What is the point in an SK or Japanese MRBM? They have no WMD afaik, and I seriously doubt they would be able to develop RVs with sufficient accuracy to make the missiles have a small enough CEP to be of much use as a tactical weapon with conventional warheads.

Why do they want these unless they are also thinking about a nuclear weapons programme?

Aren’t the Chinese building a conventional missile to hit carriers? No reason the Japanese or Koreans with US help couldn’t build one with a similar CEP.

With successful demonstration of 18000 hours during the DMAFT! Aircraft designed for 8000 h has often only demonstrated 16000 h. Shouldn’t be SUCH a big deal unless there are some serious flaws in the airframe structure.

I always assumed that they could go past the predicted life expectancy, but it still will be a fairly worn airframe by the time it comes out of UK service.

It has also emerged that the RAF is to scrap more than 50 Eurofighter / Typhoon jets which became operational only three years ago at a cost of more than £4.5bn because it cannot afford to update them.

We already knew this was going to happen, it is the T1’s being written off. I don’t know how soon it will happen though.

You are correct in that they serve on the frigates, BUT those are different missiles. They have a booster and are fired from box launchers, they would need extensive modification to be usable on an aircraft. The UGMs were retired in the last round of defence cuts IIRC. The only aircraft that we use Harpoon with is Nimrod, the Typhoons are supposedly capable of carrying them, but I’ve never heard of an RAF Typhoon ever carrying one. Since the Nimrod is going out of service, the air launched Harpoons will either leave service or more hopefully go into storage. Obviously this doesn’t affect the surface ships since they aren’t leaving service, well not this round of cuts anyway 😉

Ahem, not to put too finer point on it but the T22’s ARE leaving service. That just leaves the T23’s capable of firing Harpoon’s in UK service.

Stealth and A2G are not factors here. You cant have it both ways, you cant say RCS is a factor versus the Su-35 and then say F-35 stealth is irrelevant.
Or F-35s/ F-22 are not relevant, then tout the Typhoons A2G capabilities.

The fact of the Matter is that the TYphoon is a DOG when compared to the Su-35, T-50, F-22. It cant run cant fight cant climb.

Why did you bother to start this thread? You began with a question regarding certain aircraft, but obviously from these posts you’d already made up your mind and just wanted a chance to slate it.

Pointless.

Very interesting. I thought they needed to modify the 30 quite a bit (the proposed Aster 45) in order to make it ABM capable.

People already try to sue the SAR guys. My Uncle worked for the MOD once and had to deal with a case where the rescued people sued because the winch crew popped the inflatable raft they’d drifted out to sea on so it didn’t get pulled up into the rotor.

The former has chosen the Pantsir-S1 and the latter, the SPYDER for land-based SHORADS. If you’re arguing for inter-services commonality as a selling point, it’s unlikely that most export customers will be looking to replace systems for all three services at the same time, like the UK is with ASRAAM/CAMM.

No, but plenty of countries may find they need it in one role, which is still a decent export order. You never know, they may decide later that commonality is a good thing as well.