Instead our clever old army wastes millions on a program that hasn’t delivered anything forcing old vehicles to be thrashed into the ground and misconceived UOR purchases of vehicles that either won’t be retained or don’t fit into the logistics chain properly making them a nightmare to support.

Pedantic I know but it’s approaching a billion that has been spent on FRES so far, other than that what you’re saying is spot on, FRES has been an absolute dog’s dinner, and all for stuff that should almost certainly have been bought off the shelf years ago.

http://www.defensenews.com/story.php?i=6477523&c=AME&s=AIR

Should probably be the other way around.

It is inconceivable that the change to the F-35C wasn’t included in the cost estimate during the defence review. These are additional costs, not costs due to the change of aeroplane.

It won’t be long before these carriers are cancelled.

Regards

Nice piece of speculation, cost of reconfiguring the carriers to CATOBAR wasn’t costed at SDSR because it wasn’t known then, your talk about the carriers being cancelled is of course rubbish.

The first cost spike happened when the Government decided to slow down construction; apparently to protect jobs and not to ease pressure on the budget (honest guv), this added £1bn to the price tag. This second has happened because of the cost of building the carriers to a catobar configuration instead of STOVL, I wouldn’t be surprised if BAE has slapped a % on top for changes to the contract/deing dicked around.

Harriers could do the job for £80m a year? That would be having the carrier and crew on station and reduced fuel cost. Doesn’t factor in the cost of having the aircraft in service, let alone bringing them back into service. And that cost doesn’t include weapons use, which the £30m a week does if i am correct? Harriers don’t carry stormshadow or brimstone, so Tornado’s will still be needed for those roles. They can use PGM’s and a bunch of mavericks are lying round somewhere, not used on other types. But seeing as a major point of this conflict is to highlight the new weapons systems seemingly(including typhoon, really only to show there worth), then paying loads to bring a type out of mothballs and re-training crews, for a conflict no one wants to last months, seems pointless.

Talk about bringing back harriers is just an bit of sub-polictical smoke screen i feel

Harriers had Brimstone 1 and were slated for 2 before the SDSR, Tornado got it first because they were going to Stan.

Im sure this has been done to death, but am I the only one that cant understand for the life of me why these carriers ARENT going to be nuclear? :confused:

Cost.

Does anybody make a VL Exocet though?

Your musings on replacing helo facilities with an aft VLS farm are interesting. Accepted wisdom does very much seem to be that Frigate and larger skimmers need helo hangars. I wonder if that is likely to change? Presumably with your idea you would keep the pad and refueling facilities?

Standard is now availible in a form which double-packs in a VLS module. Whilst MBDA get their fingers out and develop VL Exocet (and Otomat especially Milas) they could work on Aster-30 which double packs. That’d make FREMM much more formidable.

Latest version of Exocet is supposedly VL compatible, I don’t think integration has been paid for with any vls on the market, obviously Sylver would be the obvious choice if it did happen though.

Has any decision been made on the AEWC platform yet? Now that it’s CATOBAR a pair of Hawkeyes would only be logical.

As far as I’m aware the MASC programme is still unfunded.