I would say its more along the lines of interservice rivarly that carries on the debate. If the picture was taken from a Viper or Eagle I there wouldn’t be as much of a stink, but considering it was a Navy plane (and one that has had a mixed reception) the bickering drags out.

Ha, it would have been two-hundred times worse if it was an Indian Su-27 that got the shot!

Oh for crisssake, if thin-skinned folks stayed off these forums, there’d be no one left to post!

If you want your Typhoon to be a multirole fighter like all the nice shiny magazine ads I see like to pitch, then a gun is as much an air-to-ground weapon as it is an air-to-air weapon.

As an example, the Israelis have gotten less and less of their air-to-air kills with guns if you look at the numbers from the Six-Day War to the Yom Kippur War to the 1982 battles over the Bekaa- it went something like all guns for the Six-Day War, to 70/30 in favor of missiles in ’73, to something like only two kills with guns in ’82. Lots of people point to stuff like that to say that an onboard gun is obsolete, but then there’s all the body of experience as has been pointed out from Afghanistan and Iraq that cannon fire has proven to be quite useful in air-to-ground operations.

And all without having to worry about firing warning shots at airliners hijacked by half-baked zealots looking for a free pass to paradise.

Or bother even posting in it? Here, have a gold star for some validation……

Maybe we should roll out the grand photoshop conspiracy again?

Will there be any money left after paying for those AMRAAM F111’s and F22’s? 😀
I think going for a single hull design would make a lot of sense, there has been a lot of support in the UK for using a Type 45 derivative to replace some of the frigate force, probably combined with a cheaper corvette to make up numbers. Problem is the cost/capability balance and numbers.

Oh do behave or we’ll have Unicorn send Carlo Kopp to your house as a dinner guest!;)

That’s one of the biggest questions in defense procurement today, the cost/capability balance. One of the big issues with going with a less capable platform to give numbers to a fleet is that inevitably, mission creep begins to affect things as the defense officials start to believe that an incremental increase in capability can come at a cheap price.

It’s really too bad that merchant shipping isn’t as well covered in the literature as naval warfare. There are so many more advances in merchant shipping that in many ways those ships are more technologically advanced and efficient than warships.

So many of what I’m sure most of us read are about naval vessels and sadly there’s a dearth of good books on merchant shipping. I highly recommend Conway’s History of the Ship series, specifically the “Shipping Revolution” as a good primer:

I thought only the A and B models were in the Flygvapnet and the C and D were export Gripens?