UK.gov confirms it won't be buying V-22 Ospreys for new aircraft carriers Britain is not buying V-22 Osprey aircraft to fly from its new aircraft carriers, the government has confirmed. “The V-22 Osprey is not part of the resourced plan to deliver the UK Carrier Strike capability,” said junior defence minister Earl Howe. “However, the Ministry of Defence will continue to explore a variety of options …
The whole thing is symptomatic of a lack of ambition within the MoD and government. The very fact that the question was asked at all shows the consequence of the myopic attitude they've had towards catapults and arrester gear.
Had they put cats and traps on then they could have used the US COD - basically a carrier capable air freighter. And instead of bolting a (quite nice) radar to the side of a helo they could have easily and cheaply put it on top of an existing fixed wing carrier capable aircraft and flown it at a higher altitude with longer endurance.
By missing the cats and traps out there's no basic fixed wing airframes that can be flown off those decks. Everything has to be stovl, immediately limiting the choice of available airframes.
They nearly did it, only to come up with an absurdly pessimistic assessment of a technology that was basically already working, and never set that against the potentially huge cost of never, ever being able to use basic support aircraft types like COD. Crazy. They decided that short term financial certainty was more important than long term operational flexibility.
They didn't have COD in the Falklands, and we're reduced to throwing essential supplies out of the back of a Hercules into the sea and fishing them out before they sank. Not easy in a south Atlantic winter storm...
It's probably not even down to economics. Flying them isn't like flying or helis or like flying normal turboprop aircraft. You're gonna need special training you probably don't even need and you can't even import it from the RAF because they don't use them.
Plus yeah not for nothing forecourt cost of these things is 70 million USD regardless (and you're going to lose them because they're not exactly subtle), for capability you might not need - they didn't use them when they took out bin laden did they? Use helis with close air support provided by f-35 or other helis or jump out a plane or frankly just flatten the place and call it job done. I don't get why this is even up for discussion. UK would never try to capture bin laden (equivalent mission) he's never going to come quietly, we'd just mess his shit up with tomahawks or something.
The US has all these aircraft and is having to go out of its way to justify their purchase by finding operations for them you don't actually need them for or they're completely inappropriate for. I'd like us not to do the same thing.
for capability you might not need - they didn't use them when they took out bin laden did they? Use helis with close air support provided by f-35 or other helis or jump out a plane or frankly just flatten the place and call it job done. I don't get why this is even up for discussion. UK would never try to capture bin laden (equivalent mission) he's never going to come quietly, we'd just mess his shit up with tomahawks or something.
As I understand it, nothing you've said here was the intended purpose of such a purchase.
As the article stated:
“long-range combat search and rescue” or “long-range high-speed delivery of mission essential spares and stores
Because of the configuration of the QE carriers - ramps instead of catapults - there is an even smaller range of aircraft than is normal for large carriers that can land on and take off from these carriers. This means many of the standard transport-type aircraft like for example the Grumman C-2 Greyhound that the US uses on their carriers for transport flights are not available for the QE carriers.
Therefore available aircraft for transport missions will be limited to helicopters such as the CH-47 or surface vessels, or other specialist aircraft that are VTOL or utilise short rolling take-off methods using a ramp. But helicopters are both much slower and have much less range than fixed-wing (or tilt rotor/wing) aircraft, which means having to come in close to shore to be able to be serviced.
The CH-47 has a range of about ~750km at ~300km/h. A V-22 has a range of ~1600km at ~450km/h, more than twice the range and 50% higher speed. Thus allowing higher-speed light-cargo/passenger delivery to the carriers further out from shore than can be accomplished with just helicopters or surface vessels.
That's what they want the V-22 for.
“long-range combat search and rescue” or “long-range high-speed delivery of mission essential spares and stores"
That's what drones are for. You can buy and operate a lot of drones for the cost of any chopper.
Immense range, lower risk to operators, high tech so keeping business happy with upgrades and replacements.
"long-range combat search and rescue" is code for special forces ops.
