Blighty's stealth robojet rolls out a year late

looks like something

from ace combat series

seriously! someones been on the playstation too much

Fighting to save jobs..........

....that actually cost the tax payer!

Now thats a saving!

Let them go back to the USA.

Most of these 'so called' brit firms are no longer British and are just owned by foreign companies (say in the US) and serve only to siphon tax payers money out of the UK.

The RAF don't Want them...

..because there'll be no cushy jobs flying glorified buses with BA or the like if you get taught to pilot one of these at the tax payers expense.

"Willy Messerschmitt", I bet you believe the ads that offer 20Mb broadband as well?

If I weren't an ethical person.

£145 million is petty cash compared to some of the projects the MoD throws money at.. And a year late for project we don't have an immediate need for is no big deal. If this is a project for the sake of keeping bright people in the company, then it's probably a good thing. Hasn't anyone here ever worked in a busy software shop? Don't they remember all the bright ideas everyone has if they only had the time to work on them? Never seen what happens when management says: "okay - it's a bit slack at the moment, take a couple of weeks to work on your own ideas". Suddenly it's the most productive anyone's ever been and you get solutions to problems you didn't know you have. Personally, purely from a strategic and business point of view, allocating £145 mill to a bunch of my brightest staff and saying: "go do something useful / inventive / exploratory" sounds like a great idea.

Of course from an ethical point of view, blowing people up for a living doesn't sit well with me.

Still, a beer for whoever set up the lighting on that thing. I'd bet a cheese sandwich they spent their formative years watching Eighties / Early-Nineties Sci-Fi.

The main problem with warfare today is......

.......the kit is just too expensive to either risk or use.

Whats the point of all this high tech sophistication if you are not prepared to throw it out there?

Would you risk $100 million of kit to take out 6 guys in a hut with $200 worth of old russian weapons? How sophisticated do you actually need?

The cost of a Spitfire was around £12000 (or £575,000 in todays money) in 1940.

The cost of a Eurofighter - £140 million (and delivery...well Primeminister, lets say 3 years?)

If a non-nuclear world war broke out we'd all be out of funds and toys within a week.

machines of war...

is it me or are these things becoming entirely pointless... it's becoming more of a who's got a bigger dick situation than actually being worthwhile..

The merkins fall for this "air superiority" BS, and it seems a pity that companies like BAE are following suit in trying to hawk this crap... There aren't many nations out there who have anywhere like the spending capability to develop better weaponry than what is currently in existence... Can you name a single nation out there who's got anything to cope with something like a Harrier or even a Tornado - that's likely to declare war on Blighty? (before the inevitable response of the "axis-of-evil" is rolled out, seriously look at their capabilities!)

The biggest threats to "democratic" nations come from determined people with bombs strapped to themselves or AK-47s - tell me which fucking aerial combat vehicle is going to stop them?

Seriously, these people have their heads buried far up their arses... This money (if it is the taxpayers) needs to be spent on more useful things - say better armour/hand-held weapons for poor soldiers deployed in the field, or even better spent on addressing the fundamental issues that will cause people to take up arms (though not more bloody focus groups - I fucking hate focus groups!)

If there really are some smart engineers there, I'm sure they'll find gainful employment elsewhere.. as for the middle-management - fuck them!

Machines of war 2

Last night I watched "Britain's Secret Engineers". However, as it was on TV giving specific locations of the whereabouts of testing/repair facilities, it isn't very secret any more. Anyway, they were reconditioning a Chinook troop helicopter (6 miles of wires, 100,000 man hours, a cost of £140 million, 2 blokes to crash it, or 1 guy using RPG's to bring it down). They use Dell laptops to fix 'em up too! That's all the detail I'm going into. There was a also a programme on about cows, which was much more interesting and no military secrets were revealed. Hum.

Oh God, I *really* hate to say this

Less than a 15% overspend and 1 year late in delivery is *not* bad by UK defense project standards.

