It's clear from US plans and numbers that a decision about F-35C does not have to be taken today, but can't be put off indefinitely.

The USN's fix is that, if they buy more SHs, they come out of the -35C requirement. The idea originally, I believe, was that the SH would replace the A-6, the F-14 and the F/A-18A/Bs. But now the SH is eating into the C/D replacement numbers, with airframes that are good until the 2030s, long after the last F-35C in the plans. A few dozen more and F-35C looks very expensive.

Hence the USN is trying not to order more SHs lest the F-35C program lose numbers and become (even) more expensive. But... next year, the price of SHs starts to go up.

Also (I think most here understand it, but it's worth the emphasis) going to Mr Boeing and saying "will you build me a $1.5 billion fleet of SHs that I can return for money back in ten years, just so that I can protect your competitor's plans to wipe you out?" is unlikely to get a positive response.

Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System - EMALS
The diesels and GTs in QE or POW generate a total of 112MW.
The propulsion motors use a max of 80.16MW.

{VA, volt amps, (or VA or kVA or MVA) is a measure of the complex power in a system, which includes the real power (watts, or kW or MW) and the reactive power. Real power and VA are related by the power factor.

Volt amps = power factor x real power
IF your power factor is 0.9, then
VA = 0.9 x 1000 kW
VA = 900 kVA

Circuits containing purely resistive heating elements (filament lamps, strip heaters, cooking stoves, etc.) have a power factor of 1.0. Circuits containing inductive or capacitive elements (lamp ballasts, motors, etc.) often have a power factor below 1.0. }

So no matter what the PF is, there will be far more than enough power to run both cats at the same time without dropping speed any.

Seems to work fine with zero ground and wind speed from the land based test version of emals.

Nice video, I appreciate this is the start of testing/qualification but in the video it appears that the EMAL track is a lot longer than traditional catapult tracks. Can anyone confirm if the US system being demonstrated will fit on the smaller UK boat?
On the plus side the acceleration appears to be a lot smoother than steam although the aircraft was probably lightly loaded for these early trials

U.K. Reviewing Lockheed

More "back to the B" reporting. Is this just because that's what people have been reporting, so that's what they ask Venlet, and take a noncommittal response as a yes (confirmation bias)? Or have people found some bad stuff about EMALS and the QEC?

Dr Boffin to the thread, please...

So.....
assuming we can't afford to convert the ships to EMALS and so go for the F-35B.
And then for whatever reason that fails - either on technical grounds, or on financial grounds in the USA. What next?
Could a Sea Griffin launch from the ski ramp with a decent payload? And what would be the lead time from the decision to start development to in service?

I think we need to start looking at plan C (or D or E or..)

Yes its a complete dogs breakfast. Going back to the B is the wrong move IMHO. The USN needs the C and will make it work. Stick with it.

Suspect PR12 exercise question may have got out of hand. As noted in post 46 - I can't see how you'd get anywhere near £1.2Bn to convert one ship. Unless you said to BAE - " the budgets £1Bn, how much will it cost (make sure you add on risk) to convert QEC".

Oh.....

Going back to B is a significant risk in itself. Overall this programme needs to be left alone to get on with it for a while. The build is going well, what is not going well is the continual vacillation by ministers, senior mil and CS and the determination by some in the media and elsewhere to portray the ships as disasters waiting to happen.

Thanks, Mr B...

It is, I think, a matter of context and confirmation bias. If a journo asks "is the UK thinking of reverting to the B?" and gets a generic all-options-on-the-table answer, said journo will take it as a positive.

In the long term, the UK really has two options: whatever the USN carries forward as its prime carrier-based aircraft, or Rafale. If the USN gets the F-35C sorted, the Hornet has problems as a long-term solution; if not, the JSF alternative that Boeing (wisely) disguises as the "International Roadmap" Hornet will be the answer.

It follows that the UK can't take a decision now, even if there was a good reason to. The program changes now are intended to give the contractors another couple of years to fix the hook, the HMD and the IPP, define and cost the structural fixes, work out how much the next-gen processors (to run Block 4) will cost, and stabilize production...

I don't think, by the way, that even JSF can withstand another couple of years of annual negative discovery and restructure.

I can't see how you'd get anywhere near £1.2Bn to convert one ship

Fairly easy if companies are trying to use emalls as cover to hide other cost overruns.

But wouldn't that be corruption and at least the offence of False Accounting? :oh:

Siddar

Depends which companies. Given that budget hardware costs for EMALS are available, the shipbuild would have to be going badly wrong. From what I've seen, it ain't, although the most challenging parts in terms of outfit and commissioning are yet to come.

