kev 99Is this for a new series of top trumps like games?
kev 99“I don’t think most people would care, but why is the Russian Navy suddenly so keen on British Furniture?”
The Russian Minister of Defense is a former furniture salesman so he knows furniture much better than actual naval construction. If he says this British furniture is superior I’d take the furniture salesman’s word for it. This is but one example of the wonders you get when you elevate utter bumpkins to high positions in government.
A Furniture salesman? Wow……..
Still we have a chancellor of the Exchequer whose only real qualifications for the job are: having rish parents, being a toff and having been to a really expensive school with other toffs.
kev 99I am with JohnK on this, it would be good to understand what was included in the +/- £1.0Bn increase in the MoD’s view of what the cost of converting the PoW was.
Are we comparing Apples with Apples or not?
As I read some of the press releases, the costs for the STOVL build is the cost payable to the ACA etc for the delivery of the ships whilst the new cost for Cats and Traps is, or may be, the whole life programme costs of the cats and traps conversion on top of the cost of the purchase of the ships.
In a way it reminds me of alleged maps with Australia in a slightly different position to justify F111’s.
It was BAC TSR2s.
kev 99This looks like a job for Mercurius!
Failing that, do you think there is any obvious motivation other than financial?
Conservative Government (sort of), I don’t think they need any motivation other than financial.
kev 99Is there any more information (anywhere you can point us?)
UK Defence Secretary Philip Hammond has cancelled the deployment of the MBDA Fire Shadow loitering munition to Afghanistan because of concerns over the long term future of the weapon system, IHS Jane’s understands. Royal Artillery personnel had been in the final stages of preparing the UK’s first loitering munition for a combat capability demonstration in April 2012 when the plug was pulled on the project as a result of the Ministry of Defence’s annual spending round (PR12)
From an article on Janes website, but I don’t have a subscription so can’t read all of it.
kev 99Fireshadow deployment to Afganistan has apparently been cancelled because of questions over it’s long-term future.
😡
kev 99This explanation makes a certain amount of sense to me. I have not seen a breakdown of the huge cost of catapult conversion, which comes in as almost as much as the basic build cost. I had assumed that they had piled on all the extra costs of operating cats & traps over 50 years (extra crew costs, maintenance of equipment etc) as if it was an upfront cost, which is standard accounting trickery when you want to make something look much more expensive than it actually is. I hate to side with Lewis Page, but I do find it very suspicious that BAE is providing both the carriers and the F35B, and given the calibre of the senior people at MoD, I would not be in the least bit surprised if they have been led down the garden path.
They are also providing F35C, this talk of a BAE conspiracy is bonkers, there’s nothing in it for them.
kev 99Now that is some awsome pics!:eek:
I like the A400 look.
Yes, it’s pretty handsome for a transport aircraft 🙂
kev 99Power points and CAD design, by 2000/2001 the work had been changed to a more conventional “pointing” gun, the AGS.
Thanks Sintra, exactly what I thought.
kev 99Gun development costs are cheap in comparison to other ship bourne weapons systems. As I say most of the work has already been done.
Got any links regarding this work that has been done? All I can find on the subject points me back to the AGS system which as we know is a pointing gun.
As stated it’s not the cost of the gun, it’s the cost of developing the gun and designing and building a brand new submarine to operate it from.
I’d guess the acoustic signature would be remarkably similar to that of a cheap surface combatant firing a smaller calibre. A quality enemy sub would be interested but SSKs can handle themselves rather well and it would be equally interested in a cheap frigate. Shore based ASM or batteries would be taken out of the equation. Any FF charging towards the firing point could happily eat a Harpoon or Spearfish though more than likely the poor little SSK would have an hours headstart from anything other than fast MR. 250 square miles of sea is a lot to search….
Fast MR would be a problem but I imagine their base would be the first to take a broadside or two….
On a surface vessell the gun is above water and it’s seperated from it by several decks, I would expect there to be a great deal less sound transference through the hull of the ship compared to something which is firing from an under water position in an all enclosing hull. I would expect your sub to making orders of magnitude more noise than the Frigate you mention and it probably wouldn’t require much effort to track down by choppers with all the racket it’s creating.
kev 99You got me, I used the wrong metric, should of mentioned height required to fit Trident tube plus machinery space and systems for the gun and various other gubbins underneath, but then I can’t find the height of a Vanguard so it’s a bit moot.
As for your point about Medium Calibre guns existing, well disingenious point there because the sort that you are proposing only exist on paper and require money to be made reality.