"long-range high-speed delivery of mission essential spares and stores" - it's called a C-130 and they're cheaper to get off the ground, and shift more/bigger mass, faster, for way cheaper.
They're a pig to fly and easy to crash, which is why it happens often. Use a plane or use a heli, there's no requirement for in between for UK forces. There's might be for US forces but honestly I doubt it, there's a reason the US navy AND the secdef in the US were against the project - it's not really fit for purpose or really any other purpose. US army in the end smartly ran away screaming.
The V22 has a less than stellar safety record, bring back the Fairey Rotodyne
Since they use traditional helicopters for that now, and do it all the time, it's really not a big difference. Plus it's hard to haul someone up to an aircraft in forward flight, and you can't get a boat to a lot of places on the high seas fast enough in most cases. Plus, if you had to bail out of a plane into the ocean, or were escaping a sinking ship, you probably wouldn't care much about how you get rescued.
Swordfish. Much cheaper than any helicopter, very short take off and landing, low fuel consumption, reasonable operational range. Fit it with a modern engine, make it of modern composites rather than plywood and urea-formaldehyde, enclose the cockpit. Design suitable cruise missiles and torpedoes. Almost zero radar profile and if all else fails could be easily adapted to drop Galaxy Note 7s from low altitude. Avoidance of enemy fighter aircraft facilitated by helpless laughter of their pilots.
Suited to our new role in the world too.
"didn't we used to have a very effective V/STOL jet fighter?"
I was honestly baffled when they got rid of them. Small, useful, proven. Ideal against the kind of opposition likely to be faced today, and for the foreseeable. And, in world war 3, the only thing likely to be available after attack + 1, due to the ease of dispersal. Daffy, daffy decision.
A very modern Harrier using composite materials would be a fantastic aircraft and it would cost a lot less than the disaster that is the F35.
Ok, I am biased as I used to work for Hawkers at Dunsfold so naturally have an afficity for it.
Bring back G-VTOL....
>Ok, I am biased as I used to work for Hawkers at Dunsfold so naturally have an afficity for it.
My old man used to work for Fairy, it was a sore point through the company for years that the Rotodyne was cancelled. For info they also manufactured the graphite cores of Britain's last generation of home grown nuclear reactors, the AGR.
The Plastic Pig was built using mostly modern composites with metal kept for the bits that tended to get a little hot due to the big buzzy thing in the middle that kept the beast in the air.
Unfortunately someone in government was persuaded that they could get a bigger back-hander... sorry, persuaded that the F35 (which at that point could still barely fly, despite being "extensively tested" within the computers used by the designers) was a better aircraft.
Why is it that modern aircraft, designed and built entirely with modern CAD/CAM techniques and the latest materials, are a lot less reliable than the old designs drawn by hand and made by the lads in the shed out the back before they tootled off to the pub for lunch?
Quote: "Why is it that modern aircraft, designed and built entirely with modern CAD/CAM techniques and the latest materials, are a lot less reliable than the old designs drawn by hand and made by the lads in the shed out the back before they tootled off to the pub for lunch?"
It's called over engineering.
Designers of old (my Dad was one), had to work things out by hand, (my dad always used a slide-rule, and a handful of reference books). Materials science wasn't as well known/accurate then, so you'd add a bit more here and there, 'just-in-case'. A lot of this would have been gut-feeling, based on experience. My Dad designed gear-boxes and turbines for large vehicles (think quarry trucks. shipping container vessels, hi-speed trains etc.).
Theses days it's all done in the software, to the exact amount they think is needed, with little room for tolerance other than what has been asked for in the specification. I would suspect if they were to add 5% for strength/resilience, 'just-in-case' on top, the weight etc. would all go up too much, and the design would no longer meet it's targets of speed, range or whatever was needed, and of course, the cost would go up!
Old engineers built things to work, to last, and hopefully built something they (and their team) could be proud off.
Modern engineering, like so many other industries, is all about cost, period.
Or another one, didn't we used to have a very effective V/STOL jet fighter?
