UK Defence Forum

Could we have tempest become typhoon X

http://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/26 ... m-per-copy

Pseudo wrote:I'd wondered whether Captor-E would adopt it due to the common heritage. Thanks for giving me some hope that has been.

Nevermind about 'hope' its an integral part of the system. Captor-E will be delivered with it.

https://www.leonardocompany.com/en/-/captor-e-radar

An interesting contrast to this top-down approach
" manned “New Generation Fighter” (NGF) teaming with a set of new and upgraded weapons as well as a set of unmanned systems (Remote Carriers) linked by a Combat Cloud and its Ecosystem embedded in a System-of-Systems FCAS architecture.

The JCS is based on the bi-nationally agreed High Level Common Operational Requirements Document (HLCORD) signed at Berlin Air Show ILA in April 2018"

is the Tempest (building blocks) and PYRAMID ( a mandatory integration architecture that those blocks will have to comply with), which is very much the opposite, bottom-up approach - exploring what is possible, at what cost.

NOW: guess which prgrm is more open to new participants? Top-down easily settles into optimising within a tight box and a Take-it-or-Leave-it offer to new participants?
- just my thinking; have I got it all wrong?

Timmymagic wrote:Nevermind about 'hope' its an integral part of the system. Captor-E will be delivered with it.

https://www.leonardocompany.com/en/-/captor-e-radar

Excellent. As I said earlier, I'm a massive fan of how brilliantly simple and effective an idea it appears to be. I doubt it gives the same coverage as the Su-57's cheek-mounted arrays, but it can't be too far off when you consider that having the swash plate repositionable potentially means that you can mount it an an even greater angle than you would otherwise and provide even wider coverage.

Arguably with the franco-german project getting off the ground BAE might find themselve a bit on the sidelines here.
Will it end up with UK having to choose between a US or an EU "off the shelf" solution?
With the f35 precedent set I wouldn't be surprised if any european offer would encompass the same technological restrictions in future.

Arguably the recent announcements on Franco German projects while good for pr are little more than keeping the program in a holding pattern.

Much will depend on exactly what they want out of a new design. Typhoon and rafale or derivatives there off offer a significant amount. If you team them with something like neuron or the expendable uav/missile it’s hard to see the cost benefit of a completely new design.

On the radars and there positioning around the a/c anywhere you place a radar it has to be able to “see” out of the structure and hence an enemy radar can see in, so the structure and systems behind it maybe become more complex and expensive to manufacture as a result.

Ultimately it maybe better to place any additional radars in a pod much like the proposal for vigilant.

From what can be found it would seem the franco-german efforts are actually quite serious. Pretty much the opposite of a PR exercise if you ask me.

The slow and considerate step-by-step top down approach shouldn't fool you, they're not just building a plane, its way more than that.
They're planning a completely new defence framework encompassing land, air and probably sea too.

http://www.defense-aerospace.com/articl ... study.html

Gtal wrote:From what can be found it would seem the franco-german efforts are actually quite serious. Pretty much the opposite of a PR exercise if you ask me.

The slow and considerate step-by-step top down approach shouldn't fool you, they're not just building a plane, its way more than that.
They're planning a completely new defence framework encompassing land, air and probably sea too.

http://www.defense-aerospace.com/articl ... study.html

I’m not sure what you think €65 million buys you in the aerospace engineering world but you’d be lucky if it bought you 150 engineers for 18months. If it was a serious change of pace looking to actual develop a program production example you’d be looking to budgets to get about 6500 engineers involved its orders of magnitude out. Germany for it part will be focusing on typhoon p4e and for France there next iteration and upgrade of rafale.

This is a purely a political high level if we decided to move fwd could we work together contract..

SW1 wrote:
I’m not sure what you think €65 million buys you in the aerospace engineering world but you’d be lucky if it bought you 150 engineers for 18months. If it was a serious change of pace looking to actual develop a program production example you’d be looking to budgets to get about 6500 engineers involved its orders of magnitude out. Germany for it part will be focusing on typhoon p4e and for France there next iteration and upgrade of rafale.

This is a purely a political high level if we decided to move fwd could we work together contract..

The first contracts are of a simbolic nature signalling that they are moving forward.
This isn't some rumored tabloid story.
There are clear unambiguous statements from both defence ministers, in line with anouncements by Dassault and Airbus.
The aachen agreements were a lot more than pr.
Why are you ignoring all the cooperative elements on tanks and drones as well? They're obviously quite serious about this whole thing and the fcas is the heart of this new defence framework.

Now they're going to go off and start working on what is feasible and how it all fits together. Why should they splash the cash before the ideas are fleshed out?

In some ways we have the luxury of there being no urgency to move forward with our next platform. Doing development works on systems that may be used in such a project, and possibly also in the updating of existing platforms both in RAF service and for export makes perfect sense.

The Franco/German programme is very ambitious, both in its scale and goals. They are attempting to basically jump form an F4 Phantom II to a F-35 in one go as well as producing both manned and unmanned variants. Collaborative programmes already have in built complications by their nature, and this programme increase any by an order of magnitude. At present the small amount of seed money is generating a lot of PR for the programme but it is going to take funding probably in excess of what the US spent of their fifth generations platforms to actually get something in the air, and it is this cost that has me worried as to whether one or more parties might waver at this and start looking at alternatives like happened during certain forth generation programmes.

