If you go for too lean a crew, you will be losing survivability? Crew number is the key for fight to save your ship. If it is properly done, it is OK. You will probably loose some, but it wont be proportional to the amount of crew you have left. Fire fighting and flood control can all be automated,...

yes, 50 core crew is very much achievable, I don't think we should get too upset by that last tweet. Lean manning is something we should be pushing for, wages cost around £10 million for a T23. With a crew of 50 its more like £2.7 million. Not forgetting how many millions it cots to train highly ski...

I was looking for which ones were heading out that way, jonas beat me to it though ; ZZ338

I spotted that earlier and called bullshit, it seems like a very misinformed piece of reporting. I couldn't even speculate where they had got this from, perhaps getting mixed up with the Kuwati Typhoon deal is possible.

Very interesting,

2 engines means big. I suppose those engines would be split with a big internal bay in between.

donald_of_tokyo wrote:Speed is very very expensive to my understanding.

Adding "littoral towed array" will be totally impossible, I'm afraid.

My thoughts too. With that you risk ending up with another T26, which wouldn't be a bad thing, but rather defeats the objective of the FLF.

The rest I like.

As I say, that's not BAe's fault............ Of course, you could just conclude that nuclear powered carriers are really god damn expensive. I never alluded that it was BAE's fault. Everything nuclear powered is very expensive, we already knew that, and avoided making that mistake with ours. It mak...

That is either an impressive exercise in lean engineering, or a small ship.....



also, perhaps we should change FLF to T31

IIRC, the cost only rose by around £200m between the announcement of the contract and the signing of it. No, when it was approved by Parliament it was a £4 billion project, it is now a £6 billion project. The good news is they are on time and on budget for the 6 billion figure, and it is 6 billion ...

The carrier's do prove that B.A.E. can provide the ships to the budget. Well it depends which budget you look at. You could argue they are 2 billion over budget. However that early cost was mainly bullshit. If we look at the new realistic 2013 budget, we can say that the carriers are on budget. The...

As i've already said we will end up with extended rivers with seaceptor hanger and big (ish) gun. However wouldn't it have been a better idea (as suggested by TD) to make 8 small "pure" asw frigates/ opvs and then some larger "patrol /flag waving/ general purpose frigates (mission ba...

For the last two budget years it looks like this (what can be allocated from the either side of £37 bn total): Thanks, from that data the split looks like this; Split between the 3 main branches http://imgur.com/IGMjHKc.jpg Split through the entire MOD http://imgur.com/Re80C2h.jpg Quite remarkable ...

Pseudo wrote:I once again ask, what's the largest likely amount of manpower the army will have to unilaterally deploy?

from the SDSR;

"An Army Division of three brigades and supporting functions of between 30,000 to 40,000 personnel"

@Pseudo, I think it does. Everything in Britain needs to be quality over quantity. We cannot compete so well on scale, but we absolutely can compete on quality. I would always favour a smaller more credible armed forces, which is why a 2 tier navy with a light frigate, or 2 tier RAF with a Textron s...

Agreed, it's probably better to think of the Type 26 as the successor to the Type 22, the large all singing all dancing ASW specialist. My hope is that FLF ends up looking like the successor to Type 23 with less of the ASW specialist equipment. I have never thought of it like that, but I really lik...

it may be reasonably quick to train up an infantry unit, but to get a well trained, high quality, effective army does take a long time. That's not something any country can get off the shelf. Arfah put it well, all sides of the armed forces need to be strong. I think there has been some bias to supp...

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CZvxAB6WwAE2xbI.jpg:large Nice image of the current French carrier group. I'd like to see us following a similar model; 2 of our own escorts 2 European escorts 1 of our subs 1 of our auxiliaries Of course replacing the jets with daves, and the hawkeyes with V22's :D

Carrying on from the other thread, I think the army is at about the right strength now, that is plenty to react for early intervention tasks. As @WhitestElephant said they seriously need to get their shit together and fix the messy UOR vehicle fleet to benefit from some serious commonality efficienc...

Ron5, you've called it scout, therefore it will be years late and over priced sorry.

Second ship tiderace looks to be coming along well.

because I really fail to understand how Denmark can build 5 frigates and UK can't build 13 frigates... We can build 13, we also build these http://www.royalnavy.mod.uk/~/media/royal%20navy%20responsive/images/news/ships/queen%20elizabeth/140717%20queen%20elizabeth%20takes%20to%20the%20water/hms%20q...

Thought something like that could work for an LLM / Brimstone combination, but then I remembered that would break our rules about only using weapons on a single platform.

repurposing old air frames for a new role, thats a fantastic idea, what could go wrong?

Engaging Strategy wrote:Also, considering we're in the STOVL business it's V-22 or nothing.

Harrier in tanker configuration?

I think I am more optimistic than some. The current leadership has committed at 2% of GDP on defence, as long as the economy keep on going as it is set to we can expect modest increases to defence. I think if we get a conservative government that 2 percent is reasonably safe. If we get a labour gove...