IIRC El Reg covered a report that said average over schedule was about 5 years (can't recall percentage over budge but I think it was 200%, IE 3x original "Estimate").

But I will be b&@@£$d If I'll say well done for that.

Here's the *real* question for *any* defense hardware.

What are the *export* sales prospects?

No export sales means (once again) *one* customer, the good old UK MoD.

BaE is a *commercial* outfit. Talk of the UK Govt's "Golden" share preventing foreign ownership and relocation to abroad (IE the US) aside So what?

They play the "You *must* support us. It's in British interests, we're British, British jobs are at risk " BS *over* and *over* again. They have not thought twice about dumping UK staff when it suits them. UK Civil Servants *wanted* a "National champion," they got one. It had rode roughshod over them ever since.

UK Commentards. Ask yourself this question. If WWIII started tomorrow ( in the best doomsday scenario you can't see doomsday coming) who would be the enemy? Would there be time to *build* new aircraft in the way that losses in the Battle of Britain were replaced? Would there be *no* one the UK could buy arms off of at short notice? What does bank rolling the UK arms biz (or basically BaE, I'd guess the rest is <10% of all of the stuff BaE has its sticky little fingers in) buy UK PLC?

I doubt *strongly* that there will *ever* be another world war where *every* side will retain national level arms mfg capability. if the war got to *that* scale *all* sides would be nuclear capable and it probably would escalate to that conclusion. The alternative will be multiple conflicts leaving most of the world at peace and running long enough to buy stuff in.

Re: Machines of war 2

AC, don't worry; the location of Boscombe Down isn't at all secret. Unlike the story of how those millions of taxpayers' pounds were lost on Qinetiq's sale.

Taranis

Sound like something I had a few hours after some Indian Curry.

Uranus and Klingon jokes ensue!!!!

Warning To Merkin Lovers

The Merkins are at the moment hell-bent on destroying one of Britain's greatest Assets - BP. All that "special relationship" is worth nothing if a populist merkin president, an outraged public and a broken legal system are unleashed on you Crown Jewels.

I suggest some Brit with balls phones Obama and tells him that

A) Britain will withdraw from Afghanistan

B) Britain will exit the F-35 program

C) American military aircraft in the UK will be grounded

C2) Merkin military ships will not allowed into UK harbours

D) the next SLBM will be bought from France

E) the harrier replacement will be the Naval Rafale

if they don't stop threatening BP RIGHT NOW.

Fail

Save c £41m by spending c£253m to "revert" the Chinooks *back* to an early spec?

There's no fail like an MoD fail.

darkside

The Emperor, and Darth Vader, would fly in one of those. This is a vessel for the dark side. I cannot find one of Amazon :(

I for one

welcome pur new flying overlord!

"An industrial capability for which we have no identified requirement"

Time to start another war, then?

F-35 , HTOVL CRAP

The unfortunate fact is that Newton invented modern Physics, but 2000s Anglosaxons are too dumbed down to perform anything else than relativistic speculation physics.

TheReg stated some time ago that non-nuclear-propelled carriers did not have the energy source to sustain the steam needed for proper, Horizontal-Take-Off-And-Landing carriers. So the Harrier pseudo-VTOL feature and consequentially the same feature in the F35 are needed. I will prove here that this is all BAE/RollsRoyce BS that will surely make RR alone 2000 million Pounds revenue for the special lifter technology. And the VTOL folks at MoD who have their careers linked to that, too.

The state-of-the art Rafale Naval Fighter weighs about 25000 kgs, fully loaded. Minimal speed is 148km/h. That's 41m/s. Let's make it 200km/h to have additional safety - that`s 55m/s.

We need

W= 1/2*m*v^2 = 1/2 * 25000kg * 55m/s*55m/s = 38MJ to accelerate this baby to 200km/h.

A litre of Kerosene (Basis of JP-8) has about 30 MJ of energy. Now please factor in air friction, thermodynamic inefficiency and the weight of the moving launcher parts. Let's make efficiency just 10%. That means you need 380MJ of JP-8 - that's about 13 kg of the stuff.

