Royal Navy

[talharim]

Dizem por ai que e o melhor hunter killer do mundo

[P44]

Royal Navy aircraft carrier may be sold to India

Government considering sale one of two £2bn machines as part of strategic defence review




Computer generated image issued by the MoD of an aircraft carrier that is due to be built in Britain. Photograph: MoD/Crown Copyright/PA Wire

One of the Royal Navy's new £2bn aircraft carriers could be sold off under government cost-cutting plans, the Guardian has learned.

It is understood that India has recently lodged a firm expression of interest to buy one of the two state-of-the-art 65,000 tonne carriers, which are still being built by BAE Systems in the UK.

Any sale of the long-delayed carriers would be highly controversial and would leave the Royal Navy with just one carrier. It could also force Britain to borrow from the French navy, which itself only has one carrier and is reluctant to build any more.

Last summer French president Nicolas Sarkozy proposed to Gordon Brown that the two navies co-ordinate the maintenance and retrofitting of their carriers, so that at least one of them is at sea at any time.

The government has accepted it would cost more to cancel the contract for one of the carriers than it would to carry on building. BAE Systems is also keen to increase its arms exports and would welcome the sale of such a flagship piece of hardware to a country such as India, which is keen to upgrade its military, particularly its air force.

According to senior defence sources, Whitehall officials are examining the feasibility of selling one of the carriers. It is understood they are planning to put forward the option as part of the government's strategic defence review, which will start early next year. The review will publish its conclusions after the general election. Whichever party wins the election, the review is expected to result in savage cuts to the UK's military budget.

"Selling a carrier is one very serious option," a defence source said this weekend, although the government is a long way from committing to any sale. It could take between six and 12 months to reach a decision, he added.

The £4bn aircraft carrier programme has been dogged by controversy and has become a totemic in the issue over how public spending – and in particular the military budget – should be cut. The programme has already been delayed by two years to push back spending commitments, which will end up costing the taxpayer more in the long run. Construction finally began in July on HMS Queen Elizabeth, which is due to come into service in 2016. Preparatory work on the HMS Prince of Wales, due for launch in 2018, has also started. The two carriers will replace the ageing Invincible class carrier fleet, and are three times the size.

Military chief and the companies involved in building the carriers had feared the government could scrap one of the carriers altogether to save money. But it is understood that the financial penalties the government would be required to pay to BAE Systems, the company building the ships, would be prohibitive. The company is currently drawing up a formal estimate of the cost the government would incur from cancelling the order.

About 10,000 jobs in Portsmouth, Barrow-in-Furness, Fife and Glasgow depend on the work. Now that construction of both carriers will almost certainly go ahead, the government is desperate to find other ways to cut costs.

Another option under consideration is to only equip one of the carriers with aircraft, leaving the other to only operate with helicopters, which could save more than £3bn. Alternatively, the two carriers could share one complement of planes. The original plan envisaged equipping each carrier with 75 new US-made Joint Strike Fighter planes, but the cost has soared from the original price tag of £18m each.

Asked about the plan for a sale of the one of the carriers, a spokeswoman for the Ministry of Defence said lots of options for the carriers were being considered, but stressed that no decision had been taken. "We have got the strategic defence review coming up, so all options are on the table," she said.

The debate over whether British soldiers fighting in Afghanistan have the equipment they need – most notably enough helicopters to enable them to avoid heavily mined roads – has brought the issue of military spending to the fore. Military analysts say that the navy's budget, such as that earmarked for the carriers under review, is most vulnerable to cuts, compared to that of the army and air force.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009 ... rrier-sale

[Sintra]

Abriu a "sily season" nos jornais Britânicos...

[P44]

Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/12/02 ... aams_fail/
Navy's £1bn+ destroyers set to remain unarmed for years

Ex-British miracle missiles in new test FAIL

By Lewis Page

Posted in Science, 2nd December 2009 14:46 GMT

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The "Sea Viper" missile system for the Royal Navy's new Type 45 destroyers looks set to suffer further setbacks following a reported failure during test firings. The weapons are already so late that the first £1bn+ Type 45 has been in naval service for nearly a year - almost completely unarmed.


