Jock, I’m really sorry if I offended you. I had no intention of so doing. I’ve enjoyed your posts. I find the whole French thing laughable because so much rubbish was talked, so I was just joshing

How dare u mention a free FRENCH motor torpedo base Prom! Why Lord Nelson would turn in his…. 🙂

Think he might have had more to say about a French company winning the QEC design, and 4 or 5 French people being on the design team. Let alone the 2 or 3 dutch. But then again, maybe not as countries used to swap engineers and designers quite a lot back then. So perhaps he would have been more surprised that the USA had produced anyone of sufficient merit to be on the team!

Fair enough on not using CDG costs Jonesy. Trouble is there aren’t too many examples to pick from where we do know the costs.

As to CVF size, it was all of those figures mentioned. MoD had a smaller carrier (50kt oddly enough) in mind but both Thales and BAES made the case that (for JSF) you needed a bigger carrier. Below the current QEC size there was a big drop-off in capability

Not sure if I absolutely agree with that. CdeG as a design comes in for its fair share of abuse, with some justification, but she has just put in a decent shift in the southern Med and had hangar space and room in the flying program had she needed to ramp up to higher intensity operations. 40k with a couple of 12-14 plane squadrons covers fleet air defence and offensive ops simultaneously. 55k does it with greater sustainability and greater ease of operation but at a noticeably higher cost. ASW you do offboard from accompanying SSN’s, theatre sensor platforms, and, decentralised, capability off suitably netted escorts with decent aviation complexes.

Commercial hulls and significant air ops dont go together. DC just isnt there to stop an accident or, worst case, battle damage from gutting the hull – see Atlantic Conveyor 1982 for any proof necessary.

I agree with some of that but I’m not convinced that 55kt costs noticeable more than 40kt. Compare CDG with a cost of Eu3bn for 1 and £7.2bn for 2 CVF. Ok CDG is nuclear which pushes up the cost but CVF was much later and thus based on higher prices. Both BAES and Thales made it clear during the CVF bid that the extra size also reduced costs in the long term as it gave space to add kit later- all ships put on weight as they age with extra equipment etc

EMALS looks good, but it’s expensive

Depends how you compare it really

Capital cost is more than steam catapults – but then new technology always is, so you would expect that to reduce. Through life cost is much less than steam catapults.

Compared to STOVL? Harder to make like for like comparisons because of the few examples of STOVL aircraft and equivalents to compared against. But looking at the difficulties that F35B has had I would say that EMALS is cheaper in terms of capital and through-life

All Soviet aircraft were designed from the outset to operate from s****y conditions including rough fields if they needed to so smooth runways were never considered essential.

It does reflect the way of thinking though. It does the job for Russian aircraft. When Western aircraft make a trip to them, they need to be tended to.
I have often seen footage of Americans walking the runways to clear it of foreign objects, I have yet to see Russians do this as certain features were included in their aircraft to minimize the damage down by these foreign objects on their runways.

Is it not also the case that the west are less accepting of accidents involving military aircraft. It is difficult to get data to do a direct comparison, but a quick google suggests that in the last 10 or 11 years there have been 34 “incidents” involving russian aircraft and 31 for US aircraft. When you consider the much higher number so US aircraft and hours flown that implies a much lower incident rate in the west (or the US at least)

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When the cost of ops comes out, that distance will be paid in LOTS of money.

It has. A public source has stated that the cost of basing the RAF out of Italy was £3.5 to £4.5m a day IIRC.

So for 6 months and counting that would pay for a fair bit of QEC.

p.s. I was joking about the classified dockyard, but notwithstanding all that has been said, some plods or MPs could get shirty and ask questions if they find someone with a sodding great zoom lens pointed at a defence facility. Indeed so they should because it is an offence under the OSA if the purpose is “prejudicial to the safety or interests of the state”. Nothing would come of it, but I am sure Jock has better things with his time than answer lots of questions (like being in the pub)