The UK might be smart to fill the empty spots on their deck with one just to fill in some of the excess capacity left from not buying all the F-35 airframes it set out to buy.

😎

That would require
a. two supply trains, two training programmes
b. tacit admission that FAA needed all of the original airframes

A typically over-complicated, British bodge solution to the first problem would be to operate JSF from one flat top and Sea Gripen (‘Grendel’?) from the other. But that would require b. and that won’t happen.

The fact is that, in order to ringfence spending on hospitals and education (both areas where a fair amount of money could be saved without hurting effectiveness)!

How dare you sir, spending 1/3 of the education budget on consultants and advisors at County level and higher makes perfect sense. Likewise a rolling annual programme of refurbishment to executive offices in NHS hospitals and Flag Rank retiring on a pension of full salary. Why on earth would be spend aany of that money on accomodation, personnel or a planned procurement of equipment for front line forces. You are talking rubbish 😉

Here is a picture of the LA class showing it’s VLS tubes. I’m not sure how many missiles fit in each cell but there are numbers on each cell that go up in 2’s so maybe it’s 2 in each cell. These are located further back from the front in what looks like a plug.

I’d love that to be the case

But:
Numbering starts at 6 (so I presume that 1 though 4 are for fish in t’bows)
The houses on the other side of my road have plates showing even numbers which go up in twos that doesn’t mean that each of them has two houses

So I suspect that its one missile per silo
We cannot see starboard central numbers so I’d GUESS at 5,7,9,13
We cannot see port outboard silos so I’d guess at 12,16
(Thus starboard outboard silos would be 11,15)

Harpoon has a much vaunted ability to follow two dog legs in its flightpath (which is why launchers fire out to the side they can be programmed to go 90 left or right after launch which older gen AShMs could not). Has any work gone into adapting/firing harpoon from these tomahawk silos? If I were Captain of a US SSN I’d like to be able to have my full complement of fish ready at all times. More broadly this would allow all ships with mk41 to use Harpoon.

The MR4A vs P8 and Wildcat vs anything else made by AW is interesting. Not least because it mirrors a thread in the naval aviation thread (San Antonio class vs. something else)

It appears (to me) that aquisition of military hardware is now in such small numbers that no programme (not even for the mighty USAF) can afford to be aimed at one customer.

IFF MR4A had been new build frames then UK would (I hope) have
avoided the cost overuns associated with retrofitting CNC machined wings to hand made one-off aiframes
had an airframe suitable for export to any number of operators of MPA looking to replace

IFF USN had taken a more sobere view of Zumwalt, LCS, OHP replacement, San Antonio they could have had the numbers they wanted and cleaned up on the export market

Which is why in my view it is SO important that JSF works.

Swiftsure and Trafalgar are contemporaries of US Los Angeles boats. I believe that all 3 have 5 tubes (2 port, 2 starboad and 1 amidships discharging at an angle below the bow sonar).

In all cases I believe that this was becase the bow sonar was so much larger than previous arrays and so this significantly changed position and layout of torpedo tubes.

Astute is significantly wider than S and Ts so I’d guess that there is room to mount 3 tubes each side. Also miniaturisation of accoustic transducers probably makes an equiavlent (or one would hope better) bow array achievable in smaller volume.

There was talk of making any handling room for Spearfish entirely automated due to hazards of propellant, don’t know if a way has been found around that which frees up room for a sixth tube. If Tactom is now part and parcel of standard operations then (regardless of retention or deletion of sub-harpoon capability) an extra tube would always be welcome.

All of the above subject to much guesswork and many provisos.

The other strange thing about it is it has no funnels/stacks/exhausts anywhere on it so how is it propelled, battery? I did mention this before but no one else seemed to think it was worth comenting:(

Not strictly true I writedified and I still believe that the structure which others (charmingly and naively IMO) take to be an amidships VLS is in fact the funnel.

Besides its 76mm oto gun. What’s is it armed with???

4x Exocet (since the whole point of the design is modularity that could presumably be swapped out for Harpoon with no drama or more likely FFBNW Harpoon)

Couple of small calibres (20mm GIATs I think)

Lightweight fish

The two small versions have a quad pack fore and aft of a French manpad (mistral?). The bigger version has a VLS for’d for Mica

I think that SIGMA could be the basis for a very successful RAN OPV and C3 for RN