The UK also has big automotive engineering muscle and considerable material science expertise. I think if their was a need to develop a new tank it could be done natively without too much trouble. You are overlooking the vast amount of accumulated experience which goes into designing complex milita...

IMO three is a reasonable minimum number of vessels for any important purpose: one out on operations somewhere in the world; one home-ported for training and exercises but available to be sent out at short notice if required; and one in maintenance/refit/reserve. You'd only need enough planes and pe...

I am against all this sending our tax to the Americans. The UK is more than capable of building anything, the carriers go some way to corroborate that. There are two separate issues here: selecting the best design, and deciding where it will be built. Whether it's a good idea to design our own equi...

Ocean has done well, but what can you do with ocean that you cant to with one of the carriers? Retain £2.8 billion to spend on other necessary things that will otherwise be cut. Not to mention the cost of the F-35s which will operate from them.... I must admit that I am dubious about the value for ...

This is the problem, we fight the last war, not the next one. The real problem is that we never know what the next war is going to be. In fact, we have an amazingly consistent record of getting that wrong. All through the Cold War NATO prepared for high-intensity warfare in Europe; what we actually...

Unfortunately, due to the internal design, it can only carry 6 rounds of single piece, which begs the question of just what incompetant ever signed off on giving it that two piece design in the first place in 1991 after the world had already moved on to superior things as far ago as the mid seventi...

I read that when they start building the T26 Frigates they are going to take some of the armament off the T23 ships Yes - most notably the Sea Ceptor missile system, which is to be first installed on the T23 fleet to replace Sea Wolf before being transferred over to the T26 ships as they are built....

I also read a report when at the Pentagon that said that the majority of firefights take place with opponents no more than 20 meters apart. Certainly true of law-enforcement firefights, and perhaps not too far wrong in urban fighting like Iraq, but very different in Afghanistan. In 2008 the British...

SKB wrote: Guns: 2× 30 mm (1.18 in) DEFA cannons, 150 rounds/gun

Another very minor nitpick: the French version used DEFA cannon, the British one used Adens - almost identical but not quite, and the ammunition is not interchangeable.

2× Oerlikon / BMARC 20 mm L/70 KBA guns in GAM-B01 single mounts Very minor nitpick: the guns were KAA, not KBA. The Oerlikon designation system works like this: - the first letter stands for the type of weapon (Kanone) - the second letter tells you the calibre (A=20mm, B=25mm, C=30mm, D=35mm) - th...

The Army considered replacing the current rifled gun with a Rheinmetall smoothbore, as used by just about every other major NATO nation, in order to save money in the long run on ammunition development and production. They got as far as making a prototype (can't recall offhand if it was a functionin...

The Army's latest plans are to keep the SA80 family going for at least another decade, with any replacement being introduced from 2025. This happens to be the same timescale that the USA is planning for, so some coordination seems likely. The US is currently carrying out a number of studies into fut...

Hi all,

Tony Williams here - found my way over from the Think Defence blog. Generally interested in military equipment issues, particularly in small arms, automatic cannon and their ammunition (from the start of the 20th century to the present day).