My last point on the subject: How stealthy is your sub once it starts firing? What do you think those 4 guns are going to do to the acoustic picture in the immediate vicinity of the submarine? At the very least it would be visible above the surface and a magnet for any enemy activity in the area.
kev 99No it wouldn’t and I’ve already supplied the dimensions so why you think this is beyond me.
I suggest you do some research on the Golf class, they were diesel powered and carried, latterly, three R21’s. These happen to be over 40ft in length and yet were easily accommodated with a hull no bigger than a largish diesel electric (3500t submerged).
A Vanguard class has a beam of 42ft, so basically I’m spot on. Also the crew living conditions on modern subs are massively different and require more space than 1950s designs.
Your ideas for adding a couple of thousand tonnes to an existing design are absurd.
The system weight for the Ohio proposal was 130 tonnes, which included ammunition.
Okay I’m big enough to admit I’ve made an error here, so all in once the space for hull lengthening and accomodation for the guns and all the strengthening that would need to be required it’s probably only a mere 1000 tonnes to an existing design, still quite a bit though.
As for cost, I’m afraid you’re way off the mark. The Tomahawk programme has probably cost close to $10 billion all in, and the two weapons systems are complimentary.
Tomahawk is an expensive way of delivering HE on target, is useless at traditional NGFS and has a long flight time.
NGFS is an important role, I doubt I’m teaching Grandma to suck eggs when I mention that the Iowa’s were brought out of retirement several times in order to provide it and that the Zumwalt’s role, with it’s ‘expensive’ gun is tailored to NGFS.
So… The US Navy has spent, at a guess, over $20 billion for three of your gun cruisers despite Tomahawk being a better weapon for the job?
Shall we add in the cost of operating and upgrading the Iowas over the years? They weren’t cheap ships to run, in fact when all 4 were operational the US Navy was devoting 10,000 men to NGFS. All this to delivery conventional shells up to 20miles inland.
If you want to it any target then artillery is a good choice. You want to compare the flight time for a CAS strike, or any conventional missile you choose to name, to that for 155mm shells close offshore? I can assure you that when you call for fires or CAS response time is by far the most important consideration. CAS is wonderful, if you have a Yank cabrank loaded with strike eagles or similar. If it’s non existent, doesn’t perform too well in poor weather(hint: RAF), has limited range and payload (hint: RAF) or doesn’t deploy well to places which don’t have 5* hotels (hint: RAF) then it isn’t quite so useful. It is also rather expensive, especially if you’re looking at F35’s or similar. Come to think of it it’s rather expensive if you’re looking at any airframe.
Get out of your head the idea that 155mm is in some way a popgun tickle feather. True there are better weapons systems for hitting hardened targets but the overwhelmingly vast majority of targets are mobile. I’ll give you a clue here, a large proportion of them have legs. Most of the rest have wheels. A few have tracks. Very few live in James Bond bad guy fortresses which the rough equivalent of a battalion of heavy artillery couldn’t scratch.
In this context Tomahawks are a diplomatic tool as much as a war fighting one.
You seem to be missing the point that Tomahawks already exist, so rather pointless measuring development costs that are already sunk against a weapon system that has to be developed and brand new platforms designed and built to accomodate it. Also I’ve already pointed out that comparing Tomahawk’s to your gun sub is more than a bit dodgy as they aren’t comparable.
I don’t see what the Iowa’s are to do with this, nobody with half a brain cell would think of them as a gun cruiser and I certainly don’t recall suggesting anyone should build a 40k battleship as an alternative to what you are suggesting. So basically any talk of Iowa’s as example of what I suggested are ludicrous.
We appear to be going round in circles here, I’ve conceeded some ground on dimensions and weights while you have ignored most of the other reasons as to why I think your NGFS subs are expensive and limited for what they would be able to do. So I’ll finish this by saying this: if you think it’s such a great idea why did the proposal never get off the ground? Why is the only platform slated for receiving an AGS a cruiser?
Also try not to be so patronising in future it’s rather poor forum etiquette.
kev 99You appear to be confusing the concept of the CVGS with that of the proposal for the Ohio class boomers…
The system does not require a boomer sized vessel, it was however proposed as a drop in module to fit inside just the missile tubes. Indeed the AGS was originally to have been a VGS until using conventional ammunition was mooted.
Sorry which are talking about here? you started off talking about 155mm vertical howitzers for Trident tubes and now you’re talking about ones that fit into MK41s?
In any case a 155mm howitzer built for a Trident sized tube would require something at least close to the diameter of a Ballistic missile sub, probably not full size but still damn big. There have been talks of Trident turbs fitting into a hull plug on an Astute so add a couple thousand tonnes onto the standard model or something about the size of INS Arihant.
