Brazil?
That’s just nuts...
The flagship of the Royal Navy, HMS Ocean, has been sold to Brazil for £84m, the South American country’s government has confirmed. The 22,000-tonne helicopter carrier, which returned from her last British deployment to the Caribbean just weeks ago, will be formally decommissioned from the RN in spring this year. Although it …
The original (retail?) price tag on the entire ship was less than an F35. Quite a lot of metal for your money , comparatively.
As I always like to quote Government spending in terms of monthly national debt interest payments - The cash we have gained from the sale is 0.024 of an NDIP. If we sell 41 similar ships we can pay our national debt interest for 1 month. . . one.
I typically translate the national debt interest repayments (approx £43Bn*) into Wembley stadiums (appox £800M).
Roughly we could build a new Wembley stadium every week all year long, a new one in every city in England (51) in a year. That's how much money the gov't gives away servicing (not decreasing) ours, our parents', and our grandparents' debt.
How much debt interest will we saddle on our children and grandchildren I wonder? An aircraft carrier (£6.2Bn) a month perhaps?
*When interest rates were higher, IIRC this figure was over £50Bn pa.
I can remember when Ocean was commissioned, the first ship in a while not to be named after a city. There were several letters in The Telegraph along the lines of 'We used to call our ships Victory and Murderer and WarBastard. Why is this HMS Ocean? What next, HMS Badger?'. I'm not sure what Ocean is going to be replaced with. Probable one of the two aircraft carriers with no aircraft to fly.
It's not a boat, it's a ship. Hence the "S" in HMS.
Although submarines aren't called HMB, and they are boats.
I'd assumed that the 'S' stood for submarine in the case of subs
(Also note that a number of shore establishments, AKA stone frigates, carry the "HMS" designation, e.g. HMS Raleigh, HMS Calliope)
Can we not get some appropriately named ships please - they are WARships!
Iain M Banks had it exactly right in the Culture series - a ship's name should reflect its personality. Or for ships not exhibiting actual sentience (and choosing their own name) yet, how the RN want them perceived?
I'd like to start with HMS Really Vicious Bastard - any alternative offers?
Pint for Mr Banks, he's sorely missed by many & long may his writings live on! ->
By this logic and as a Banksian eastender whose uncle served on Ark Royal and Victorious during WWII and up to 1970
HMS "Don`t fuck with me or else"
That is a proper Shipname in that universe. and uncle Chas would approve if still here.
"Don`t start , it will hurt you more than me" also works if PC is more important than keeping things real.
"Specialises in electronic warfare, stealthy "hit'n'run" and making enemies disappear mysteriously while making a profit."
The issue is that it would never actually make it to the war, due to the liberal application of its patented excuse generator. Props for making a warship that runs on pints and onion bhajis though.
You would probably also need to start lining up quite a lot of replacement admirals, due to the unavoidable attrition rate.
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"We'd have to have loads of identical ships named Badger though..."
Great... stealth naming! Nobody on the enemy side would be able to determine which ship we were discussing! It would also help in obscuring financial package details for the ships, as nobody which know which was which!
"I'm afraid to report, Sir, that HMS Boat has sunk. But HMS Boat will be picking up the survivors along with an escort of HMS Boat and HMS Boat. The investigators are already loaded on HMS Boat and headed to recover HMS Boat now".
When the RN was at it's zenith, warships were named after all sorts of things. The before mentioned HMS Pansy was almost certainly a Flower class corvette, all of which were named after, um, flowers.
It used to be that capital warships were named after famous people, characters from mythology, or an adjective (like Victorious).
Lesser ships have been named after all sorts of things, like counties, towns, and as you get down to the more numerous ships which followed a letter (destroyers, frigates etc.) like the Amazon class all started with "A", with names from all sorts of word category (e.g. Amazon, Antelope, Ambuscade, Arrow, Active, Alacrity, Ardent, Avenger).
With the smaller number of warships recently, there has been a desire to keep certain names going (for example Victorious, Vanguard, Audacious, and Ajax), although for submarines, they are apparently following letters as well.
IIRC, Ocean was quite unusual, as there had only been one previous HMS Ocean, which was a Colossus class aircraft carrier.
One interesting part of Royal Navy tradition is that battle honors for namesake ships are carried across to the new ship, and I believe that the wardroom silver- and crystal-ware is also moved to the new ship.
If this is the case, you can imagine there having to be significant storage space for the wares from all the ship names that are no longer in use!
It's a great idea. But I for one am not volunteering to go aboard HMS Capita. It'll probably manage to sink itself. Or half of its own fleet.