Now even Lewis will realize that a fully fueled Rafale-size fighter contains more than 4000kgs (!) of fuel. Adding to those thousands of kgs a mere 13kgs is insignificant.

Now LP will certainly claim Britain cannot afford the boiler needed to generate the steam. This little calculation will show this is also bollocks:

The admiralty has assembled their carrier crack crew and trained them in the Japanese Martial Arts of Speed and Precision. They manage to launch a Rafale every ten seconds.

That means the boiler must supply

P=38MJ/10s == 3,8 MW , 38MW if 10% efficient

of steam on average. A steam tank will be replenished while the next fighter is positioned for launch, so average numbers are OK.

The WW1 (!) cruiser SMS Gneisenau had more than 15MW SHAFT POWER. That means it had a boiler of at least 45MW, probably 60MW.

Any more arguments, Mr Lewis ? Maybe you could attack the VTOL guys instead of hitting BAE who do something relevant ?? But that would endanger the Merkin F-35....

PS: The F18E/F and F14 max weights aren't much different from the Rafale. At max 20% difference. Scale the aboce numbers by 20% and you get the fuel and power requirements.

Nuclear Carriers ?

Both the Essex and the Kitty Hawk class proved you don't need a nuclear reactor to launch superheavy bombers. The Essex even launched a 38000kg Goliath (!)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitty_Hawk_class_aircraft_carrier

They had 200MW Shaft Power and I guess most of that power was spent on moving the hull through the sea at high speed, not the catapult operations. Running at max power and 25% efficiency requires 2400000 kgs of JP-8 per day. That would be about 30000 tons of fuel to steam down to the falklands at 30 knots (in 10 days). No big deal if you have a 200000 ton capacity Supertanker waiting near HMS StHelena.

As I said, BP is a strategic asset.

Re: C17 / Airstrips

Thanks for the sarcasm...I had a specific question as to what you defined to be a "real, heavy aircraft runway".

You seem to imply that flat sea-ice is fine...as is compacted snow...but not flat desert?! Strangely, a quick search on Google comes up with plenty of video clips of the latter.

Tommo

Expect to see this baby operating by the 2030s. Why? In the early 80s BAe with MBB of Germany started the Experimental Aircraft Programme, a bit like this one and I should know, I worked on it. This morphed into the EFA/Eurofighter/Typhoon (a real world-beater says The Reg, but the world as it was in the 1980s apparently) which first flew in 1994, the first were delivered to Germany in 2003 and it finally started real service with the RAF in 2008. Only 25 years. Woohoo.

Anyway, ROTM will happen long before then.....

@Willy Messerschmitt

Good analysis, aside from some French leanings.

The Rafale is really a second-rate fighter - without the engine, cockpit and electronically-scanned radar upgrades nobody is interested in buying it. Brazil has been on the cards for a while, but still hasn't signed. The existence of a navalised version (unlike Typhoon) might make it the only choice for carrier-launched fighters, but they're probably not as good as helicopters/UAVs/cruise missiles. There's pretty much only one use case for a carrier-based fighters: parking off the coast of a country with a competent air force and engaging them in dogfights. Far better to take them down with (semi-stealthy) deep-strike weapons when they're on the ground and medium-/long-range AA missiles if they get airborne.

As you note with BP, the US' interests are not the UK's, and sacrificing our ability to design and build aircraft - even if we haven't had a production line in half a century - for a few tens of millions of pounds is ridiculous. The Tanaris development cost less than buying a single F-35. It would cost tens of billions, and decades of research (or active espionage), to get military aircraft design capability back once lost. Yes, we don't need to build fighters now; we didn't need to perform a beach assault in the 1970s; we didn't need desert khakis in the 1980s; we didn't need to do anti-piracy patrols or land-mine/IED sweeping in the 1990s. Things change.

The need for a defence capability is, to a great extent, influenced by its absence: a competent enemy commander will change their strategy to exploit whatever weaknesses can be found.