My main point is that high end war between states is not a dead letter, but it is the most dangerous and difficult thing an armed force can do. If a nation decides that it is going to be self sufficient against this sort of threat, as Australia (and presumably others who are building big, powerful warships) has, then big powerful warships are a must and the luxury is the corvettes to do low-level, anti-pirate work. The Armidale class are not combatants, in a war situation they would be doing SAR and the closest of coastal patrol, they are the RANs luxury.

I like the Belfast, I’ve got a photo somewhere of the one at Cairns airport belonging to Heavylift that I took in 2008. I read that the break even point for Shorts was 30 aircraft, they would have made a profit from the 31st aircraft onwards which makes the drastic reduction of the RAF order even more of a tragedy since it might have sold on the export market.

I’m a bit surprised nobody has mentioned the C160 Transall. It’s an elegant looking airlifter and some have that nifty IFR setup in the main landing gear blister which is cool.

Double post, sorry.

What show stopping issues? Undercarraige problems were show stopping? Where were the performance shortfalls? Are you referring to the use of a development engine to rush the aircraft into the air for political reasons? I see it as the most advanced strike aicraft in the world at the time, featuring automatic flight control system (ACFS), terrain following radar (TFR), forward looking radar (FLR), sideways looking radar (SLR), inertial navigation system (INS), internal weapons bay for conventional and nuclear munitions, capable of mach 2 at altitude, supersonic on dry thrust, able to fly at 200ft to evade radar… Where is the over-hype?

Cost-wise it would have been very expensive (£600+ million program cost for 110 aircraft) but much cheaper than F-111 which cost Australia several times as much as expected and was about a decade late in delivery. In the end the spend on development and airframes plus the cancellation cost of F-111 totalled almost half as much (£250 million) as it would have cost proceeding with the programme. I do not include the cost of the abortive AFVG nor the cost of developing the Spey-powered F-4 – more expensive than the standard F-4 with inferior performance – which was ordered in the absence of TSR-2.

If the TSR2 was as good as the F111 then it would have been awesome. The Spey Phantom was developed for the RN and their short catapults, it didn’t take money away from TSR2. The cost of the AFVG probably didn’t amount to much, and some of the TSR2 avionics were developed and installed in production aircraft, the Jaguar got a couple of pieces of TSR2 avionics.

The RAAF F111 buy was going to cost about $150 million but end up costing over $350 million, so cost increases in this class of aircraft at this time were inevitable.

The cheap alternative for the TSR2 does not exist, its cancellation was a bad thing all round.

Just a word on TSR2 affordability, since it is always bought up in TSR2 discussions. The TSR2 was cancelled after 195 million pounds was spent in favour of the F111K and AFVG. The F111K was cancelled after 46 million pounds was spent, the French pulled out of AFVG during development and morphed into the UKVG. The RAF then bought 118 F4M, 200 Jaguar and 46 Buccaneer for tactical strike and kept the Vulcan in service in the tactical strike role throughout the 70s. In the meantime the UKVG was morphed into the Tornado of which Britain was a 42% partner in development, and bought about 220.

In my mind the 46 million wasted on the F111K would have finished off TSR2 development and the money spent producing Phantom, Jaguar and Buccaneer, operating Vulcan and developing Tornado could have paid for TSR2 production.

India buying from Europe or Russia is fine because the relationship is much more equal and India can exert a lot of influence, India got a lot of tech transfer and the like from France with the Rafale. These are the sorts of things people don’t think about with major weapons purchases, they think it’s all about the speed or range or whatever but the strategy with regards to long term support can be more important that an extra hundred miles of range.

I’ll clean this up too, sorry about all that.

I know, I just plucked the dole from the list of thing the government spends money on as an example of what might be cut.