Might as well park her up for a bit, lads. You're wasting your time

News of the test failure comes courtesy of the Ares blog, reporting remarks by Andrew Tyler of the UK Defence Equipment and Support (DE&S) organisation.

“[The test failure] has been a setback," says the MoD mandarin.

“We are working extremely hard with the other partner nations and the company to resolve what the problems were with the final firing ... [It is] too early to come up with the diagnosis.”

Sea Viper is the Royal Navy's name for its version of the Principal Anti Air Missile System (PAAMS), European industry's answer to the highly successful American Aegis/Standard, which has nowadays developed to the point of being able to shoot down satellites in low orbit (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/02/21 ... rets_safe/). Sea Viper/PAAMS is largely French and Italian in origin, but includes some British technology too.

The system's promised special sauce is that it is supposed to be able to knock down supersonic sea-skimming antiship missiles, a thing that even the latest Standard SM-2s may be unable to do. Such missiles are a terrible threat to surface ships without air cover, as they will only be seen by a mast-mounted radar as they emerge above the horizon during the final minute of their flight. Sea Viper/PAAMS is supposed to be able to detect a hostile shipkiller the second it appears, fire an Aster countermissile almost instantly, tip the Aster over from its vertical launch and fly it to intercept the shipkiller head-on at a closing speed in excess of Mach 5.

There has always been some doubt as to whether this is worth doing - it would be cheaper and simpler to deliver maritime air cover from carriers than provide every convoy or task group with a screen of £1bn+ destroyers. Airborne radar can cover vast areas of ocean, tracking sea-skimmers over their entire flight, and patrolling jets would have a much easier task taking down the shipkillers with time in hand from behind - or, even easier, attacking the plane or ship carrying them.
HMS Daring will probably be on her third captain by the time she's actually armed

Now it seems possible that the miracle destroyers can't actually be built anyway, or certainly not yet by the PAAMS coalition. Ares reports (http://www.aviationweek.com/aw/blogs/de ... 292ba7fe73) that the final test was "the most stressing of the test firing program". Shooting down multiple supersonic sea-skimmers is the most difficult thing that Sea Viper would ever be tasked to do - so we can take it that it can't in fact do what it says on the tin.

This is embarrassing on many fronts for the MoD. Firstly, the Ministry deliberately chose to continue with PAAMS when the multinational Euro-warship project foundered and Blighty went on alone with the Type 45 - even though an Aegis system in a British hull would have been far cheaper and more capable (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/23 ... page2.html).

Secondly, the only real reason this was done was in order to preserve British jobs and tech expertise. This too has been a failure as BAE Systems - the UK part of PAAMS - has already fired those workers anyway (http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/b ... 934053.ece), before the system is even in service. The weapons are no longer even partly British.

Thirdly, Sea Viper/PAAMS is about the only reason for having a Type 45 destroyer. Space has been included in the ships' design for Tomahawk cruise missiles, but none have been bought and there is no sign that any will be. We already have the ships, but in the absence of Sea Viper they are embarrassing, expensive white elephants.

HMS Daring, first of the Type 45s, will have been in Navy hands for a year in eight days' time. She is armed with nothing but a 4.5-inch "Kryten" gun turret and a pair of light 30mm cannon, suitable for shooting up pirate dhows and the like. This is an utterly pathetic amount of punch for a £1.1bn (at the latest estimate) warship with a crew of 200. Her first captain has already been and gone; the second, it now seems certain, will also depart before the ship is capable of achieving anything even vaguely in proportion to her cost or even vaguely worth his time commanding her. It won't be at all surprising if the same thing happens with the second Type 45, Dauntless, which has just arrived (http://www.google.com/hostednews/ukpres ... Uq0ITqf9JA) in Portsmouth ahead of handover to the Navy tomorrow.

The whole saga is made even more depressing by the fact that it is very largely the vast expense of the Type 45s which has led to the swingeing cuts to the rest of the British fleet seen in recent years, and which is imperilling the future of the new carriers which would be so much more useful.