The F35's spec is far better than any Harrier, and it's weapons system is phenomenally good (it needs to be to make up for the [minor] lack of agility).
They're gradually getting it working properly, once it's finished it will be awesome. It recently came out very well in a Red Flag competition, knocked everything else out of the sky.
How well does it have to do against guys in Toyota Pickups and AK-47s?
Dogfighting? Really?
The Harrier is still a relevant design and yes a modern variant using modern materials and construction methods would be a world seller.
It's like the A-10, make a revised version of that. Most of the people we have to fight against for the foreseeable future are mainly ground based.
It recently came out very well in a Red Flag competition, knocked everything else out of the sky.
You mean the last year's Red Flag competition where the Indians were assigned to the aggressor squadron and disallowed to use their radars? So that anyone actually stood a chance by being able to close in with them being blind while having full visibility. Same Red Flag where they were not allowed to turn on the ECM pods which all of the Sukhoi nowdays carry?
If it is that Red Flag, I believe the F35 still sucked rocks against the Su-30 MKI and F-16 within in visual range. The odds stacking for weapon advertisement purposes was beyond odious though. So rather unsurprisingly it showed fantastic scores against an enemy ordered to fly blind from long range. Frankly, if you had an F4 with 1960-es missiles it would have shown same score in that scenario as it was stacked one mile high in its favor.
What a fecking joke of a Red Flag by the way.
But Sir, as Admiral of the Fleet I can categorically state that I think I believe we are the Navy and we sail ships. Why would we have any need to spend money on noisy, magic, flying machines? Hoist the mainbrace and shiver-me-timbers, pass the '57 port Captain. And where's Roger ... my cabin's in need of a thorough seeing-to?
That's almost exactly what the Captain of HMS Glorious thought back in 1940. Unfortunately for him and his crew, HMS Glorious was an aircraft carrier. Because it didn't have an air patrol up, when the German battlecruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau appeared over the horizon there wasn't much to do but wait for the first big 28-cm shells to come hurtling down. Two hours and ten minutes later. HMS Glorious and her two escort destroyers had been sunk.
On the bright side, there were a few survivors. Forty-three, to be precise.
Yours is an interesting take on the battle.
Glorious had been used to transport fighter aircraft to Norway to support the ground forces there. Once it was decided to evacuate Norway the aircraft were to be destroyed, however the pilots of the Hurricanes and Gladiators pleaded with the Navy to get their aircraft back to Britain. Without these pilots ever having performed a carrier landing before and with aircraft not fitted with arrestor hooks the planes were all landed safely. This meant Glorious had no space on her deck to launch or recover aircraft as the Hurricanes could not be taken down into the hangar as their wings did not fold. This is why there were no aircraft up to spot.
'Its not like they learned much regardless of circumstances, what more than a year later with Force Z.'
Not true, originally Force Z was to include HMS INDOMITABLE, however she was delayed about two months due to a slight collision with Jamaica during work up in the Carribean*. The threat from aircraft was well known, it was however also known that the ground forces needed naval gunfire support to hold back the Imperial Japanese Army. Much like the evacuation of Crete the RN was willing to risk ships to support the British Troops. The greater tragedy is that at the Fall of Singapore the Japanese were down to their last few hours of ammunition, for a lack of intelligence it would have been their first defeat.
The Captain of PRINCE OF WALES was seen off by his son, a Midshipman at the time, who eventually became Admiral Leach, First Sea Lord at the time of the Falklands Conflict.
*It was a brand new carrier with brand new squadrons so there was a lot of work needed to get them up to speed.
Indomitable was NOT scheduled to be present at Singapore - were she to take been so she'd have had to have left well before she ran aground in the West Indies.
Even had Indomitable been present, her air group had a single squadron of Fulmars and a single squadron of Sea Hurricanes - or in other words dead meat to the Zero. Most likely she too would have been sunk from the same torpedo strikes that sunk the Prince of Wales and Repulse.
