EMALS
Wasn't the deal with EMALS that the USA Navy would sell it to us for a fixed fee of something like $200 million, and do any required remedial work on the installation at their expense, recognising that we'd basically be operating a bleeding edge system shared with their new supercarrier that hadn't had all of the bugs eliminated?
This made sense for the US navy as they'd then be able to:-
1) Get free testing for their EMALS system their new carrier has.
2) Gain an extra couple of fleet carriers for a closely allied nation that they'd be able to cross deck on.
3) kill off the F35B variant, screwing the US Marine Corps ability to operate their America class ships as mini carriers.
IIRC the extra £1.9 billion bill came from BAE having said "yeah, we could stick an EMCAT in this spare space I guess?" without doing any design work for the additional cabling, deck reinforcement etc. They got away with this up until the point that Cameron said "We'd like take that offered EMCAT fitment option please", at which point it was discovered that it required so much redesigning and refitting it'd have been cheaper to build a new carrier from scratch.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
