Elections Have Consequences - Sometimes Unintended

Oct 24, 2010 18:47

The (English) Royal Navy emerged as surprisingly powerful, when a fleet built for cannon engagement only defeated the Spanish Armada. The Spanish ships were so cramped that reloading cannon in battle was considered impractical, while the English ships were designed for continuous cannon fire, with guns reloading and repeating as rapidly as state-of ( Read more... )

idiocy, politics, economics

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jojomojo October 25 2010, 01:05:00 UTC
On the plus side, the UK (Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland do get to use our navy too you know ;) did keep the actual carriers necessary to fly fighters off of; for a while it looked like the contracts to build those would be axed. And they're adding catapults that weren't in the original plans since we were going to use JSF-C's.

Losing those would have been a much worse proposition than axeing the Harriers, which are decades old at this point and not exactly top-flight tech any more; we could buy some F-18s or similar off the US or France in a hurry if we had to, but there's noone that sells carriers and they take years to build.

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murstein October 25 2010, 01:28:15 UTC
Yeah, but none of the carriers you currently have, have a catapult to toss an F-18 off the deck. So, short of adding a catapult to the Ark Royal (and they're talking about scrapping her, rather than upgrading her), the UK is abandoning naval air capability.

Are the Harriers old? Yep. On the other hand, I doubt that many would argue they aren't better at air-to-air capability than a Lynx or Merlin. Because that's what the Royal Navy will be left with: Helicopters trying desperately to do the job of tactical fighters. And that kind of under-equipped gamble paid off more often in the days of shield-wall and saxe than the days of technological warfare.

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jojomojo October 25 2010, 03:02:31 UTC
Correct, our current carriers are not proper ones (and are getting on a bit to boot - bear in mind these are the same ships that fought the Falklands war 30 years ago)

The UK is, however, still building two proper, full-sized carriers (Queen Elizabeth and Prince of Wales - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen_Elizabeth_class_aircraft_carrier ), which originally were not going to be fitted with catapults but now will be - those are the assets the Navy was fighting tooth and nail to save. It helps that the previous Prime Minister, in whose constituency they'd be built, set the contracts up so that cancelling them would require the government spend an equal amount of money on other ships built by the same company ( ... )

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murstein October 27 2010, 02:48:59 UTC
Suffice to say that, what you call "a bit dicey" is what I call "nine years before you have carrier-based aviation ( ... )

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