We've asked the MoD for more details on the test failure, but as of publication hadn't heard back. We'll update this as soon as we hear. ®

[old]

Visto el panorama en materia de destructores navales parece ser que han acertado Españoles Holandeses y Alemanes (F100 LCF y F124) y han fracasado Italianos Franceses e Ingleses (Type 45 y Horizont)

Cada uno por su lado, fabricando series cortas de no mas de 6 unidades. Si exisitera una política comun, se podrian fabricar series de 20/25 Destroyers, al margen de Fragatas menores.

This is Europa

[soultrain]

[talharim]

A Marinha do Império Britanico será sempre a guardiã da Europa livre.

Deus abençoe a Rainha !!!!!

[P44]

é isso, é...


From The Times
January 4, 2010
Time runs out for ageing Royal Navy carriers
Tom Coghlan: Behind the Story

It had been a textbook wargame in almost every respect. Ark Royal performed violent evasive manoeuvres at 30 knots in the Channel and a jet thundered past its bridge amid anti-aircraft fire. And then there was the fire in one of the carrier’s four engines — not part of the exercise.

The first sign of the air attack is a radar blip 100 nautical miles away. In the green glow of the screen Flying Officer Sarah McDonnel warns that it fits the profile of a Russian built Flanker aircraft.

The Ark Royal is performing violent evasive manoeuvres at almost 30 knots, as the incoming jet thunders past the bridge amid a clatter of outgoing anti-aircraft fire. As it does so there is a report of a fire on one of the four engines of Ark Royal.

In the midst of a vividly simulated wargame last month in the English Channel, complete with attacking aircraft and blank ammunition, this last piece of information meets with concern. It isn’t part of the game. The fire is real. Ark Royal is one of the two carriers that the Navy has in service, but for how much longer? The ship and its sister, Illustrious, are 30-year-old veterans and although the sprinkler system put the fire out, it was the third Ark Royal has suffered since a £12 million refit ended in September. The Government cut the first steel on Queen Elizabeth, the first of the two replacements, in July. Yet even at this stage the future of the twin-carrier project is not guaranteed because of the economic backdrop and the Navy is worried.

“Once capabilities are lost, they can’t be plucked from a hat — we may not be able to regrow them in time for the next operation, whatever it may be, and prediction of the future is a challenging art,” Admiral Sir Mark Stanhope, the First Sea Lord, told The Times.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/u ... 974823.ece

[gaitero]

Tem um F-18 no da direita. não combina com ski jump....

???

Não vi F/A-18 nenhum... acho que to mal das vistas...

Alguem já se perguntou o porque de a RN desenvolver um navio de 65000t, sem catapultas???

[P44]

There is also a growing view that Britain will not be able to afford to build the two large aircraft carriers, already delayed, let alone the planes due to fly from them. "The carriers are under real threat. There will certainly be a big reduction in JSF numbers," a well-placed military source told the Guardian.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/jan/1 ... ers-budget

[gaitero]

There is also a growing view that Britain will not be able to afford to build the two large aircraft carriers, already delayed, let alone the planes due to fly from them. "The carriers are under real threat. There will certainly be a big reduction in JSF numbers," a well-placed military source told the Guardian.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/jan/1 ... ers-budget

Espera-se que o numero de F-35 caia a 50 encomendas. O que reduziria os gastos em cerca de 7 bilhões de libras.

[P44]

no artigo fala de uma redução de 50%, de 140 aviões para 70

[gaitero]

no artigo fala de uma redução de 50%, de 140 aviões para 70

Tenho dados diferentes...

Os numeros sairiam de 138 para 50...

Mas, de todo o modo, seja 50 ou 70, será com certeza uma enorme redução...

[P44]

teu cenário é ainda mais negativo, oh portista

quais são tuas fuentes?

[gaitero]

teu cenário é ainda mais negativo, oh portista

quais são tuas fuentes?

-Aerospace Web site
-Airforce Technology F-35 site
-Air Vectors F-35 site
-Flug Revue X-35 site
-Müller, Claudio. Aircraft of the World .
-Spick, Mike. Brassey's Modern Fighters: The Ultimate Guide to In-Flight Tactics, Technology, Weapons, and Equipment .
-Taylor, Michael JH Brassey's World Aircraft & Systems Directory 1999/2000 .