Reply to post: Re: Who cares

Re: Who cares

When you design something to carry aircraft, it's generally a good idea to know whether it's said aircraft are going to work on it, as well as actually have some. Otherwise surely you risk building a massive floating football field for all it's use.

Come off it! I know it's easy to bash the MOD and BAE. And they certainly deserve it a lot of the time. But this is just willful ignorance.

Firstly defence systems are notoriously a nightmare to procure. As you're often buying several bits of kit at once that don't currently exist, and yet will have to work together when they do. Assuming they meet spec.

You're then having to assume that spec hasn't changed, because of changing circumstances. And they do change, unpredictably. Particularly when procurement takes so long. And even if perfectly managed, you don't produce a new class of 70,000 tonne ships in less than a decade.

Then we move on to the aircraft trials you mock. The Royal Navy have never run a carrier this size. They've not run a full fleet carrier since the 70s. Nor an air wing of potentially 48 planes, plus 10-20 helicopters. This will take practise. Lots of it!

They'll have to run trials with small numbers, then analyse what worked and what didn't, then increase the size of the air groups, then the complextiy and speed of the sorties. Then analyse mistakes. Then write some policies and doctrines. Then train the crews to follow them. Then test again. Fuck this up and you'll have crashes, or planes falling out of the sky for lack of fuel on ops, or fuck-ups with live ammunition. The flight deck of a carrier is an incredibly dangerous place - even when you know what you are doing. This will take years to get right.

Had we designed for catapults in the first place, we'd have the teething problems from the use of nuclear reactors delaying us now. So the aircraft work would be easier, but the engineering harder. Instead we've gone for gas turbines, so we could have tried the electromagnetic catapult, but that's not proven and the Americans are having problems with it on their new carrier.

So yes, criticism is fair. The procurement of this project has been a problem. But your point is just silly.