Cameron's F-35 U-turn: BAE Systems still calls the shots at No 10 So there it is: done. As this is written, defence minister Phillip Hammond is on his feet in the House of Commons, trying to justify the fact that he and his boss, David Cameron, have decided that the Royal Navy's new aircraft carrier (maybe carriers) will not now have any catapults or arrester gear in order to save money. This …
Even when weapons of war are not actually destroyed, their manufacture is still a convenient way of expending labour power without producing anything that can be consumed. A Floating Fortress, for example, has locked up in it the labour that would build several hundred cargo-ships. Ultimately it is scrapped as obsolete, never having brought any material benefit to anybody, and with further enormous labours another Floating Fortress is built. In principle the war effort is always so planned as to eat up any surplus that might exist after meeting the bare needs of the population. In practice the needs of the population are always underestimated, with the result that there is a chronic shortage of half the necessities of life; but this is looked on as an advantage. It is deliberate policy to keep even the favoured groups somewhere near the brink of hardship, because a general state of scarcity increases the importance of small privileges and thus magnifies the distinction between one group and another.
The recent "Defence and Security Co-operation Treaty" between UK and France include a part about carrier sharing...
I think the french will feel a bit tricked if UK carriers won't be able to accomodate the Rafale-M, but they still have to respect the agreement on the CdG...
Maybe the fact that this decision was made so close to the french presidential elections and the change of government was not a coincidence.
The French tricked the UK into this agreement knowing their catapult could never launch a F-35C. It had to be extended to support the E2 which weights about the same but launches at half speed. The French carrier can't even launch a fully loaded Rafale.
Whats shocking is the complete lack of investigation this shows in the original decision to switch to the C and share the French mini-carrier.
Is this the French mini carrier you're talking about? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_aircraft_carrier_Charles_de_Gaulle_(R91)
She's 20 m shorter than your precious Queen Elizabeth class aircraft carriers, so that would make those mini+ or something.
If you have to lie to make your point, that means you're wrong.
1. If we have US aircraft carriers - they'll have to constantly go back to the US to be worked on. Every time a ship comes back from Sea, they do some work on it - and there isn't much in the way of UK military ports that'll take a ship the size of a US aircraft carrier.
2. Cats and traps involve throwing a very heavy aircraft at a very high rate of acceleration (or deceleration) off a carrier. It isn't just a bit of welding, and we'll stick these on here. Since we don't have a nuclear engine to generate steam, it'll have to be EMALS to launch. EMALS is so brand spanking new, that the Yanks have just started to get it to work, and not even on a boat yet.
3. F-18 is an inferior aircraft to both Eurofighter, & F35. Indeed, on of the strongest areas of the F-35 is its sensor package, which is really useful fighting the kind of wars we are fighting, and will be fighting.
1. How often do you call "constantly" and how "constant" would it be compared to the dock time for our home-built ships and would not a contract decide on threat of penalty decide how constant that was?
These are metrics one ought to know before throwaway statements like that.
2. Emals works and will be working long before F-35 - B or C. It's definitely way ahead in testing of F35.
3. Yes, but the whole point is that it can go anywhere on an aircraft carrier now - which Eurofighter defintely can't and F-35 won't for many years. Actually, the sensor package is vastly over-specced for the kinds of wars we have been, are and will be fighting. Those sorts of sensors are best loaded on a cheap ucav not an all-singing, all-dancing fighter plane of which we will be able to afford all too few of.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/12/23/lemv_cargo_potential/
If this British designed airship has the potential '...to carry big cargoes' then it can carry airboure radar etc and the people to operate them. Or leave them in unmanned mode with targetted microwave and/or laser links back down to the carrier.
According the article they have a 21 day flight duration so only has to "touch down" on the carrier to refuel every three weeks. The navy can refuel a flying helicopter from a support ship, so this airship doesn't even have to touch down, just lower a fuel pipe.
Obviously, under some (most??) wind conditions, refueling while flying might not be possible, but with a 21 day flight range, just send a new one from any convenient land base.
Not only do we still have a few years to iron out any "difficulties" before they will be needed, but with the interchangable modules, they can be re-purposed as cheap slow cargo or long duration AWACs etc as required. They could probably launch/retrieve drones too.
