Home on jam at that point.......
Am enjoying this discussion, hopefully we'll never see how well or badly all this paraphenalia performs.
Rail guns too - chucking a big lump of metal 100miles...
By freeing up time from the mechanical tasks involved in flying a plane, a pilot gets more time to asses the situation
Jag cockpit 8)
For proper men.
[img]
[/img]
Catapults and arrestor gear.
Ah, thank you. I thought it might be relating to the launch system but had no idea really. Ta.
I have a fascination with flying things but little knowledge so this thread is great reading.
Interesting thread...
...But Zokes is coming across as the love child of Sharkey Ward and Lewis Page!
Seems they're already working on integrating DIRCM into the F-35 fuselage, not just bolting it onto some pods taking up valuable hardpoints.....
http://aviationweek.com/defense/northrop-develops-laser-missile-jammer-f-35
That's some Star Wars type stuff, right there...
...But Zokes is coming across as the love child of Sharkey Ward and Lewis Page!
Guilty as charged (at least for Sharkey) 😆
However, on a topic that none of us have any first hand experience, it's as good an "appeal to authority" as any other
BigEaredBiker - Member
...But Zokes is coming across as the love child of Sharkey Ward and Lewis Page!
That was an actual LOL comment - bravo!
Lewis Page's Register articles were interesting but after a while his tendency to turn every defence story into an excuse to bash BAE Systems and the RAF got a bit boring.
Yeah Lewis Page reminds me of the kind of bloke you hear at the back of a pub nursing a pint of Newcastle Brown...mumbling drunken outbursts of "Harriers....Thatchahhhrr what a woman....Falklands.....the SLR was an elephant gun.....back in my day we didn't have Kevlar....." etc etc 😀
The Sharkey comment was quite funny...
Its best we never have to use these carriers. Chock full of design flaws. Surprised they dont sink upon launching.
Its best we never have to use these carriers. Chock full of design flaws. Surprised they dont sink upon launching
Feels like a bit of a leap there, what design flaws are you aware of that make you think sinking is feasible?
[Experience mode]
Given that when we flooded her up her centre of gravity was within 0.05% of design is actually quite impressive and meant the two cranes on the flightdeck (that were there to tweak the CoG if the calcs/build were wrong) never moved during the evolution.
[/Experience mode]
I'm happy to bash BAE and the procurement methodology in MOD / DE&S when they deserve it (and there's plenty of instances when this is the case including within this programme) but there's also a lot of good work that's overlooked in favour of seemingly unsubstantiated scaremongering.
I've actually met Sharky Ward, and most of his thoughts about the deployment of various types of Harrier in the [i]particular circumstances of the Falklands[/i] are fairly sensible. Using the one with the air to air radar and pilots with air to air experience for ACP, using the one with pilots with ground attack experience for bombing thngs...and so on.
I'm happy to bash BAE and the procurement methodology in MOD / DE&S when they deserve it (and there's plenty of instances when this is the case including within this programme) but there's also a lot of good work that's overlooked in favour of seemingly unsubstantiated scaremongering.
Yup, been over to Rosyth a couple of times to see them getting built. Despite them being bolted together by Babcock "we are still not a shipbuilder" Marine they still seem to know what they're doing
Back to the carrier AWACS thing, the Osprey wouldn't necessarily work as an airborne radar platform. For starters those rotors use an awful lot of available space that would otherwise be used to balance a massive dish to house a radar. The wash from the rotors would at very best be impeded.
We do have a particular knack of going for the half-arsed solution, hamstrung by the reluctance in Whitehall to spend an extra twenty million quid on a project that has already cost several billion.
Oh and I see the Jaguar cockpit and I raise you an English Electric Lightning...
Until the Chinese progress to cats & traps they are just playing at it just like the Russians, Indians and us (eventually).
They are now looking at developing a new cheap to fly and maintain a-10 replacement.
Wasn't that the Apache? 😆
"Harriers....Thatchahhhrr what a woman....Falklands.....the SLR was an elephant gun.....back in my day we didn't have Kevlar....."
I was in the TA with a failed Marine recruit who had a proper hard-on for the SLR: "When you got hit by a 7.62 long you stay down... Take your shoulder off... Proper rifle..." etc. etc.
The arms race in the pacific is interesting...
India have a domestic carrier programme too, also based heavily on lessons learned from Soviet era technology. The USA has courted India with a view to selling them EMALS technology, giving the Indian navy a huge advantage over the Chinese.
The Chinese are developing their technology in incremental steps, this new carrier appears to have been designed with retrofitting with catapults in mind (early footage of the construction seems to show a tell-tale notch present in the deck support structures).
Seems they're already working on integrating DIRCM into the F-35 fuselage, not just bolting it onto some pods taking up valuable hardpoints.....http://aviationweek.com/defense/northrop-develops-laser-missile-jammer-f-35
That's some Star Wars type stuff, right there...
DIRCM is not new technology - it dates back to the nineties for the original DIRCM programme.
At one point post 9-11 the US govt wanted to put a DIRCM on all transatlantic and transpacific airliners. Then they worked out how much it would cost...
LDEW, now that's more like star wars...
Nothing to add really except growing up in Portsmouth and going to school opposite the Hard you were always excited to see the carriers such Ark Royal and Invincible.
My dad was an electrician and diver on Bulwark as well in the 70's when it was a light carrier before it was re-purposed.
It was sad to watch them disappear. A mate's dad was in charge of the Sea Dart project, and he used to take us fishing inside the dockyard, used to love the big American ships coming, as we would walk off with baseball caps and zippo lighters too.
I remember when one of the Nimitz class US aircraft carriers came to Pompey, it was too big or to deep in the water for the channel into the harbour so it anchored off of the IOW, Portsmouth was flooded with yank sailors and we watched hookers come off the train down from London at Hard station, spoke to a few over some beers and they said that the boat was that big they have "ghettos" on board, there were areas the white guys wouldn't go and visa versa and the captain had an armed escort round his own ship.
Can I just add that Lewis Page is a friend of a friend and I've met him several times. Nice bloke,nothing like described above 😉
...they have "ghettos" on board, there were areas the white guys wouldn't go and visa versa and the captain had an armed escort round his own ship.
Heard this before. Insane.
The arms race in the pacific
Have you seen a Nimitz class carrier? The Chinese have 1 and a bit, the US has 10 and more airplanes than the RAF
To be fair they are also building islands in disputed waters to use as airfields so they have come up with a novel approach to the issue of air power in the Pacific.
seeing as this has evolved (or has it devolved) into random navy stuff I feel comfortable adding my own little anecdote.
One of my cousins was in the US Navy for his whole career (he went to Annapolis and was in the experimental diving unit I think although I never bothered discovering if he actually was a diver or this was just a front for some other kind of wet-work).
His main hobby is marathon running and he used to train by running around the 'edge' of whichever carrier/ship he was on at the time.
I've not watched these yet:
[url= http://www.channel4.com/programmes/warship/on-demand/64736-003 ]Warship, Channel4[/url]
Any good?
Spent hours freezing my knackers off watching Harriers taking off from Ark Royal in the far north of Norway up some fjord near Tromso, this was in the early nineties in complete contrast sweated my nads off watching the Mericans trying to land intruders on the deck of USS Ranger in the gulf, never forget the smell of burnt avcat 24/7.