Tekever aims to create a new type of partnership between government and industry where we will ensure a constant cycle of capability evolution that delivers decisive advantage to our end users
Does he speak English?
British Army finds a new eye in the sky after Watchkeeper woes
The UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) is investing up to £400 million in new surveillance drones to replace the British Army's troublesome Watchkeeper fleet. The MoD has selected the Tekever AR5 uncrewed aerial vehicle (UAV) for a fleet of "spy-in-the-sky" aircraft intended to provide real-time intelligence, protect troops, and …
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Wednesday 29th July 2026 13:31 GMT I ain't Spartacus
Does he speak English?
It's contractor speak for spiral development. Which is defence-speak for anything from continual improvement to continual billing - depending on the company and skills of the procuring organisation.
Take Eurofighter. Tranche 1 was air-to-air only - which was fine, we had a Cold War need for a fighter aircraft on permanent quick reaction alert. Shame the Cold War ended... As happens that has never quite gone away, and we do more QRA now, than in years. Tranche 1 had "austere" air-to-ground capabilities added - it could drop some bombs.
Tranche 2 was always going to be designed to do both, at full capability. And did. It also got the capability to fire Meteor, so got even better at air-to-air.
Tranche 3 was better than both. Tranche 4, the latest, has an incredibly shiny radar that can also do "electronic attack" (i.e. jam other aircraft's radars while still doing radar things itself) - and tranche 5 will be the so-far German only electronic warfare aircraft. They refuse to buy the cool new British radar, so have only got the (still-good) new "Common European Radar" (German version of). God knows how many different versions of the F16 they're up to - I think they're up to the letter V...
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Thursday 30th July 2026 08:50 GMT CrazyOldCatMan
I hope they use Castrol R.
Hmm.. two-stroke. That lovely cloud of blue smoke when you twist the throttle and then the sight of the tree approaching at high speed when the power curve hits the 'going stratospheric' point..
Yes, I remember the old Yamaha RD250 - famed for wheeleing learners into trees because of the semi-vertical power curve once you passed a certain revs.. The RD350 was worse but wasn't legal for learners when I was a nipper. And, by the time I could afford a new bike, they had changed the rules so that learners could only ride a 12bhp 125cc bike.
Mine was somewhat 'lightly' restricted - a washer on the inlet and exhaust manifolds to restrict fuel flow. A set of washers that, mysteriously, seemed to be quite volatile and wear away quite quickly.
"File marks on the washers constable? Dunno how that happened - must have been when the shop serviced it!"
(I kept the old washers and just replaced them when required - bike services, presenting the bike at the police station after being caught doing silly speeds on the country roads..)
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Tuesday 28th July 2026 13:28 GMT Jellied Eel
Re: So that's the platform
It's based off an Elbit drone design but goodness knows how much it varied from that.
Probably quite a lot given the speed which drones are evolving. But the French should be a bit more trustworthy. On which point, they snapped up Racal Research who I did some work with many moons ago, and think moved that from Reading to France. They were fun. We need a thing, and a week later, said thing arrived and did what we wanted.
But IMHO, there's the two aspects to droning. Have a basic airframe that's cheap, easy to manufacture, transport and assemble with an autopilot so it can loiter somewhere. Then hopefully a mission/payload bay that's easy to configure with whatever new technology comes along. Something that struck me about drone evolution is how quickly they've gone from 720p to 4k cameras. Or back in the day, thermal cameras used to be big, power hungry and sometimes needed cooling to cameras on small DJI-style quadcopters that provide good image quality, and negate a lot of camouflage.. Plus being compact & cheap enough that law enforcement can keep them in the back of a vehicle & catch criminals, without needing to summon a helicopter.
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Tuesday 28th July 2026 13:11 GMT Pirate Peter
billy Connelly nuclear bomb salesman sketch
up til now UK defense (and other countries) reminds me of the billy connelly nuclear bomb salesman sketch
arms companies could make all these weapons and sell them to the armed forces at huge cost with the likelyhood they will never be used
now Ukraine have turned that upside down and the economics of the system no longer work, as Russia launch cheap (£10k-£20k) Iranian drones and the west were supplying missiles at £100,000's to shoot them down
now those missiles are used for the cruise missiles, and cheap homegrown racing drones chase the Iranian shahed drones
the other thing coming out of Ukraine is the speed of innovation and change to combat jamming and countermeasures mean normal procurement processes take too long as by the time the process is complete the spec for the weapon has changed and original spec ineffective
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Wednesday 29th July 2026 13:55 GMT I ain't Spartacus
Re: billy Connelly nuclear bomb salesman sketch
Pirate Peter,
It very much depends on the tech in question.
Drones are still changing on a weekly basis. That's mostly not actual technology changing, so much as people learning how to operate them, how to counter them, how to counter that counter and so on... Which means that your $500 civilian drone that they started the war adapting is now pretty much useless on the front line, and that Ukraine are using everything from $2,000 customised FPV drones, up to $20,000 interceptor drones to kamikaze into Russia's drones. Not to mention various flavours of cruise missiles (some improvised some the product of big defence contractors), which are just more expensive drones
Look at the enormous changes in aircraft and tanks throughout WWII - although in that case - the underlying technology was also changing incredibly rapidly. Since the war we've only had 5 main battle tanks in 80 years (we were using more than that in 1944 alone): Centurion, Chieftain and Challengers 1, 2 and 3 (same name almost totally different vehicles).
Peacetime procurement is slower, but also you don't have the crucible of tactical change that a long war provides. Also, with something like a tank, you know the basics of what you want when you start, a big gun, some good armour a big engine. What changes is whether you now include a recce drone on top of the turret and definitely you have to include a active protection system to shoot down incoming missiles and drones. But good peacetime procurement means you spend big on your initial tank, so it's got more power and weight capacity than you need - so when you add all the crap to it that you turn out to need later - you have space to do it.
Example, the initial weight of Challenger 2 was something like 61 tonnes (from memory). By the time you bolted on all the extra upgraded armour bits that have been added over the years (the Theatre Entry Kit - as it's known) it's up above 71 tonnes. Challenger 2 is now a very fat old tank, hence the upgrade to Challenger 3 - which has been sold as a fancy new turret - also meant new armour, new engines, new gearboxes etc.
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