s are being used (ifi recall correctly), UAVs are being used against fixed targets like buildings or departments on pre-planned missions.

They’re being used to track vehicles and people on the ground too, with the decision then being made on whether to engage that target. I’ve seen footage of it happen. In the instance I saw, they tracked a pickup but they chose not to engage because of civilians nearby. However they would have been perfectly capable of engaging with a Hellfire if the pickup had moved away from the civvies.

This raises an interesting question: Do military planes generally take longer to go from design to flight than civvies? Never really thought about it myself.

We’d be better off if that monstorsity that is the A400M didn’t get off the ground, then Britain might buy some proper strategic lift. Or we could just PFI it. *cries quietly*.

The A400M must be about ready to fly by now, what exactly are they still waiting on? FADEC is sorted, engine is supposed to be sorted. I know it’ll be overweight and not meet any of its targetsa but it must be able to get off the ground by now at least.