The idea was to rotate the hulls anyway, yes.
But i suspect the mothballing will mean putting PoW in a dock and keep it there even when QE is out for refit, unless a war starts and requires the second carrier to urgently be pulled out.
Which would take weeks at best, probably.

If we are a little bit more lucky, PoW will be used with Marines and helos instead, with smaller crew and navy reservists on board whenever possible, and be a bit more readily available to act as strike carrier as well to replace her sister in duty tours.

What worries me, is how much the RN is asked to pay for the budget cuts. I had to read this and i nearly had a heart-attack to say the very least:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/news…-carriers.html

One truth in particular horrifies me: the UK is going to gain NOTHING from the carriers. Apparently, now that decent aircraft carriers are about to come online to give air power projection at sea, the amphibious ships and the Marines themselves are going to be lost, making the whole “power projection” thing a politic lie.
For 7 years the UK’s had a fantastic Amphibious force, but lacking in air support.
Now we’ll possibly have air support (still have to see; it depends on how many F35 actually are bought!) but we are going to lose the amphibious force.

What’s worse is that the UK was better off with the amphibs than with a carrier with no planes.
Arguably, the amphibious task group is worth even a carrier with planes.
Seriously, power projection requires the carriers AND the capability to land credible forces in an area of choice. That was the sense of the Navy’s part of the SDR 1998, and the conclusions of that review in this sense, regardless of the lies of the current SDSR, are unassailable.
The carriers were to be the cornerstone of the british defence policy. They had to support and protect missions abroad, including amphibious assaults. They had to be escorted by Type 45 and frigates. And supported by MARS.
Now it is all going to be ripped apart, leaving the navy in a mess without strategy, without coherence, and without balance.

We are rowing full force towards the worst decision EVER: build carriers without planes as a massive job-creating measure, and just because there’s no way to escape the penalties for cancellation of the contract.
And to pay for two beautiful but deemed to impotence carriers, we lose all the rest.

I have no words. It is worse than a horror movie. FAR worse.

No, i was referring to the far more radical and ultimately unrealistic suggestions Lewis Page makes, actually.
When one goes as far as to call frigates “pointless”, he’s got problems.
I’m firmly convinced something in his navy career frustrated him and made him bitter about the navy, and most evidently about the frigate force.

You know how much men a helicopter requires to work, yes…? It is not just about pilots, but ground personnel as well, support, training, mainteinance.
HMS Ocean’s complement rises fast when helicopters are on board.
And those are utility choppers!
ASW ones require even more support.

Ocean is “cheap”.

But who the hell would fund all the helicopters and crews and fuel and stuff you’d need to go on a fleet of “motherships”/through-deck cruisers…?
I think you need to check your math on such proposals.

You are depicting things far simpler than they are in reality. I’m starting to suppose you’ve been contaminated by those blog on which a guy with the obsession for motherships wasted no time in calling the Type 26 “pointless” and advocate for his solution to everything: merchant ships magically “converted” with a flat top and a wing of helicopters on top.
1) Such a hasty conversion barely worked in WW2 to make escort carriers, but today it won’t work.
2) Helicopters COST a lot. Where you’d get all that money, personnel and stuff is a mystery.
3) How poorly merchant ships would fare in a shooting war is easy guess.
4) Helicopters aren’t magic. They have to pull the sonar up to move from point to point, so there’s gaps in coverage.
A towed sonar is there all the time, gets the first contact, and tells the choppers WHERE TO SEARCH.
The ocean, you know, is pretty damn big even if you have a ****load of choppers on board.

I won’t waste more time pointing out other flaws, i think these ones are already enough.

I think he should get real, and his readers should follow.

I think the real problem is people obsessed with frigates being poor value for a fleet. I don’t think it is a realistic view.

It carries 8 harpoons which can’t be effectively used without airborne support and the less said about the Mk8 the better.