HMS Rentokill?
In an Iain M Banks stylee, we should have a ship called HMS We're Only Here for the Booze.
I also really think it's tempting fate calling your ships things like HMS Invincible. Particularly considering what happened to it at Jutland. That's almost as bad as having an HMS Unsinkable.
We ought to have called one of the S class submarines HMS Surprise as well. Still, we could always have an HMS Boo!
We ought to have called one of the S class submarines HMS Surprise as well.
A pint for the late Mr O'Brian -->
Matthew Smith,
Seems an odd name to complain about.
The Royal Navy has a whole bunch of historical names, and a lot fewer ships to pin them on. But a quick check online shows that Ocean is a traditional capital ship name - and was used on wooden ships of the line, then a pre-dreadnought battleship and then a WWII carrier.
The capital ship names now get used for big stuff like carriers and also submarines (mostly). Though the latest Astute class are using traditional old sub names. But the S and T classes that preceeded were all traditional battleship names.
It used to be that light cruisers got city names and heavy ones got the county names - while destroyers were a mixed bag of different ones, often starting with the same letter. Or classical mythology. Then in WWII we had the Flower class corvettes.
Now they pick a rule and some old favourites when they launch a new class of ships - so the Type 23s were all counties, the Type 42s were cities, the Type 22s were traditional destroyer names beginning with B. The Type 45s are D names.
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"It is expected that Ocean will undergo a comprehensive refit in the UK to Brazil's specifications before she departs for a new life under a new name."
I assume a fair bit of expense in this "comprehensive refit"?
Which might hit the quoted profit made on this sale to a large extent.
Unless it's done at the buyer's expense, in which case it provides an additional boost to the local economy in Portsmouth.
In addition to any routine servicing of mechanical parts, there will be a lot of NATO-standard kit to remove, and Brazilian Navy gear to fit in its place.
Unless it's done at the buyer's expense, in which case it provides an additional boost to the local economy in Portsmouth.
Still probably cheaper than paying for full decommissioning and break-up.
Like gettng rid of that old banger you know won't pass the MOT in a year or two,for a few pounds and avoiding having to fork out rather more for 'safe disposal'.
Still probably cheaper than paying for full decommissioning and break-up.
well , 84 million is not to be sniffed at, like selling your 20k car for 10k
re the banger. The metal contained in the car is currently enough to cover that and get you some cash , a trend i think will stay that way given the worldds dwindling resources. That ship's probly got a couple hundredweight of steel in it as well!
Yes, but just imagine what an F-35 can do instead: it FLIES! (sometimes, if the wind on the runway doesn´t extinguish its engine (speaking of which, it isn´t included in said 50 meeelion quid)), and it is STEALTHY (somehow "stealth" is wrong in caps, so: *whisper* "stealthy") - oh so *whisper* stealthy, most of the time it it will be completely undetectable in the air. And its DEADLY (caps allright here), it is sooo deadly it KILLS (even its own pilots due to malfunctioning oxygen supply, but hey, kill is kill...).
I might be wrong on the last point, though, could have been the F22...
As an evildoing (cia installed) dictator, I´d be trembling all day and crying in bed should HMS fat lady cruise up and threaten me with two dozen bombs per day. Much worse than this old (newer than my car, though), sold rustbucket which is more a glorified cruise shi*knockknock* whos there? ROYAL MARINES DAKKADAKKADAKKA....
small and stupid,
Ships have a sell-by date. That often gets extended for useful ships, but it does mean ripping out large chunks of the stuff in them at some point, and replacing it all. Engines, machinery, electronics, radars, controls.
Lots of this is planned. HMS Ocean was built on the cheap. It was built to civilian standards with less damage control, redundency and space for upgrades. To keep using it would mean spending lots of cash. The carriers can cope with the helicopter movements for deploying marines - but specialist ships would have to deal with any boats they wanted to use.
One of the things they try to build into warship designs is space to put new shiny stuff that hasn't been invented yet. And they tend to plan for mid-life upgrades.
So often the quoted prices for MoD purchases are actually a total life cost. That is the cost of the ship and all the shiny kit on it, plus a couple of planned major overhauls and often a mid-life total refit taking a couple of years - to be done by the builders. With a guesstimated cost for the new radars and weapons that haven't even been designed/developed yet. Plus new / reconditioned engines and machinery.
Fair point - IF Oceans steel has worn away to uneconomic-to-repair levels (in which case - are the Brazilians blind, bribed, or both? )
Machinery - doubtful. The 'Civilian' machinery isnt that expensive and the 'Military' stuff has to be upgraded periodically regardless of the age of the vessel.