I had initially thought that the F-35Bs could be dismounted from the carriers and used in another, Harrier-like, role: eg in a zero length field situation from a clearing in the jungle, or the Falklands.
However I find they need a ski-jump to get any significant weight of bombs - F-35s are primarily light bombers - into the air from a zero length field. They would have to operate from ski-jump carriers or bases with runways, with a fairly short range and considerably lower (than eg a F-35C) bomb load from runways.
F-35Bs would be of almost no use if dismounted in zero length field situations, and of very little use in runway tactical/strategic situations unless the runway was unusually close to the action.
So, on to electric catapults which cost billions - or rather, not on. But wait-a-bit, why electric catapults?
A 30,000 kg aircraft needs to be accelerated to takeoff speed in about 1.5 seconds - say 65 m/s from the catapult and 10 m/s from the aircraft's engines, for a total of 75 m/s (or 145 knots). The aircraft accelerates at 5G maximum, the catapult path is 56m to 75m (about 250 feet) long.
That's somewhere around 75 MJ of kinetic energy supplied by the catapult. I agree that an electric catapult of that energy and power would be expensive (although £2 billion still sounds a bit OTT), but what is really needed is a simple big spring - or rather two 30 ton contrarotating springs with a fusee, in a housing, with a total weight of around 200 tons. A 5 MW electric motor winds the springs up in 20 seconds from ship's power.
Well-designed springs can deliver the required 1.25 MJ per ton with comparative ease - for instance, that's quite a bit less work than a car suspension spring does (when was the last time you heard of one of them breaking, in normal use?), and it would have to do it far less often than a car spring.
The whole spring/motor assembly including mountings would weigh about 320 tons, and it would be quite dense, so it might usefully be mounted near the bottom of the ship providing some ballast, and the energy transferred to the flight deck by cables in ducts.
Similar energy/speed fast-moving cables in ducts are used everyday in the arrestor gear of aircraft carriers. The spring assembly could of course be mounted almost anywhere in the ship, as required.
You might want two seperate housings, one for each of two catapults, mounted in different locations, with independent cables and ducts to each catapult, for operability, combat damage etc reasons.
In extremis, you could probably make one from old car suspension springs from the scrappy - 60 tons of springs, £70 per ton, that's £4,200. And no, I am not kidding. Lose ship's power? Put five hundred burly sailors on the windlasses, if they still have those aboard, and they'll rewind them in about 12 minutes.
Billion-pound electric catapults? Pah!
While your tongue is obviously firmly in cheek, this is something that has been looked at before. The problem with springs is the force they apply is proportional to their extension, so the spring applies a maximum acceleration at the start of the launch and zero acceleration at the point of launch. This isn't something you want with aircraft catapults as it knacks your airframe, not to mention your pilot. One of the initial problems with the EMALS system was that it too struggled with applying constant (relatively) low acceleration, but as 30 seconds with youtube will inform you, the system is now fully functioning, launching everything in the USN's inventory.
My tongue was not (entirely) in my cheek, nor even close - the purpose of the fusee (as in a watch or clock, or even some crossbows) is to get the near-constant thrust profile right. It's easy to do, and you can get any thrust profile you might want.
From the wikipedia entry for fusee: G. Baillie stated of the fusee, "Perhaps no problem in mechanics has ever been solved so simply and so perfectly."
Oh, and before you ask - the reason for having two springs per catapult is so you can wind one up this much, and wind the other up that much, and thereby vary the total thrust produced on the wire, to adjust for different loads and different aircraft.
It's not as sexy as an electric catapult - but it's a whole lot cheaper, and a whole lot more reliable to boot.
My first comment was a bit long, and part of it may be hidden - there's a link at the bottom left to "expand comment", and display the rest of it. The answer to your question, and more, is there.
In the first instance, 5 MW of electric motors driven by ship's power rewind the springs in 20 seconds (the carriers have 40MW turbo-electric drives). Or you can use a lot of sailors on windlasses, or a diesel engine, or whatever you like really.