'Indomitable was NOT scheduled to be present at Singapore'
According to people who were on her at the time she was. See 'Carrier Observer' by G Wallace or 'Sea Flight' by H Popham. As there were no Zeros present at the sinking of Force Z only bombers operating at the limits of their range Fulmars and Sea Hurricanes may well have materially affected the outcome.
Post facto "recollections" aside, she would have had to have left the West Indies at least a week if not two prior to when she ran aground in order to reach Singapore in time.
The Japanese first detected the PoW and Repulse with a recon flight. Had any fighters been present (or a carrier spotted) then Zero's would have been sent along to make mincemeat of the Fulmars and Hurricanes.
'Post facto "recollections" aside, she would have had to have left the West Indies at least a week if not two prior to when she ran aground in order to reach Singapore in time.'
Not true, PRINCE OF WALES, ELECTRA and EXPRESS, left Cape Town on 18 Nov 41, 15 days after INDOMITABLE ran aground. At 18 kts INDOMITABLE could have reached Cape Town in time to rendezvous with PRINCE OF WALES (6279NM at 18kts = 14 days 13 hours).
Now what would have happened if she had been there is a matter for conjecture and would probably depend on the reliability of the ship's radar for fighter direction allowing raids to be broken up before they got to Force Z.
Except that:
1: She hadn't finished working up when she ran aground;
2: Arriving with less than 24 hours to spare to fuel up, carry out whatever repairs were needed; restock stores, etc.
3: Sea Hurricanes and Fulmars were dead meat to any escorting Zeros - which would have been present had the Japanese detected a carrier at the same time they detected Repulse and the PoW - even Spitfires with Battle of Britain veteran pilots later had great trouble with the Zero.
'1: She hadn't finished working up when she ran aground;
2: Arriving with less than 24 hours to spare to fuel up, carry out whatever repairs were needed; restock stores, etc.
3: Sea Hurricanes and Fulmars were dead meat to any escorting Zeros - which would have been present had the Japanese detected a carrier at the same time they detected Repulse and the PoW - even Spitfires with Battle of Britain veteran pilots later had great trouble with the Zero.'
1. And Victorious hadn't started working up when she went to engage the Bismarck. Indomitable wasn't particular worked up when she faced the Japanese the following year.
2. I presume as Indomitable's running aground was known about before Prince of Wales had left Freetown on the 7th the subsequent sailing from Cape Town wasn't delayed for a rendezvous that wasn't going to happen. Certainly the details of her war service indicate it was the intention to join Force Z up until her grounding http://www.naval-history.net/xGM-Chrono-04CV-Indomitable.htm
3. In a pure fighter vs fighter engagement it wouldn't be great for the Hurricane and Fulmar, but considering PoW was essentially crippled by one torpedo hit on a prop anything they could do to break up the raids would have helped. Nor does it detract from my original argument that the RN were unaware of the dangers of ships being without air cover, they were they just didn't have any to spare for Force Z.
The lack of "working up" experience showed with Victorious too - only one torpedo hit. Next year when her pilots engaged the Tirpitz they were even more inept.
The Prince of Wales also hadn't finished working up when she engaged the Bismarck - and that showed too. The Germans thought they were fighting HMS King George V as there was no way they would have sent a ship out that hadn't gone through that process - hence the Tirpitz not participating even though she had been commissioned as she was still working up.
The Prince of Wales was crippled by multiple torpedo strikes that overwhelmed her torpedo and flood protection systems. There is a theory that one of the worst (or best from the Japanese perspective) hit struck a location that had been previously damaged by a German bomb while she was undergoing construction and had not been properly repaired. Either way, large scale uncontrollable flooding rapidly led to her capsize.
Apart from the endurance problems associated with the Merlins meaning spares, routine maintenance and costs will be higher when using whirlybirds for aforementioned duties. That's why the Yanks have used the Hawkeye or whatever it is for the last 50+ years.
So the Osprey would have made total sense, because they have far better record for endurance vs cost whilst meeting all the requirements. No, wait....
