I understand where your coming from but for the huge cost of deploying a carrier just for the sake of maintaining carrier doctrine seems like a massive waste to me, especially when there isn’t any plans (that I have heard of anyway) of a new Brazilian carrier on the way in the near future. and im not sure training for harriers carrier ops is more expensive than the constant training required to perform carrier traps?

Its cheaper because you don’t have to maintain catapults and arresting gear, which also decreases the needed crew. The problem is that they would have three choices. First you get BAe to reopen their Harrier Production line, which would be expensive, secondly you look at the Yak 141 which is going to be expensive since you would have to pay for the completion of development as well as the building of the production line. However if the product is sufficiently cheap you may get overseas orders from China, India, Russia, Thialand etc. Third option is an off the shelf buy of F-35B’s which is probably the cheapest of the three.

A question. How much would it cost to develop a STOVL Aircraft using the F135 or F136 along with the lift fan from the F35 if you dropped stealth as a requirement and used the avionics from Eurofighter?

The placement of a single island has to be optimised either for air operations (best stationed aft) or ships operation (best stationed forward). The Americans go for air ops, the French go for ship ops, Britain has chosen to do both.

It means that air ops can be optimally controlled as can ship ops. It probably build some redundancy into the ship as well, the island always looked like a bit of a juicy target for a SSGW to me.

I’m fairly sure there is a gas turbine or two under each Island in sponsoons as well.

I think you should not read much into it. The requirement for the USN is to keep a large fleet of Legacy hornets active, while for Brazil they only need a few.

If the Americans will let them, they can go handpick the few they want from amongst the potential junk.

The problem is that the USN Jets have all been used about as much as the Australian and Canadian ones, which have had so many flying hours that the entire centre barrel of the aircraft is being replaced. I think I read somewhere that the USN was considering joining the program so that it could keep its 18’s going until when they are scheduled to be replaced by F35C.

Long Story short, USN, RAAF and RCAF Hornets arent really an option, I’m not sure what condition the Malaysian, Spanish and Swiss Hornets are in though.

There are still a small number of upgraded A4’s in Storage in New Zealand that are for sale.

thats an interesting thought on CDG but as a nuclear powered vessel ever been transfered?

It would be a really interesting thing to see.

With the french not confirming that they will join the CVF project i think in the end they may use the deisgn but change it to use nuclear propulsion. They love it.

Sure, the Indians Leased a sub to the Indians in the 80’s or easly 90’s and an Akula II is about to be transferred as part of a lease agreement.

Which IN Submarine did the Chinese capture?or was it in your dreams.:p

I think he was trying to say “found” or “detected”, not “captured”

AFAIK all the Argentinean Skyhawks had probes (I don’t recall ever seeing a picture of one without), but not the less numerous Mirages & Neshers.

That would make sense 🙂

Unless there is clear evidence that they do not train for anti-shipping tasks, I would strongly assume that YES, they do, as the Air Force exists to deal not only with the enemy air force and land forces, but also the naval force of any potential enemy.

The smaller planes especially would have little difficulty if they choose the anti-radar option for attack.

The problem is that you have to find the target first, so if you launch 60 aircraft and they separate into pairs to search for a target you might find only 4-8 aircraft making radar contact. And then if they pass that contact on to the other aircraft, you may have 60 aircraft launching missiles at a single oil tanker or something.

Edit:As an example, the Argentines launched strikes of ~36 aircraft in 1982, however many aircraft did not find targets and many of the ones that did were shot down.

Does an anti-ship version of Storm Shadow Exist, i doubt it would be hard to switch out the guidance system.