I suspect that a decent civilian design can have a 30 year life, and 'military spec' includes plenty of gold-plated nonsense.
' suspect that a decent civilian design can have a 30 year life, and 'military spec' includes plenty of gold-plated nonsense.'
A civilian design can last that long, if used as intended, however navies tend to do more throwing it around style driving and less plodding along in a straight line at a sensible pace. Consequently vessels built to civilian standards but operated by a navy tend to wear out faster. Which was known when Ocean was ordered. Brasil is likely to use her less intensely and also has plenty of cheap manpower to throw onboard, which the RN lacks.
Few corrections :-)
1) The Queen Elizabeth's *are* designed to function as LPH's, with accommodation and "assault pathways" for troops. Given their size, they will be a lot better at it than Ocean, since they can carry more helicopters and launch more simultaneously than it can. The ability to carry 4 LCVP small landing craft doesn't help much, and if you're using helicopters you don't want to be close enough to land things via landing craft anyway: the idea is that you are over the horizon.
2) The Albions can carry 4 LCU large landing craft each, but the three Bay class landing ships can also carry 1 LCU each.
Exactly how much money from trading (anything) have the people responsible for buying this kit in the first place and then selling it at a loss? Ever made? Or in simple terms do they have any business experience at all?
I appreciate that warships are not exactly the sort of item you would find on Amazon (yet) but surely by now we should be avoiding these seemingly ongoing disasters of buying ships that break down (type 45's), aircraft that cannot take off and land fully weaponised (F35) as nauseam?
If you use something for 20 years, you don't expect to make a profit on your purchase price when you sell it. This isn't trading, it's selling a used car. One lady owner from new, in this case...
As for the other stuff, all military purchases will always be fucked up to some extent. Because the stuff is complex, there are political factors if you order working old kit from foreigners, rather than new kit from domestic suppliers. Old proven kit may become obsolete very quickly sometimes - if technology changes. The Royal Navy in the late 19th Century were building whole classes of ships, then having to scrap them ten years later because they were obsolete.
One of HMS Ocean's predecessors was a Canopus class battleship. Entered service in 1900 - obsolete by 1905! Along with all the other battleships in the world, when HMS Dreadnought was built. Canopus itself was basically useless in the fuck-up that was the battle of Coronel in 1914 - because it couldn't keep up with modern German cruisers - that it could probably still sink if they'd only cooperate. It would have been slaughtered by a dreadnought or even a battlecruiser. And Ocean got sunk by a mine in 1915 - when it got used in the Dardanelles campaign, along with most of the other useless pre-dreadnought battleships.
One of HMS Ocean's predecessors was a Canopus class battleship. Entered service in 1900 - obsolete by 1905!
And then there was the Cressy class, much the same. Except they were pressed back into service in WWI to form the livebait squadron, a nickname that proved prophetic. Not the RN's finest hour (a number of relatives lost in that event)
The armoured cruisers were another failure of design theory - but also victim of technological change. Ships were getting massively faster in the era, so the Canopus class battleships were doing under 20 knots, Dreadnought was about 21 (5 years later) and the early battlecruisers could only do 24 knots. By 1916 the Queen class could do 28 knots, and yet were armoured like battleships - and were still good enough to be effective fighting units for the whole of WWII.
That speed change meant the armoured cruisers could no longer catch the smaller cruisers they were supposed to have been built to dominate. I guess they didn't want to just scrap such modern ships - but they should have.
The battlecruiser wasn't obsolete, just too expensive and shiny. It should have been used to scout for, and then run away from big ships - while being able to outrun and destroy anything smaller. Plus be used for dealing with raiders to protect the ocean lines of supply. But they were just too shiny not to put in with the main fleet. And then Beatty was rubbish at commanding them anyway.
So the Battle of the Falklands in 1915 was their real job, destroying von Spee's German cruiser squadron that had earlier won at Coronel - because instead of sending the proper battlecruisers to do the job, the Admiralty sent the obsolete Canopus and a mixed bag of cruisers. 1 modern, 1 auxilliary and 2 obsolete armoured ones, almost as bad as Cressy.
Not so much a reply as an addendum. The replies so far seem to refer to ships and deals over 100 years ago....so nothing has changed it would seem. Surely our brave sailors deserve a better standard of equipment without some idiot in Whitehall interfering? Why on earth did we sell all those Harriers cheap to the US Marines (who are still using them)? They would have done nicely on the two new carriers surely?
HKmk23,
We decided to have less stuff, so we could spend less on defence. Or at least grow the defence budget less fast. Partly because the previous government had committed to ten years of defence equipment procurment that was two or three times as much as our actual equipment procurement budget.