[I'm not a military guru so that might not be 100% accurate, but you get the idea]
Having an airplane-based AWACS offers other benefits:
1) Speed, so you can get from the carrier to your patrol station, or from one side of the outer perimeter of the carrier group to another side where you suspect bad guys are more likely to come from
2) Range, so you can send an E-2 out a few hundred miles if you need to provide AWACS cover for troops, or an important convoy/surface group, or a naval or land-based ally that needs AWACS cover
3) Height, a plane can fly a lot higher than a helicopter can, so your radar horizon is much farther out.
Would there be a downside to the possible enemy jamming of much of the radar telemetry from the drone (vs. maybe jamming a manned AWACS that can then mostly just communicate by voice?) Does all that radar emission from the AEW radar screw up remote control of the drone? Otherwise you'd think that somebody would have already deployed a drone-based AWACS, or at least be strenuously evaluating one.
Considering that the Indian Navy is looking for a new AWACS, and they are going with a manned airplane of some sort, and that the U.S. Navy had to choose a new AWACS platform, and chose to go with the modernized E2-D Hawkeye, I guess there is some major drawback to placing AEW radar on a drone.
Merlins are 2 to1 hours on maintenance to flight time though. 600 hours before overhaul. In theatre that is pitiful. E2s are 1 to 4 so in theory you only need 2 for 24-7 support (4 for peace of mind).
Our spares and repair schedules are bad enough for land merlins never mind AEW sea based.....
stood and watched the farewell flight of the Lynx about a week ago :(
Why do we never seem to make sure replacement weapons systems are in place, with problems ironed out, before their predecessors are retired? Or indeed aircraft carriers are not ordered without aircraft?
As for the Harrier (Sea Harrier particularly), seems like a phenomenally stupid decision, even by the standards of the MoD & it's political masters.
'Apart from the endurance problems associated with the Merlins '
It's got five hours endurance which is only an hour less than a Hawkeye, and to be honest if you're fitting into the carrier deck cycle with fighters who're lucky to make two hours airborne it's a bit of a moot point. The advantage the Merlin has here is that it doesn't have to stick to the deck cycle the way a Hawkeye does.
Altitude is the main advantage of a fixed wing platform but after almost four decades of helo AWACs operations the Baggers have got pretty good of working around the limitations of the platform and for reasons I don't understand don't spend a lot of time at their max operation altitude. I think their theoretical radar horizon at 10000' would be around 125 nautical miles but they'll spot things at any sort of altitude further out than that and of course that works both ways so to have a chance of finding the fleet the Opfor has to be at altitude too.
It's got five hours endurance which is only an hour less than a Hawkeye, and to be honest if you're fitting into the carrier deck cycle with fighters who're lucky to make two hours airborne it's a bit of a moot point. The advantage the Merlin has here is that it doesn't have to stick to the deck cycle the way a Hawkeye does.
The hawkeye doesn't need to stick with the deck cycle either since it can use aerial refueling to extend its range/endurance (though this is also a moot point without a proper CATOBAR configuration).
'The hawkeye doesn't need to stick with the deck cycle either since it can use aerial refueling to extend its range/endurance'
They'll still be sticking to a multiple of the deck cycle, carriers like to launch and recover aircraft all at once to minimise the time spent on the flying course. Once recovery is complete aircraft are respotted to the back of the of the landing area ready for the next launch cycle, it's tricky getting back on board once they've done that.
On an aside, the USN is using around 1/3 of its Super Hornet flying hours as tankers! Tactical jets don't carry a huge transferrable fuel load compared to a proper refueller.
'Yes, but the Opfor can fly pretty low and have a few scouts at altitude or a satellite guiding it to target, then it pops up, launches missiles and skedaddles for home.'
Oh for sure, and those scouts are the first thing you target, possibly with an air defence destroyer operating under EMCON silence and getting its targetting data from the AWACS. There are counter moves for everything.
Although if they can manage near real time satellite targetting you've got other issues.
'If they are carrying Merlins for other duties (and they can keep the commonality between those and an AEW verison high)'
Oh the commonality is beyond high, it's absolute. All the Merlin Mk2 airframes are being upgraded to take the AEW kit so you can just swap bits around the embarked fleet if you're having serviceability issues. It also allows the fatigue life to be spread around the fleet rather than concentrated on certain airframes.