If you are talking about an AGS that is around the same depth as a MK41 then you are still talking about a damn big submarine, an AGS weighs what? around 300 tonnes? so that’s 1200 tonnes plus you would need a pretty strong hull say a couple thousand metric tonnes hull plug added to an existing sub (probably a great deal more), plus it would need a lock out chamber for the special forces as well, so more weight added.
How are you launching the UAVs? if it’s vertical then that’s more vls tubes needed, if it’s torpedo then you can save some room there. Are these UAVs going to drop ordinance or are they just recon? If they are to be armed then the launch system would need to be pretty large.
To show you that your assertion is ridiculous consider the space taken up by the system you pilory as being too large to possibly fit into a conventional submarine. 40 * 7 feet for the gun system designed for a boomer.. Thats about 1600 cubic feet of submarine space taken up by it. Now consider just the space taken up by the Mk48s or similar on a conventional diesel sub. Upholders carried roughly 18 torpedoes, which alone add up to 1000 cubic feet. Add in the tubes, racks, space to load them, firecontrol, sensors etc and you can easily see that the torpedo weapon system itself takes many multiples of the volume. By your logic no diesel powered coastal submarine would be able to carry torpedoes.
I never said any of that, you are both putting words in my mouth and then using them to draw false and absurb conclusions.
As for gun cruisers a Type 45 comes in at £1 Billion and wouldn’t be used unescorted or be capable of stealth. A Zumwalt 4 times that…. Cheaper? Most definitely not.
I’m not talking about a world class AAW destroyer or land attack cruiser designed by people who think they have a limitless budget, I’m talking about a ship for coastal bombardment with a SAM system, which is what you’ve been talking about with your gun sub.
Actually the unit price of a T45 is closer to £650 – £750m once the R & D costs for UKPAAMs are paid for (which they are). We don’t have to pay R & D costs on PAAMs if we install it in new ships, which in any case I haven’t suggested.
Most of the development work has been done as part of the AGS and VGS projects, This would be more of a conversion from existing projects.
Right so who is this proposal for? Sounds like USN to me, so it’s going to be expensive to bring it in to service, because it always is, also why are they interested in a conventional sub, they don’t use conventional subs. If it’s for the RN then they don’t use conventional subs either. If it’s for someone else then they first need to pay for access to the AGS/VGS technology from the USA and then pay them more money to further develop it into a working system. Then they need to pay money to design a submarine specially designed for it. What costs more to design a submarine or a surface vessell? All of a sudden my gun cruiser is starting to sound a great deal cheaper.
Quite why you think developing or modifying a gun system is expensive is beyond me. Compared to what? It would cost a small fraction of any similarly capable weapons system and most of the work has been done, especially on the AGS project.
It’s isn’t the cost of modifying a gun system, it’s the cost of modifying it to do something that has never been done before and then designing and building a platform for it. Then there’s the talk of mission profile, it looks limited, if you offered a couple of these to the RN submarine service they’d almost certainly ask for 2 more Astutes instead, the cost would probably be similar.
As for compared to what – really you can only compare it to Tomahawk or other cruise missiles based on them both being fired from a sub because there isn’t anything in service currently*, but the beauty of a Tomahawk is that it fits in exisiting sub designs, you can fire them from Torpedo tubes and you do’t have to pay large sums out to develop it.
Cheaper to develop, cheaper to build and cheaper to deploy and use.
Cheaper than what exactly? There’s only cruise missiles that exists and to be honest it’s a very poor comparison, what you’re proposing is something that doesn’t really exist at present so doesn’t have anything to compare against, except on a very loose level.
* Amongst Western Navies anyway
kev 99The fact that this Trident gun system is only a proposal means it requires development money, this equals expensive, the fact that a vertical gun system fired from a sub has never been done before means even more expensive.
The gun requires a ballistic missile sized sub, they don’t come cheap, therefore expensive platform.
So we’re talking expensive system and expensive platform.
UAVs technology launched from subs isn’t exactly mature yet, if you want to develop this further then there’s more expense.
Really if you want to get 4 155mm guns into position for coastal bombardment then building a gun cruiser with a decent SAM system would deliver a similar effect at much lower cost.
kev 99A long range coastal diesel sub with UAVs, space for special forces and 4 155mm guns would be a cheap and effective proposition. The ability to pop up off an enemy coast, shoot and scoot before ASW assets could respond would be rather useful, particularly as land based MR bases are always on the coast
Sintra is right, the cost of this submarine would be eye watering.
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