"However I find they need a ski-jump to get any significant weight of bombs "
Not so. USMC don't use ski-jumps at all. The specifications call for 2000lb bombs, full fuel and two A2A missiles requiring a 600feet run. The ski jump add to the load capabilities and the extra 300feet of deck (uk carries decks are bigger) length gives even more weight possibilities.
So to get more load you need more runway length than the 600ft minimum. In the Falklands 250m was used (most of the material had sank with the Atlantic Conveyor unfortunately)
The spring idea is not bad, in fact the USN tested a catapult using jet-fuel and oxidizer. Dirt cheap, about $20million twenty years ago. Google ICCALS
I don't know whether it would be possible to launch A-10s from carriers, but that would be - something!
Air supremacy is good, and even necessary, and light bombers and other ground attack aircraft are also useful, but for CAS there's nothing to beat the A-10 - and CAS wins battles.
Everything beats the A-10 in CAS. Compared the CEP of the A-10's main gun to the CEP of a modern smartbomb, and then bear in mind a bomb can be dropped from 30,000 feet, while the GAU-8 is designed to be fired from 4,000 feet. The A-10 is a relic, designed when plinking tanks across the german plains was still the USAF's #1 priority. The only reason the USAF still deploy it is that they've got no choice; they built 700 of the things. Prior to about 2005 they didn't have any of the new fangled deelies like targeting pods, gps receivers/interfaces for jdam, data links to share targeting information and talk to drones; stuff that western nations consider fairly essential for dropping bombs and shooting at things within the vicinity of Our Lads and also Johnny Civilian. Compared to something like the F-16, the F-15E or even, yes god forbid, the F-35, its precision strike capability is limited. The only reason they were upgraded rather than binned is, again, the sheer number of the things. The USAF couldn't meet its obligations with just its multi-role planes, much as the RAF kept/is keeping planes like the Jaguar, the Harrier and the Tornado around long past the realistic end of their shelf life.
Lets see. The A-10's GAU-8 "CEP" from 4,000 feet is 80% in 20 feet radius. The GBU-39 (the smallest smart bomb, not widely deployed as yet) has a 50% CEP of 25 feet, with a further 100% lethal blast radius of 26 feet, and lethal shrapnel out to who knows where.
If the A-10's pilot is reasonably good, and especially if (s)he knows where I am as a friendly, I'd much rather be 100 feet from the aim point of an A10 gun strike than 100 feet from the aim point of even a teeny tiny smart bomb.
Agreed, only some A-10s are kitted out with the "newfangled deelies" , but it's a known upgrade. Which also includes the ability to drop smart bombs accurately, if that's what you really want to do...
In a carrier-based role, I'd like to give the A-10 a bit better air-to-air capability, but I'd also put some air superiority fighters (and 2 or 3 Hawkeyes, and a COD) on the carrier, for local defense if nothing else. But I don't know how much it would cost to modify an A-10 to fly from a carrier.
I also don't know why it's better to drop a bomb from 30,000 feet than a few hundred or a few thousand feet, but that's another story.
The fashion is to go for turboprop for ground attack. The UK has plenty of them already in the shape of the Tucano as its the basic trainer for the RAF, so not much training required . Probably need strengthening to work on a carrier but its low take-off speed (69knots stall) is probably perfect for use without the catapult.
The article is certainly on target, especially as far as the centralization of the economy is concerned. It would help I think if people understood that this sort of centralization is the mark of a central-banking run economy based on fiat currency, where mercantilism is the rule, and continued centralization of control is unavoidable until the final societal collapse (usually distracted via war and/or a complete renewal of the monetary system, in the process wiping out more of the middle class).
In a non-centralized economy, specifically where money is both not monopolized (making the economy no different from any other socialist one) and not dessociated from value, monopolies can only exist with the support of consumers; i.e., beneficial monopolies would and could exist, but not the type we currently have in the form of mercantilist entities relying on government-distributed handouts (created as debt by central banking and legally created as obligations of teh tax payers) to maintain their existence.
May as well just melt them down now, for all the use they will be to us. Regardless of the choice, they will spend most of their time docked, maybe venturing out once every few years, only to limp back in need of a multi billion refit (BAE will insist it isn't their fault). That's assuming the Navy can ever assemble enough iPod owning chucklefucks to man the things.
