Maybe if the Brits were to acquire Ospreys for some other role it would be a possibility but I can’t envision them ever buying the aircraft just for the COD role.

That was my thinking (well I think mine was that in reverse!)

Buy the Long Range version of Osprey (which happens to be the COD platform) to do lots of jobs it just so happens that one of them would be the one it was originally optimised for

“buy an Osprey, get a fleet air arm”

Wonder if the would have put Speys in them? Tomcat F.1? Sounds great!

Almost certainly

Look at the history of Corsair and Tomcat problem engines and engines which actually worked

I’m sure that we’d have had the designation Tomcat FGR1 and ideally for RAF as well as RN
Which to my mind brings images of two rocket pods under each wing glove (for no logical reason)

Would we have bought Phoenix as well? I suspect an opportunity to save money by sticking to Skyflash myself

The Falklands was a political campaign on both sides

Galtieri and co needed something to distract their populace from their domestic woes

If they could have held off until their preparations (and UK errors) were completed then they would not have needed to launch the invasion in the first place; if they had time to plan they had time to follow a far less risky course of action

Co-incidentally Thatcher and co needed something to distract voters from their domestic woes

(Famously she asked her advisers where Ark Royal and her Phantoms were when first meeting to plan a response, which suggests a less than complete understanding of UK defence capabilities; the invasion could have been avoided by a display of sufficient will before hand, repeating the SSN disappearing and leaking reports that she was headed down south or even just NOT planning to sell our baby flat top to the Australians and scrapping the Antarctic survey ship would have given the Junta the impression that the FI and FIs meant something to HMG)

EDIT: Just read the rest of the thread and have been beaten to the punch

The software is written in ADA .

ADA is a pig to programme it’s true and generates much* more lines of code than alternatives. But it excels at what it was meant to do it’s very difficult to ‘successfully’ programme in it and then find that it falls over

*much is a non specific term with no numbers given to back it up. But frankly if you are reading and able to respond to this you are connected to the sum total of open source human knowledge and could get a better understanding with less effort and/or time than it would take to query my phrasing.

I’m in complete agreement over the custom designed hardware and its obsolescence built in point though.

Vikings in Korea!

I’m torn; on the one hand its clearly **** for everyone on the Korean peninsular and neighbours that the tension is just ratcheting up. On the gripping hand I’ve a soft spot for the S3 and its good to see them going back into service rather than rotting away (however slowly that rotting is in the boneyard)

VN – Which contracts would those be? Not Korea, which I believe is the only real competition (not a beauty contest) where prices were on the table for both the F-35 and a European competitor.

Was it a real contest though? The link with the U.S. Is SO important to S Korea (and for very good strategic and historical reasons) that the likelihood of anything other than the U.S.’ next big programme winning was always very small

I think it depends which airframe you update

An F15 with new bells and whistles will still have fantastic kinematic performance and endurance (whilst it has quite rightly been stated that an AIM120 does not care what plane it was launched from, and to get the best out of it you need the mid course datalink which fits with the upgrade policy, the higher the altitude and velocity the launch aircraft has the better the performance of the missile)

An EE Lightning will still have shoddy endurance (but bags of charisma and kinematic performance) if retrofitted with DASS and Blue Vixen

What you get when you rearrange the Foxhound into a Typhoon’s wing layout…

Didn’t someone once describe the Tiffie as being an F15 crammed into an airframe the size of an F18? I suppose that design is just the (Il)logical extreme. Wouldn’t want to corner too sharply on the ground though…..