I read that the U.S. Navy buying something like 40-50 Ospreys for that role, and retiring the C-2 Greyhounds they currently use. There will still be E-2 Hawkeyes in the carrier-based AWACS role, and Northrup Grumman is in the middle of the latest production run of those right now.
And the USMC uses Ospreys for onboard delivery on the helicopter carrier/landing dock ships it operates on.
So if the RN can probably call Uncle Sam if they run out of parts or people on some future carrier mission.
Well, Nelson fancied "up close and personal" strategy for naval frank exchange of views, so he would have been rolling around for quite some time really, seeing how standoffish everything has become.
Or he might have engaged with the Russian submarine forces, I hear they like the "knifefight" style of submarine warfare, whatever that is.
"welding giant-sized Lego blocks together". That is the way to do it today and nothing new. Have a look at how the Liberty ships were built during WW2 in the USA and why.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6A9ms26SaM
PS. Edd China was mentioned on some other thread, here saying good by, too bad.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IB15T1LYiY
They built a working biplane on Scrapheap challenge once in 4 days. So it can't be that difficult.
All you need is a shed, a handy junkyard, a mail order propellor supplier and lots of shouting.
On the other hand, I think this lacks ambition. I really don't see the point of just strapping two helicopter blades to a plane, when you could strap 100 round the outside of the carrier - and just fly the whole thing. that gets rid of the need for separate AWACS and refueling planes, and just leaves you the need for some fighters. Also, if the carrier was able to do about 120 knots, you wouldn't need catapults for takeoff.
The problem I see here is that the Navy are refusing to take this eminently sensible, and logical step, purely because of inter-service rivalry. They're worried that if their carrier no longer spends the majority of its time at sea, but airbourne, that the RAF will try and take over.
The simple solution is to make the carrier airtight, with backup rocket motors, then call it a space ship. We all know that space has navies, not airforces, so for a few pennies more they can kill two birds with one stone.
A cunning plan.
Find 4 squaddies from Iraq/Afghanistan. 1 office with a cigar (or Pipe, we are British), 1 weido (of the type played by Benedict Cumberbatch), 1 pretty one and one big black guy
Have the Met accuse them of a crime they didn't commit
Lock them in a barn with a welder and a suspiciously complete toolkit.
10 minutes later you will have a servicable aircraft/tank/submarine/aircraft carrier
Admittedly every time it shoots anyone it will miss - but this is pretty much true for any new complex weapons systems
"The simple solution is to make the carrier airtight, ..."
Or use a submarine in the first place.
Yes, I've been re-reading Harry Harrison's "In Our Hands the Stars" recently.
As I think that a Royal Space Navy is long overdue, genuine question to those in the know: would the type(s) of reactor(s) currently used in nuclear submarines be able to work in microgravity (or could they be converted to do so)?
"would the type(s) of reactor(s) currently used in nuclear submarines be able to work in microgravity (or could they be converted to do so)?"
We need better heat sinks in space. Submarines use the ocean to dissipate heat. There are other problems, but until we solve this it is hard to conduct high energy research.
Kind of hard to do a failsafe scram of the reactor control rods without gravity, but if you're willing to spend Apple's net worth on the problem then modifying the reactor for use in space could probably be done in the next couple of decades. I'd think the more fundamental issue would be radiating all the heat off the spacecraft so that you don't melt the thing with the amount of power it's producing.
Probes Voyager 1 & 2 both were nuclear powered (thermoelectric generation), but I understand a limiting factor of the power generation capacity was the heat that could be radiated effectively. That was around 430W at launch. Sub reactors are thought to be in the multi-megawatt range. Radiative heat transfer from a black body is q = σ T^4 A
where
q = heat transfer per unit time (W)
σ = 5.6703 10^-8 (W/m^2K^4) - The Stefan-Boltzmann Constant
T = absolute temperature in Kelvin (K)
A = area of the emitting body (m^2)
So either you need a heatsink material capable of getting to a very high temperature, or you need a massive surface area. Gold (melting point 1064C) over 1sq metre can dissipate a 180kW of heat- so you could radiate 47MW from an area the size of a tennis court at ideal conditions at a degree below it's melting point. Aluminium has a melting point of 660C so would radiate 11MW from a tennis court sized heatsink. This though is probably feasible for a nuclear space carrier.