SW1 wrote:I’m not sure what you think €65 million buys you in the aerospace engineering world but you’d be lucky if it bought you 150 engineers for 18months. If it was a serious change of pace looking to actual develop a program production example you’d be looking to budgets to get about 6500 engineers involved its orders of magnitude out. Germany for it part will be focusing on typhoon p4e and for France there next iteration and upgrade of rafale.

This is a purely a political high level if we decided to move fwd could we work together contract..

Agreed. The £2 billion funding given to the Tempest programme until 2025 to do pre-prototype technology development is credible in my view. €65 million is enough to have political conversations and high level discussions with industry heads.

Most on my timeline are excited about some new ships, and Gavin Williamson also pulled another interesting point out the hat.

"swarm squadrons of network enabled drones...ready to be deployed by the end of this year"

Sounds like a British version of DARPA's gremlins. Excelent!

Looks like as expected Spain will be signing on the dotted line for FCAS. Not a great loss, but always on the cards due to Airbus Military being based there.

The same article also implies that the Netherlands and Italy are firmly onboard Tempest. The Italians makes perfect sense, but the Netherlands?? Why? I think that bit might be wrong. They're in the F-35 camp for the next 40 years.

https://www.france24.com/en/20190211-sp ... at-fighter

That feels like it's re-reporting something that was mentioned ages ago in almost the exact same words.

This is the Mako drone from Kratos. A jet powered, rocket launched target done costing around 3 million USD, and recently approved for export by the US, coincidence?

Could Kratos be partnering with UK companies do deliver a drone swarm based on this aircraft as part of the 100 million GBP Lanca project?

RetroSicotte wrote:That feels like it's re-reporting something that was mentioned ages ago in almost the exact same words.

Suspect its from the same slide presented in Spain, but it did mention that an LOI is to be signed this thursday at the NATO summit so looks like its ceasing to be speculation. No idea on the Netherlands bit though...it might be they're looking to protect or grow the areas of their industry that produce parts for the F-35 from 2040 onwards, but unless they're putting some funding or orders in why bother?

Or maybe it’s buying MALD-V

Timmymagic wrote:

RetroSicotte wrote:That feels like it's re-reporting something that was mentioned ages ago in almost the exact same words.

Suspect its from the same slide presented in Spain, but it did mention that an LOI is to be signed this thursday at the NATO summit so looks like its ceasing to be speculation. No idea on the Netherlands bit though...it might be they're looking to protect or grow the areas of their industry that produce parts for the F-35 from 2040 onwards, but unless they're putting some funding or orders in why bother?

Is there anything more firm on Italy joining?

dmereifield wrote: Is there anything more firm on Italy joining?

I'm sure it's still early days and whatever talks that have or will take place are going to be pretty low-key for now.

The diplomatic spat between them and the French can't bode too well for a joint EU fighter collaboration though. Recalling the French ambassador from Rome is pretty serious stuff for neighbours who share a currency and economic market.

Could make Tempest the ideal middle point between sustaining their military aerospace industry (which like ours is part Typhoon and a bit of F-35) and not being too dependent on the other two European powers or America.

Leonardo being so very Anglo-Italian should hopefully help too.

Jensy

Jensy wrote:Could make Tempest the ideal middle point between sustaining their military aerospace industry (which like ours is part Typhoon and a bit of F-35) and not being too dependent on the other two European powers or America.

Leonardo being so very Anglo-Italian should hopefully help too.

This is the key point, Italy is in pretty much the same situation as the UK with Typhoon and F-35. They're also closely linked through Leonardo who are already in the Tempest programme. They're also not too keen on working with the Germans again. Not too sure about the French as FREMM seems to be successful, but political relationships are not good and unlikely to improve in the next 4 years. All in all I'd say they were the most likely to join, probably ahead of Sweden even.

Janes is reporting that a unmanned version of Tempest has to be carrier capable, not sure how they would launch and recover it.

https://www.janes.com/article/86417/tem ... er-capable

If there going to make the unmanned element carrier capable then i would of thought getting general atomic avenger and asking for further development and in particular payload design and air vehicle assembly to happen in the uk maybe a option. A lot of infrastructure already in place to support protector.

We Should of asked for it with protector and then offered to assembly integrate and market all versions to european countries.

Responding to a question about the Swedish company's willingness to collaborate on future European combat aircraft programmes, Saab chief executive Hakan Buskhe says it has so far seen no detail about a recently launched French/German project. However, he confirms that it has had "very fruitful discussions with the UK and partners" regarding the Tempest concept.

https://www.flightglobal.com/news/artic ... sa-455831/

Loyal wingman to be carrier capable

https://www.janes.com/article/86417/tem ... er-capable

Yeah, but the companion to the wingman - the one from the carrier - would need to rely on the astronaut way of doing a 'pee'
- were that to be the way forward; the manned fighter itself coming in from far