[QUOTE=BME330]

France still has some Mirage F-1EQ stored brand new

What happened to the undelivered Mirage F-1EQ fighters. Saddam Hussein didn’t pay for them, them there was talk of delivering the fighters to the Kuwaitis during the Gulf War? That was 15 years ago?

The Delhi sonar should look similar

What is the source of the excellent line drawing?

New images from KHI.

Thanks are these brochure scans or from the web? Links?

Harrier is no longer needed. It’s a great aircraft, but a V/STOL jet fighter is no longer really important in modern-day war since the prospects of Russia blowing up airfields all over Europe is very very slim, no matter how many NMD sites that can’t hit SS-25s are put in Poland.

So, the UK can fix it’s problems through the EF-2000 by speeding up the Tranche 3 program. That fixes the RAF.

The big problem is that the RAF won’t have Tranche 3 standard Eurofighters for many years. With the drawdown of the Jaguar fleet, there is already an air-to-ground capability gap.

In the longer term, the RAF will need to either upgrade Tranche 1 and 2 Eurofighters to a minimally capable Tranche 3 standard, or face the premature retirement of these already obsolete airframes.

The RN? They have two options. Developing a naval Typhoon, or doing the smart thing and collaborating with France on the new carrier, making it CTOL, and buying Rafales. Problems solved.

Why not tie the cancellation of the CV-F to the cancellation of the F-35B.

The sad truth is that a navalized Eurofighter would require a far longer timescale than the JSF and would been even more costly on a per unit basis. It is also likely that a navalized Eurofighter couldn’t entire until several years after the retirement of the GR.9 fleet. In short, the RN would have two brand new carriers for several years before they would have any fighters in service. Even after the wait, the end product would be spectacularly expensive and obsolete.

It is even sadder that the CV-F cannot be readily adapted to CTOL operations – despite all of the many claims to the contrary. EMALS catapults are far from proven, and it is hard to imagine the integration of steam catapults, along with the requisite boilers and accumulators, into the CV-F design.

They are counting on the SDB and other weaponty to acheive this role as they are starting to get more confidence in their weapon sensors .

The future belongs to cheap, small, low collatoral damage weapons like SDB.

It is also reasonable to expect that every JSF might have a rudimentary emitter locating capability equivilent to the current Tornado ECR or the former F-4G Wild Weasel.

Bristol was designed as an air defence ship to support the aborted CVA-01 project. Sort of a pre-Aegis version of the USN’s Ticonderoga’s.

When the carrier program was stillborne the rationale for more Bristol’s went away.

One of the major issues was that she was not designed to carry a helicopter, a cardinal sin for a modern warship of any size.

In addition it was a period of Defence cost cutting in the UK (like it always is) and there was no money for the additional three Type 82’s planned.

Instead money was saved by reverting to a smaller vessel, the Type 42 which was built to a smaller size than originally planned as (you guessed it) a cost saving measure. For the same reason the Ikara was deleted from the design.

One thing Bristol was excellent at was acting as a flagship as she was outfitted with a full and very comprehensive communications suite including multiple sattelite communications channels plus the full set of Link communications channels. I understand that she often acted as communications gateway ship for RN ships wishing to communicate with non-RN ships that were fitted incompatable communications systems (particularly Link 11 and Link 16).

Unicorn

The original plan was to build a total of 8(!) Type 82s for the two planned fleet carriers.

It seem entirely clear that the RN intended to maintain a fleet of 16 AAW destroyers. Of course, the Type 82 became a singleton class, and it became increasingly clear that the Seaslug armed Counties were entirely obsolete – despite being relatively young ships.

I think that the need for such a large number of hulls was a driving reason for the small size of the Type 42s. The RN got all 14 planned units, and wound have had a Sea Dart armed destroyer fleet of 15 units…if two hadn’t been lost in the Falklands.

Keep in mind that the French never had more than 7 AAW units, despite a comparably sized fleet, so the Royal Navy may have been overly ambitious about overall force totals.

Perhaps it would have been better to have had 8 Type 82s, than to have 12 surviving Type 42s?

Evening Times (Glasgow)
July 19, 2006
Pg. 2

The Jebat class vessels are smaller scale versions of the Type 23 frigate

Yarrow offered an entire series of stretched and shortened Type 23 frigate variants. Most people know about the 7 and 10 meter “stretches” offered to the RN, but there export proposals that were 13 to 28 meters shorter than the production Type 23.

Blue Vixen’s scrapped now. Not gonna be much spares support….

I suggest you mean Vixen 500E AESA:

http://www.selex-sas.com/datasheets/Vixen500E.pdf

What relationship does Vixen 500E have with the now out-of-service Blue Vixen radar? Are we simply talking about an AESA grafted onto the existing Blue Vixen radar?