Plus they'd been spending quite a lot of the defence budget on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan - and emergency kit purchases for those (particularly new vehicles). The army now have a lot of shiny new armoured vehicles, that probably wouldn't have been bought otherwise.
So when the coalition came into power in the depths of the severest recession in 70 years, they decided to cut stuff - I'm not sure it was in the best way for our defence capabilities, but I think they'd hve had to considerably increase the defence budget if they hadn't.
So cutting some Harrier squadrons, but keeping others, still leaves you with almost the same maintenance and support costs. So they thought it would be a terrific wheeze to dump the whole aircraft type, when they could still get money for them by selling to the US Marines - and obviously that allowed them to cut the carriers early, rather than continue the capability until the first new one became operational around 2020.
I think the big problem was that a bunch of new kit was due to be purchased at roughly the same time - even though a lot of it will last for 30 years - and the biggest chunk of that was the Navy. Which is why the navy got clobbered hardest.
Because the RAF employ more bullshitters than pilots, and "persuaded" the MOD they could do anything the Fleet Air Arm could do.
Turns out thay cant, and never could, who'd a thunk it.
BTW, the news that the F35 cannot land while carrying its full weaponload infuriated me, as it was the exact excuse given for scrapping the Sea Harrier, but even worse. The SHAR only had an issue landing fully loaded in the Tropics; the F35 cannot land anywhere.
Much as I dislike the French, we should have walked away from the F35 and bought either SuperHornets or the excellent airframes the French Navy uses (yup, forgotten the name - blame my meds).
An aircraft carrier with a golf course on top... reminds me of a game I used to play...
So, do we sail it over to them, the British crew show the new Brazilian crew how it works (as in watch that button- have to press it really hard to work) and either fly back, or get a lift from the new crew ?
Or, do they pick up from here ?
Just wondered this sort of thing.
I suspect the Brazilians will send a crew over here to be trained up in her operation, including going through Operational Sea Training with FOST in Devonport. Then they can sail her back ready to go to work. We generally seem to include that sort of thing in the sales package.
When that sort of thing is going on the trick is to make sure your pilot knows that your ship is the light grey one with the white ensign and not the similar looking dark grey one with the Chilean ensign...
It's not the first time Brazil buys an used aircraft carrier, but WTF does it want to do with such a ship? It's a lot a wasted money.
A helicopter carrier with room for embarked troops is actually a very useful and flexible ship. You can use it to invade places of course. But even if you never fight a war - it can offer military support to friendly governments (as it did in Sierra Leone), but is also great for disaster recovery (something it's done a lot of in the Caribbean after hurricanes), plus anti-piracy operations in the Red Sea. I think we also used it to help out with the Ebola epidemic 2 years ago - ferrying people to hospital ships and medical staff around the affected countries.
It shows Brasil’s regional rivals, namely Chile and Argentina, who’s the daddy.
BTW. I recently learned there was once a battleship race between Chile, Argentina and Brasil with two of the countries buying dreadnaughts from British yards. Argentina chose to buy American.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_American_dreadnought_race
Perhaps Chile would like to buy the Prince of Wales? (The ship or the man, we can negotiate on price)
It's 20 years old, and has been heavily used. It's been replaced. The options are to spend loads to extend its life (not a bad idea but the RN are short of crews), mothball it, scrap it, or sell it.
Given it's 20 years old and needs a major refit - it's probably not worth that much. Oh, also, not many countries operate ships this big. And a bunch of those won't buy ships they haven't built themselves for political reasons. So there are only a handful of potential buyers in the world. Unless someone like Bill Gates wants it as a super yacht...
£84 million is not a lot of money for a LPH (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landing_Platform_Helicopter) ship.
The US will be pissed if it turns out that Brazil was acting as a straw purchaser for China or someone like that. Then again China would end up wasting billions making a STOVL F-35B equivalent to fly off the clones of HMS Ocean they'd produce.
Ocean was always meant as a stopgap measure between the invincible class and the QE Class (once the latter was delayed) and for the price its a lovely ship, also weve been able to train some staff on a big vaguley flat top. ocean was supposed to be 30,000 tonnes halfway between Invincibles and QEs.
the PoW wil be called the PoW as the last 6 to wear the name have been.
Ocean was designed from the ground up for Commando operations, even down to the width of her passageways. I have to admit, i didnt like the idea when she joined, but have warmed to the LPH idea, and now i'm starting to think 3 oceans and the two albions, would have made a better capital fleet, and saved us on the F35 costs.