AC because nuclear is supersecret and if I was identifiable as I told you all this I'd have to kill you.
I would have liked to see the Ospreys shipped. They look even more exciting than Chinooks, and from what I've heard they are a great deal more unreliable. That will make plenty of work for the mechanics, so they won't get bored and stroppy.
Besides, just look at that picture! Those Su-35s won't dare to tangle with a contraption like that.
"Those Su-35s won't dare to tangle with a contraption like that."
True. They'll probably get the Ekranoplan out of mothballs and just have a weirdness contest.
"Upvoted for taking any excuse to mention the Ekranoplan!"
Thank you. Yes, I do like reminding people that military budgets can get allocated to really bizarre stuff, even under socialism. And that people fail to ask really awkward, obvious questions like "How exactly does this thing turn, tovarishch engineer?"
However, in the context of aircraft carriers it's worth noting that the Soviet Union was attempting to build what was effectively a 300kt carrier of unpiloted aircraft, and if it had worked and hadn't had the minor design flaw of only being able to fly in straight lines on flat water, it would have been rather useful.
Couldn't they just make a really big Harrier? Just double everything up
Would be a complete new design, but the F35B is only about four feet longer than a Harrier, and about six feet wider across wing tips. It could certainly be done without doubling the size. As for speed, before the Harrier, Hawkers designed the P1154, which was a supersonic VTOL aircraft. It was cancelled by the great British traitor, Harold Wilson in November 1964, and shortly after that we had to buy F4 Phantoms to provide the required strike capability.
It's worth noting the F-35B can carry in the order of 15,000lbs of stores in total (when using the external pylons). The Harrier II can manage about 8,000lbs. It's basically got twice the thrust of the Harrier so can hover at twice the weight. It can also go about 1.8x as far and over 1.5x as fast.
So effectively if you want to build a really big Harrier. They have*.
*You couldn't just double everything up because scaling doesn't work like that, surface area increases with the square whereas volume (so weight) increases with the cube.
'given that RN carriers were shorter than the USN, you don't think more engine power was needed?'
I was being slightly tongue in cheek about the spaying of the Phantom, although the USN ones did manage to cross-deck to the Ark and even the Victorious on one occasion. A smarter move may have been buying Crusaders as the Aeronavale did rather than trying to cram Phantoms onto the rather small UK carriers.
The P1154 required plenum chamber burning to fly, and in the view of at least one of the Harrier test pilots would have been a deathtrap as a result. The heat and force from the plenum chamber would have destroyed any landing surface and made debris ingestion into the engine inevitable. It seems likely that one of the driving factors to its cancellation was the unwillingness by the pilots to consider flying it.
Andrew Dow's "Pegasus - The Heart of the Harrier" has some very interesting stuff about other aircraft that were designed, and even prototyped, around the Pegasus engine - some of those were multi-engine.
"It might be better not to pick up any F-35B pilot who bails out, since he will have just pissed away £70 million. Pour encourager les autres."
No, he'll just need to be promoted to the level at which it's OK to lose £70 million of hardware. To a certain extent in a navy, what defines your rank is how much stuff you can use up in an afternoon and still keep your job.
After all it is just a s̶m̶a̶l̶l̶ tiny part of the US military machine:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/03/22/us/is-americas-military-big-enough.html?_r=0
There are only 8 other non-US carriers on the whole planet.
I'd suggest it really just doesn't matter whether these ill-conceived, mismanaged "aircraft carriers" have Ospreys, Merlins or Fairey Swordfish. The procurement has been so atrociously screwed up that the only remaining question is "How much more money, to the nearest billion, will we piss directly into the sea?"