When BAE eventually do make them seaworthy, the gov of the day will suddenly decide carriers are obsolete, proclaim the future to be land based UCAV's and hurridly sell the carriers to India, for the price of a good curry. They will tell us the carriers were junk, it'd have cost us more to scrap them... 30 years later, they will still be in active service with the Indian Navy, who will be boasting about what good value they've been. The RN, by then comprised of an inflatable that's manned 1 day a week, will insist they're as capable as ever and the gov will ask if they really need the paddles.
At least. As the main reason to get a catapult (although they can fly without on the UK carrier) it was never going to be purchased. Even a v-22 was considered too expensive at $80million.
I'm a fan of the AW609, less than half the price of the v-22 and pressurized up to 25k feet.
You can't really compare the cost of a V-22 to a Hawkeye as one comes with a massive radar, data link facility and one doesn't. By the time you've added that to the V-22 I'd expect the price to be >$210 milllion assuming you can figure out where to put the radome without getting in the way of the folding wings and rotors. The radar less cargo carrying version of the E-2, the Greyhound costs around $40 million so it looks like the cost of the radar is in the order of $170 million, add that to the cost of a basic V-22 and you're talking $240 million and that's assuming the development costs are amortized over a decent production run. Which they won't be.
The AW609 maybe cheaper still but you probably couldn't get all the systems in that, unless sir wants a bespoke option which I'm sure BAe would happily quote for and then fail to deliver a decade and several billion after the in service date...
The Uk already has a decent radar system in Searchwater and the proposal is to upgrade it to phased array so the scanners would be flat panels on the side of the aircraft.
http://home.janes.com/events/exhibitions/dsei2011/sections/daily/day4/searchwater-radar-aimed-a.shtml
Lockheed Martin have a identical system.
http://www.ainonline.com/aviation-news/singapore-air-show/2012-02-10/lockheed-martin-and-northrop-grumman-offer-airborne-vigilance-lower-cost
Both systems will be cheap and easy to install as the roll in the ramp in the back of what ever aircraft you choose and clap the antenna on the side.
Brazil has bough C1 Traders and is looking at these radars to give 250mile range. UK will probably stick to the Merlin but who know, a Twin Otter or M28 Skytruck could be a dirt cheap option ($7million) with 25k feet altitude.
$7million +$10million tops for a Twin Otter and Searchwater with 250mile range or $230million for 450mile range with a E2. Do the maths, its not worth it.
A lease is only financiable viable since you get to loan it once & sell it afterward. I didn't even know we offered that as an option.
Secondly, how can I get in on that? Is there a link to the lease page? I can certainly afford payments on a single craft. Can I also float armaments?
If you are taking sides on whether the F35B or the F35C is the better option, then you are already on the wrong side of the arugment, whichever side you take. By the time the things come into service manned planes will already be an anachronism.
For a fraction of the cost, you could have drones that can do the job of sitting over a war zone, waiting for days to drop a bomb in whichever insurgent / terrorist / wedding party you like, piloted by some desk jockey in Gloucestershire. If one or two get shot down, then so what? Your enemy has just given him/herself away and those drones that you built in numbers because they were so cheap will have a buddy only a few miles away to finish the job.
As ever a good article from Lewis.
I remember seeing a news article about the F-35B and V-22 Osprey melting the deck on carriers and therefore reducing their operating life. Wonder if its been factored in?
I think that catapult and hooks would have at least provided mechanism to allow other countries to reuse the carriers however a comment further up suggested that they will be using drones with a few fighter jets so the likelihood is a lot of predator-like drones, some F-35B's for missions and carrier air support and helicopters;
To be honest, the whole MOD procurement from small items all the way up needs sorting out. Simply too expensive to procure things.
"I remember seeing a news article about the F-35B and V-22 Osprey melting the deck on carriers and therefore reducing their operating life. Wonder if its been factored in?"
Yes, definitely. You need a much bigger deck to stop crew being blown overboard, which we have. No cooling required, just some heat proof paint and a few other stuff.
The cost to the marines light carriers is $70million each.
If Shipboard Rolling Vertical Landing is used its less of an issue, they will be coming in at 35-40knots to land so the jet blast will be spread around.
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