Time will tell. What grips me is the constant stream of "facts" spouted, many of which could be bettered by a six-year-old with a crayon.....

Fully with you on that, a proponent of the the B, within the MoD, has obviously seen the opportunity to get some bad press in for the C, hoping to push the case for the B variant.

Was it William Shakespeare that first raised this question of whether to purchase the 'B' as opposed to the 'C'?

To 'B', or not to 'B': that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,

Apologies if the humour is out of order but I at least need cheering up :sad:

Hopefully the criticism of these aircraft might taper off but I still cannot understand why Lockheed Martin has such sensitive information on computers that are linked to the Internet.

Hi Greenknight thank you for your post and I fear you might have misunderstood my question. At no stage did I ever think the EMALS systems would have an effect on the ship's speed, I was querying whether each unit was a fully self contained item that had its own power supply completely independent of the ship's power source. Using ship's power would suggest that the price of two would not be double the price of one. :)

As for why LMT has JSF data on computers linked to the Internet: In order to build global support for the program, JSF has thousands of subs in 50 states and around the world, some of them so small that the chief information officer is also the receptionist.

Building an "air-gapped" network would be impossible, or at least very expensive - and moreover, in 2001, nobody had a clue about the APT or how it might work. So they built a system that (as far as I know) is not unlike a commercial VPN and called it good.

This is a good document about how the Advanced Persistent Threat works:

http://www.mcafee.com/us/resources/w...-shady-rat.pdf

Curiouser and curiouser...

Cost fears cause MoD rethink on fighter jets - FT.com

"Douglas Barrie, analyst at the Institute for International Strategic Studies, the think tank, said a switch back to the F35-B “would present some interesting presentational issues” for the government having portrayed the C-variant as more cost-effective."

No :mad:, Sherlock. I don't see the whole thing being thrown into reverse in two weeks' time.

The MoD's inability to cost defence projects independently (as opposed to relying on industry prices) is what is being exposed here.

I repeat, the dollar costs for a shipset of 4 EMALS cats for USS Ford as part of a Firm Fixed-Price Contract are available here on pg 38:

http://www.finance.hq.navy.mil/fmb/13pres/SCN_BOOK.pdf

At $1.5 : £1, that's £516M, for the hardware of a four-cat set (based on the higher estimate for CVN79). Given that you're buying half the linear motors, half the power converters and half the power storage devices, you might think £300M was in the ballpark for one two-cat shipset.

The advanced arresting gear is at pg 40 and hardware cost is £120M per shipset.

Now if you add the full engineering support for each system (also in the data), you get costs for supply of the systems, technical data and engineering support of ~£50M and £20M respectively. So, broadly speaking about £500M for the hardware and support for one ships worth, excluding integration & installation.

As noted before, installation is actually quite light on manpower (even if you do need lots of sparkies) and integration into the L3-designed IPMS should be possible for £50M, you're looking at nothing like the numbers being bandied about. I can see that there might be a premium for accelerated delivery (probably needed for PoW), but this is taking the p1ss. Where are these numbers coming from and who is actually marking the homework?

"Where are these numbers coming from?"

I'm going to speculate here.

What if someone on the UK side has said "We can't live with a US Navy IOC beyond 20xx, because we have to shadow the USN, with the C, and big grey floaty thing + no jets = embarrassment x infinity."

To which the US response is: "We haven't nailed down any IOCs yet".

If I was LockMart, at this point I say "if you want earlier IOCs, go with the B... or at least consider it your fallback", and I'd be using whoever is sympathetic to plant the story all over the place.

What if someone on the UK side has said "We can't live with a US Navy IOC beyond 20xx, because we have to shadow the USN, with the C, and big grey floaty thing + no jets = embarrassment x infinity."

To which the US response is: "We haven't nailed down any IOCs yet".

To which the UK response ought properly to be : "Can we please lease X C/D frames from AMARC, put the aircrew/maintainers through your conversion pipeline and can you please provide the number of those nice people who do depth maintenance on the Candian FA18? Or is that Mr Boeing?". Eight years from 2018 ought to do it, thanks. How much?

Problem being C/D frames are probably fairly high-time and those that aren't are scarce.

We've recently increased our inventory of airworthy airframes of a certain Boeing (McDonnell-Douglas)/BAE (Hawker-Siddeley) combat type... perhaps you would be interested in a lease of some of those?

:E:E