The F-35 is arguably the most transparently disastrous combat aircraft project since F-111 (and shares many of its philosophical and implementational failings, starting with the eye-wateringly stupid assumption that you can design one common airframe to perform many different missions). The F-35B, the V/STOL version, which somehow manages to be even worse than the -A and -C variants with its pitiful range, ordnance loadout, and common failings ("Cant' climb, can't turn, can't run, can't dogfight" etc), is of course the one chosen by UK MoD, meaning that the carriers don't need CATOBAR: so their ability to project any kind of useful striking power or to maintain CAP was thrown away almost immediately. Having realised ithe stupidity of this decision, later UK gobment proposed to fit CATOBAR and then realised it couldn't afford it. So we're guaranteed a small number of very expensive inferior combat planes ...
... Except it won't matter, because the number of escort vessels—the surface ships, and some subs, which actually keep a carrier battlegroup alive—has been slashed beyond the bone. In a serious war against a remotely competent foe (e.g. Russia, which just qualifies as remotely competent) the carriers' life expectancy is well below 24 hours. So they either go to the bottom with Ospreys, or go to the bottom with Merlins, but even THAT won't matter to the very few F-35B pilots who actually survived a turning dogfight against previous-generation fighters, because they'd already burned too much fuel to get home to mama anyway. (All F-35B pilots will be trained in landing on handy cargo ships with bingo fuel.)
Of course, if the purpose of these very expensive targets was really to get steel rolled in the constituency of the One-Eyed Scottish Idiot, and thereafter, as with Trident, to blag a seat at the Big Boys' Table for epicene, self-important British politicians ("Look at my great big carrier, it's bigger than Donald's hands!" "I say Theresa, come look at the length of my missile")... well, suddenly all the stupidity makes sense.
And a bonus for the future will be the opportunity to use $150m aircraft, at a laughably low sortie rate, firing missiles costing £250k apiece at two-hundred-dollar 4x4 clunkers full of bearded chaps sharing ancient RPG-7s and dodgy AK-47s—if not a nice little MSF hospital or wedding party: they're all guilty of *something* after all— thereafter to get the Daily Hate's "journalists", not one of whom ever served in uniform, to brag about the important strategic blows struck against {Enter Pitiful Enemy's Name Here, while somehow comparing it to the Nazi war machine circa 1939}.
In short, it's yet another episode of almost insane incompetence by generations of politicians who (since about 1985), appear to have the mentality and character of dim and rather nasty 10-year-olds.
The merlin nearly went the way of the Nimrod projects, (massive MOD scope creep, ending in a defence review scrapping) but someone with power at BAe managed to salvage a generally workable airframe with limited losses over the Sea King.
The F-35 is a victim of the same thinking that spawned the Typhoon, namely that because it does everything its gonna be good. The same thinking gets you a camel when what you need is a horse.
F-35A/B/C are supposed to replace the F-15, F-16, F-18, A-10, AV-8B/+ and the abortion of an replacement known as the F-22 and there is no single airframe that can do all those roles.
Like the Typhoon was an awful replacement for the Tornados, Jaguar and GR.7 and the proposed sea-typhoon was not a patch on the F/A2. The original CVF spec was highly capable with twin runways, better performance and CATOBAR capability, and there were going to be three of them, but they got hamstrung by successive Defence reviews and turned into the joke they now are.
All this fuss about replacing the baggers...........a few things you need to know:
1) for the past few years the baggers have almost exclusively been used over land, tracking insurgents a controlling strikes. This could be done equally as well from an Islander or similar fitted with a simple radar.....we just had the baggers available
2) where their unique radar HAS been invaluable is in identifying disturbed ground.....synthetic aperture radar is quite clever like that. I leave you to work out why thats useful. But again, its an overland role.
3) considering the new carriers should always be in the company of a Type 45 destroyer, and those things have a very powerful very accurate over-the-horizon radar, is a maritime AEW platform required? Especially so given the capability of the radar in the F-35
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