arfah wrote:Helicopter from RAF Valley suffers technical emergency, lands, then catches fire.

That will buff out, right?

If you are going to go smaller than 7.62mm NATO, why keep the calibre? A lighter bullet at lower velocity with the same cross sectional area will have a much more curved trajectory and it will be harder for a soldier to score a hit. How are the short 7.62mm rounds "better" than the NATO s...

after ww1 there wasn't allot of money or will to spend money on defence and as you say there was millions of rifles in store....even the SMLE was looked at to be updated to the mk IV? (there wasn't even the money to do that) and the No4 only came much later. Same with the Americans large numbers of...

Ian Booth's latest blog is available here: http://www.aircraftcarrieralliance.co.uk/delivering-the-nations-flagships/programme-director-blog/yr-2016/july-16/july-blog.aspx I'm sure some F-35 hater will soon pick up on the QE tracking F-35's on it's Long Range Radar....and in the next paragraph ment...

It'll already be great news if it goes onto Tranche 2. Tranche 1 is pretty much out of the question: while not completely impossible, it is technically very complex and extremely expensive. It'll be installed on Tranche 3A aircraft first, and then, hopefully, on Tranche 2 if we are lucky. Its retro...

I believe it was. But if I remember correctly we were looking at a different launch system from the US. It was to be an electromagnetic system from Converteam, which I believe was partially developed and working better than the US EMALS (at least sub-scale).

QE's float out date was 17th July 2014, 2 years and 2 days ago. Is QE likely to need a hull clean beneath the waterline before sea trials? SKB, I try to keep current, by reading this thread, and before that being a lurker on Mp.nets mega thread. I seem to remember that they had run the engines unde...

Ha ha. Nice try. Ha ha. Nice try. Ron to be fair, and not wanting to derail the QE thead, all the reports I've ever seen were glowing about the ALARM's performance, in contract to that of the HARM's. The only bad thing I've read about it, is that it was surprisingly not very low drag carried extern...

downsizer wrote:PWII is not supported nor trained for on Tornado any longer. It was only retained until typhoon could do PW4.

Bugger. I'd hope we sell them/gift them on to a friendly country who can make use of them (friendly as in European or Commonwealth, not Saudi).

Call me old fashioned, but with much of SS being classed as secret I don't like seeing these numbers bandied around. ;) Fair do's. But numbers aside. Are we really going to scrap a large number of our most effective/expensive weapons? I could understand if they were a throwback to the Cold War, but...

ISIS? We did fire 2 the other week. If we're getting rid of a load though, couldn't we have fired 20? Just to make absolutely sure....Plus another few just in case... It is something that perplexes me though. If you look at the weapons used by Typhoon and Tornado in Iraq (and very occasionally Syri...

93km according to the RAF website. Seems pretty good. No idea what the actual range is, but I'd take any published range on the RAF's website with a massive dose of salt. If it's on there, its wrong, and usually by a healthy margin. Storm Shadow is listed as around 200 miles range and ASRAAM's used...

I don't recall much about said about it's withdraws. It seemed to have reached a point where it needed to be mlu'd after the 2010 SDSR so got canned as a result, I suspect money was the issue. All I've seen about it's effectiveness is that it was regarded as far more effective than HARM in a real wo...

downsizer - In all truth those figures are all open source. The original buy has been mentioned in loads of places, including Hansard, as have the number to be mlu'd (granted neither are exact). After that it's just subtraction and a bit of common sense guesswork of numbers of rounds expended in tra...

Brimstone characteristics straight from the horses mouth, MBDA. They don't say much on range. Think Defence in his excellent Complex Weapons series had this to say.. "The range of Brimstone is generally accepted to be approximately 20km, with Brimstone 2, again, generally accepted as approxima...

It would be fairly straightforward. But the RAF is looking to move to DEAD with SPEAR 3. For SEAD it would make more sense to re-resurrect ALARM with it's loiter capability. For the UK the F-35 negates the need for the long range AND speed of a Meteor ARM. The SPEAR 3 has the range. If we were looki...

Well, thus far we've seen (including in development concepts) LRASM: - Mk41 capable - Canister Capable - F-35 Capable - P-8 likely NSM: - Mk41 capable - Canister Capable - F-35 Capable - Submarine Capable MARTE-ER: - Typhoon Capable - Helicopter Capable Sea Venom: - Helicopter Capable From that lis...

This talk of trials followed (much) later by actual service reminds me of the Sea Skua in 1982. When the Falklands issue erupted the Sea Skua was undergoing initial trials. Overnight the trials Lynx and the available Sea Skua missiles were put on the task force, only to prove dramatically successfu...

[quote="Ron5"]That's a very good question (how will a UK Apache use over the horizon targeting). I don't know but in discussions about extended range Hellfires, one possibility was getting their targeting info via link 16 from an airborne ISTAR asset. In UK terms, I guess that would be a S...

Regrettably they're not British. They're Belgian.

Hopefully, they won't wreck the fantastic workplace created by Jimi Heselden. It was a genuine family business, I guess Jimi's family got an offer they couldn't refuse, particularly as HESCO was having a rather epic decade of business.

the commencement of MBDA Storm Shadow and Taurus KEPD 350 stand-off cruise missile tests in late 2013 have given added impetus to the concept. Both of these missiles are large and 'boxy' weapon systems that impart a great deal of drag on the host aircraft, reducing range. This is compounded by the ...

Ron5 wrote:Couple JCB's should do the trick. British too I think.

Maybe for the heavier tasks, but there were some new towing units being trialled down at Culdrose for aircraft and helicopter movement. There were some photos floating around somewhere...

It was the use of the word 'new' that threw me....I guess it means something different to the MoD.

Does this mean that the Merlin fleet is going to have enough engine spares to last a lifetime?

What happens to the UK Apaches in service now? Are they that shagged out after ops in Helmand? Given that we never had more than 8 in theatre from a buy of 67 , they can't be in that bad a state surely? I'm sure the MoD has done the usual cannibalizing to keep the fleet going, and there is no doubt ...

Is Harpoon going to be really disbanded? Then, I guess the only (?) solution will be to, - increase the Harpoon life till, say, 2022 or so - adopt LRASM on both canister (T23 and T45) and VL (T26) versions. If you do the similar stuff with NSM/JSM, canistered one is NSM, and VL is JSM, which are si...