Rumours have been persistent that there were still problems with MRA4, it wouldn’t surprise me if they was some truth in it. Shame really but for a little more vision and a little less penny pinching from the Treasury we could have had the world class MPA+ that new builds would have given us.

Yasen class doesn’t have pumpjet propulsion?

Libya didnt need 500nm standoff ranges though Kev. If we can close in, as happened with French, Italian and US through decks there we could use the kinds of weapons you list. The ones above just show options for strike effect keeping the deck 500nm or so back if so required.

Which doesn’t reinforce you’re insistence that 500nm range weapons are enough, there is still a requirement for the weapons I listed, if we can only use them in an environment where the enemy has no credible airforce because our aircraft are short ranged then CVF and JCA can’t do the job it needs to.

As stated earlier Kev 200nm offshore isnt a random figure and the CO of the Charles de Gaulle would have been well aware of it. From a 20,000ft airborne radar the radar horizon, against a 100ft masthead, is about 185nm. At 200nm then the carrier is quite undetectable. The MPA trying to target though is running around emitting on his search set and will likely gain a little attention for his efforts. It would take a very decent airforce indeed to generate that risk.

That’s still quite a risk that you’re taking, hide the carrier at that range is not a game we should be playing when we’ve got the option of making it that exponentionally more difficult, and I wish I had you’re confidence that we will never go up against an enemy with anything more than a useless airforce, after all we’re not talking about single MPAs here, any country with 1 almost certainly have multiples.

The CO of CDG will have been well aware that there was virtually no credible air threat by the time they were in position.

Its already well recognised that the requirement for carrier strike is ISTAR and not just AEW. No-one is talking about E-2 despite the fact that, as of right now, we are still officially building CATOBAR. That is because of the understanding that a monolithic solution like Hawkeye does not address the requirement however nice it may be to have.

And yet despite this in all the years since the replacement carrier concept has been floating around the MOD have not come up with a carrier capable ISTAR programme, and indeed don’t even appear to be investigating it as a concept.

No?. So when weve taken our pound of flesh back out of the bankers and the financial crisis is yesterdays news things arent going to get better?. Who’s to say what will be justifiable in the middle distance future?. I say justifiable because, obviously, CATOBAR is affordable now it would just cause uncomfortable decisions to have to be taken.

I’m looking at nearly 70 years of post WWII history, MOD budgets aren’t getting any easier, Government’s don’t want to fund what their actual requirements would cost and the forces are forever shrinking, conversion costs won’t be forthcoming in the future for the same reasons they weren’t forthcoming for the WWII carriers.

I’ve already covered why the threat, that needs us to go CATOBAR, will give us the necessary warning to DJ a page or so back. Just to reiterate it no-one else, barring India and China, is building up a force capable of challenging us in blue water and we arent going after either of those powers on our own!. Anyone else who is a likely threat will take years to build up an entry denial capability and get it operational. That build up will provide the political justification for the spend to counter it as well.

I know Jonesy and I didn’t agree with any of it, in my lifetime the only occasion I believe where we’ve used an aircraft carrier in an actual shooting war with a 2 year notice of the requirement was GW2 and then it was only used as an LPH, military planners are notiriously bad at predicting the future.

I think it’s fair to say we’ve done this debate to death and it’s obvious neither of us is has moved an inch, since you probably think I’m being stubborn I’ll set out why I believe F35b is the wrong choice:

1. The CVF requirement for surge capability and sortie generation are dependent on a large JCA buy that was originally intended to be 150 airframes. That large JCA buy won’t be anywhere near that now (probably about a third!) and those sortie generation rates and overall surge capability now look like they won’t be achievable. It’s just another one of the 98 SDR decisions that has turned out to be either wrong or unaffordable/unfunded, in this case it’s probably both though.

2. If doubts about the surge capability of CVF exist then STOVL CVF looks pointless, we should bite the bullet and get as much bang for our buck as we can. To me it looks like we should be building CATOBAR CVF and creating a capability similar to France.

3. Joint Force F35 will be subject to the usual differing forces requirements and as a result be a cause of inter-services infighting, same as JFH was and other periods where the RAF have had control of naval fixed wing aviation. I don’t see this ever going away regardless of MOD talk about jointness because the RAF don’t want to be the FAA.

4. STOVL makes the carriers fundamentally more limited for their lifetime until conversion happens.

5. F35b has reduced range, internal payload and bringback weight compared to the JCA requirement. The solution for reducing the effect on the bringback weight problem appears to negate one of the main advantages of STOVL; vertical landing, it will also mean a greater training requirement and take up more space on the flight deck.

6. Internal weapons bays; it’s looking fairly limited about what it can carry, apart from 500lb PWII and PWIV there are question marks over every other weapon the UK is intending to use in the future. I think the final straw for me was when I saw the MBDA mock-up of SPEAR Capability 3 with 2 in an F35a weapon bay. I’m getting a very real worry that we’re going to have to buy unique weapons just for use on it, or worse, we could buy a VLO aircraft that we can only operate as VLO on very rare ocassions.

7. F35b cost and maintenance issues.

There’s probably a few more things that I can’t remember right now, but even if there wasn’t I believe the disadvantages of F35b now outweigh the single advantage in training required for getting pilots to sea.

There, that’s me done for this thread.

India are building their own carriers, a country that wants to build it’s military infrastructure isn’t going to be interested in buying an aircraft carrier.

Remember F-35B isn’t Harrier either. With standoff weapons strike radius is allegedly near 500nm.

True enough but you can’t solve every problem with a stormshadow; after all it can only hit static targets and if that’s all we want to do then we shouldn’t be building aircraft carriers, we should be building cruisers with loads of vls and TLAM because they could do the same job for a lot less money.

JCA needs to be able to drop less expensive ordinance on lower value fixed targets, it also needs to be able to go after moving ones.

Well i know one of them is AMRAAM, but here is the link:

http://www.navair.navy.mil/index.cfm?fuseaction=home.NAVAIRNewsStory&id=4976

Right, first off from reading that it’s not 9 weapons it’s 9 weapons combinations, also:

Testing included inert versions of the GBU-12 Laser-Guided Bomb, the 1,000-pound GBU-32 Joint Direct Attack Munition and the AIM-120 Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missile.

Depending on how the weapons combinations are classified that could probably make up all 9 combinations.

That Daily Mail article is a hash of 2 different stories one of which is a non-story anyway since Rivet Joint has been known about for at least a couple of years.