Please, talk about calling the Kettle Black! The UK Government changed it mind about operating CTOL F-35C’s and equipping the QE Class with Catapults and Arresting Gear. Not because they had to re-design the ship. More to the point such a late change in construction would delay the introduction of the carrier and would increase the cost of a project that was already over budget. In addition the UK would have to fund the New Equipment (Catapults and Arresting Gear) plus the added cost of the F-35C over the F-35B. This of course doesn’t even touch on the extra personal or training of the former.

This only shows that you haven’t paid any attention to the project in quite some time, and in fact you are doing your usual debating equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ear and singing la la la when someone tells you that you are wrong.

I will say this again for the last time read the numerous reports about why the change to cat and trap was abandoned , because to anyone that has been following the project you are making yourself look a bit foolish.

Nonetheless, it was designed to be “adaptable” as you say. Yet, that doesn’t just mean “big”. It was planned from the very start to be equipped with either STOVL F-35B’s or CTOL F-35C’s using Catapults and Arresting Gear.

If that were the case the MOD would not have spent hundreds of millions of pounds in detailed design work to fit catapuilts to it, which was then abandoned because the estimated cost of QEII was going to almost double.

On 30 September 2002, the MoD announced that the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force would operate the STOVL F-35B variant. Also announced was that the carriers would take the form of large, conventional carriers, initially adapted for STOVL operations. The carriers, expected to remain in service for fifty years, were designed for but not with catapults and arrestor wires. The carriers were thus planned to be “future proof”, allowing them to operate a generation of CATOBAR aircraft beyond the F-35. Four months later on 30 January 2003, Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon announced that the Thales Group design had won the competition but that BAE Systems would operate as prime contractor.

Lovely 11 year old marketing blurp that was all written before the final design work for CVF was finished, now we all know how much work is involved installing cat and trap for CVF and most of us know that the word adaptable doesn’t mean what we thought it did when applied to CVF.

The CVF’s were designed to be built either as STOBAR or CATOBAR from the very beginning. So, much of the design work has already been done.

No they were not, they were designed as STOVL carriers that could be converted later, you obviously hadn’t paid any attention to the switch to CATOBAR and back to STOVL again and the sums being talked about for conversion, if you had we wouldn’t be having this debate. A working design for CATOBAR CVF almost certainly does not exist.

According to Jane’s UK might receive main gate approval to order it’s first squadron of F35s (14) by the end of the year.

United Kingdom
2 (?) F-35 – 48 on order to replace Tornado.

That’s not quite right though is it, the UK does not have 48 on order because it hasn’t placed any orders yet, nobody even knows what the official number that we will order is either.

To risk paraphrasing Swerve and going over myself again Scooter but the days of the UK buying jets for type specific roles are over, that is partially due to cost but also for the efficiencies that will entail.

At the risk of being a little contradictory/going off topic, especially when I broadly agree with most of what you have to say, if the RAF were offered the chance to regain some strategic bombers I reckon it would be bite your hands off time.

Yes I do rather think that the supersonic stories are wrong, I’ve never seen anything official about that just stories in newspapers, and I think they are all missprinting an error.

Oh, I guess you haven’t been reading the budget short falls projected for the next few years.

If the USN was interersted in building affordable ships then it would have done so, even the so called affordable ship project; LCS is gold plated and massively over budget.

Your wrong……..

With the greatest of respect that is just your opinion, and let’s be honest this is just an exercise in Fantasy Fleets done for your own amusement without any actual real world need.

The truth of the matter is that the USN has a carrier fleet that is many, many times the size of the rest of the worlds combined, and unless there is some sort of escalation of rivalry with a peer then there is no need to reverse the reductions that have been made since the end of the Cold War.