That is valid for every ship firing missiles at other targets at sea. Blame the curve of Earth and the effect it has on both visual and radar horizon.
That’s why hydroplanes got on ships already when main weapon was the big ass gun.

If its down to using its own torpedos against a sub then frankly its screwed

That’s because light torpedoes lack range. They are a snap-shot capability and yes, in many times they’d be fired when a enemy torpedo is already running against your ship (hopefully to be lured away by the towed decoy or other systems).
It would be worse if there weren’t and you had no chances to reply to attack while your helo is in the hangar or getting refuelled or unavailable in any way.
That’s why two choppers would be better, but, again, then we get to the money issue.
That’s also why US Navy got the ASROC, the russians got their SSN 14 missiles and Italy has the Milas: to bring the torpedo at a greater distance and hit the submarines well far away from your own hull.
The RN never got the money to follow that path, but it is not the navy you should blame.

2087 is a great hull mounted sonar

It is a variable depth, towed active and passive sonar system which performs in conjunction with Sonar 2050 bow-mounted active sonar on UK’s Type 23 frigates.
The Towed 2087 can dive below the thermal layers in the waters of the ocean and listen to enemy subs hiding in the depth, where the 2050 can’t get them. It is a heresy to express it in these terms, but i will all the same to make it easier: the 2087 is a HUGE and far more powerful variant of helicopter mounted dipping sonars, and by far it is the best mean to search enemy contacts at distance, listening stealthily for them. Once a contact is acquired, the helo is vectored in the area to chase.
Was ASROC available, the frigate could fire it in the area, and the rocket would bring the torpedo there so it could go on a chase in circles, listening for subs or using its own active sonar to get the contact.

Satellites capable to find a submarine DIVED do not exist. They can track Diesel Electric snorkeling and SSNs surfaced, but once they go down, a sensor capable to pierce in the ocean’s depths STILL DOES NOT EXIST. That’s why the SSBN is the ultimate mean to ensure you have a survivable nuclear deterrent.
So true it is, that even communicating with a dived submarine is a major problem: only Extremely Low Frequency pierce the water, but it takes 10 MINUTES to send a couple of letters.
In fact, these letters are a code that identifies a submarine and calls it to periscope quote, so it can deploy an antenna over the surface and download messages from airplanes of satellites.
Qinetiq is experimenting a Blue-Laser mean to communicate from airplanes to submarines just under the surface at extremely high speed, but it is doing so with US funds, and it is still just in development phase.
There are many times when even the first sea lord does not know where Astute is. Once a SSN is dived, no one knows where it is until it comes back up to periscope height and receives its messages.

As to SSNs being the best way to chase other SSNs, that’s certainly true. But you can’t do everything with SSNs, however good the british SSNs are. Britain was the first fielding a 60+ knots torpedo, the Spearfish still in service today, developed to get the 40 knots+ Alfa URSS submarines.
Britain beat even the US in timing before they rolled out their own MK48 ADCAP.
But with 7 Astutes already overloaded with tasks, you obviously can’t do everything.

But what we get from your intervention is another confirmation to my point, to mr. Fox’s point, and to the point in so many we made on these forums:
1) The UK needs flat tops and needs to deploy aircrafts and helos at sea. Regardless of what Dannatt says about “desirable but not indispensable” carriers.
2) The UK needs the Nimrods as well.

Yes, it is that simple.

Except that ignores range. The primary reason for using a bigger helicopter for SF is the range issue

I dunno how true that point is. Normal range of the Chinook is 425 km. AW101 has an autonomy of over 1300 km, which possibly means a 500 km range. AW149 has an autonomy of 1000-some km, which also would give pretty good range.
The Chinook isn’t that long-legged when it comes to range, so i have some doubts on the effective importance of that one point. Also, not always such long range is needed.

Besides, the US Special Forces helicopter of choice is a version of the BlackHawk, after all.
True, they have Combat Talon C130 air tankers for refuelling them as well, but this is true only a fraction of the times.

I don’t think there’s so much of a discrimination in these terms.

There’s still flaws in the reasoning. RFA Fort Victoria is slower and relatively more vulnerable. Also, it has a smaller crew, but i’m really not sure it is that cheaper than a frigate to send down there doing the work.
As to offering greater assistance to civilian ships in trouble… How would it…??? What can it do that a Type 23 couldn’t in this regard?

As to the Type 23, it is an excellent multimission frigate and i don’t think it can be contested. She’s the finest sub-hunter in the world, and that’s what she was built for in the first place, so we can say it is a most succesful design.
As to Sea Wolf being self-defence only, it was a choice. Actually, it could have been worse: original plan was that the Type 23 would have no SAMs, but would have operated in small groups supported each by a Fort class replenisher armed with Sea Wolf providing aircraft facility, support and supplies and air cover.
6 Forts were planned back then.

Then, luckily, the decision was reversed, and Sea Wolf never got on the Fort (even if there is the possibility to fit it).

If in place of Sea Wolf a longer range missile had been chosen and fitted, the Type 23 would have had broader capabilities. With CAMM, it will be already better, but still we are going for a self-defence only missile system. It is a choice, based on money as well. CAMM will be endlessly cheaper than ASTER 15 and won’t even need a real VLS silo. (explanation: it WILL need a silo were to fit, but won’t need a complex silo-launcher like Sylver or MK41, since CAMM is “cold-ejected” by compressed gas contained in its launcher/container and its rocket engine ignites AFTER launch, a bit like shoulder-launcher anti-tank missiles like the Javelin.
This means there’s no need to manage the exhaust and flame and shock of the rocket launch from the silo, and the CAMM launches from its container-tube, which could be pretty much put everywhere, even on top of a flatbed truck. Which is, after all, what is envisaged for replacing Rapier in the army)
Italy had planned only Aster 15 for the FREMM, but then decided to fit longer Sylver launchers and now there’s the possibility to use Aster 30 as well, even if the ship itself lacks the indipendent ability to target enemies at the maximum range offered by the Aster 30. For that, a CEC data-link is the solution. However, from point defence there’s already a jump to area defence. Not as wide an area as a Horizon can do, but close enough.
As for the SSMs, subsonic SSMs are what we get in the West. I have my doubts on how a Harpoon would fare against a modern ship with CIWSs and SAMs, but so far only the US have in study a future, supersonic anti-ship missile in the west. Teseo, Exocet and such are all high subsonic. 8 is also a standard number for SSMs in the west.
The main gun, hopefully, will be a 155/39 on the future frigates, firing the same ammo of the army AS90, and that would be a major step forwards.
As to the crew, it is high because the Type 23 was designed in an age when automation was at its starts.
The Type 26 will surely have a smaller complement. I’m also the greatest supporter of the idea of giving Type 26 larger aircraft facilities, allowing to take on board up to two helos or helos plus UAVs (UAVs that will have to be bought, however: at the moment, the RN has nothing to field in that regard… even if the Boeing ScanEagle was launched and tested and recovered on board a Type 23 frigate already)

Besides, the point about it being only another one demonstration of how underfunded and in difficulty the RN is, the RFA Fort carries ONE Merlin.
It could carry and service 3 of them, and maybe even 4. THEN it would make sense.

With one Merlin alone, it does what does a Type 23 with its own Merlin in terms of piracy contrast. With the difference that the Type 23 can move faster towards a call for help.

PS Even Dannatt is now saying keep the number of helicopter the same and reduce the size of the standing army and transfer assets to the TA once out of Afghanistan

I still get the chills at reading the part about aircraft carriers and immediate retirement of Harriers, however.

Gods, Dannatt is the worse strategist EVER.
One of the first things the SDSR should conclude is that Dannatt must be limited to talk about the Army and full stop. When he gets talking of air power and power projection, it becomes too evident he gets NOTHING of it.