Originally Posted by
tucumseh
Blue Fox was only ever going to have a 10 year life, max. That made it unusual. Like I said, in many ways it was a technology demonstrator. There was a planned, funded and contracted upgrade path in the family of radars. That provided stability and encouraged innovation. Why was any Ferranti radar good? The design team. But also the superb radar scientists we had at RSRE Malvern, who contributed so much. Also worth mentioning is that in the 70s and early 80s many MoD(PE) project managers had been radar designers. The Fox & Vixen one was brilliant; so too the Kestrel one, who later did Apache. By end-90s, all that expertise was largely gone.
This nicely illustrates what has annoyed me intensely throughout my engineering career. Beancounters generally have absolutely no idea how to count the beans, or know how to go looking for where the beans are, or really care what it is the beans are supposed to be buying. Expertise is priceless - officially so - because no bean counter ever places a value on it. Yet we (engineers and end users) all know very well the true value of expertise, and the value of maintaining it regardless of anything else.
A good example of how radar developments can go wrong. Type 996 - an air surveillance radar for the RN - was a procurement to forget. No one had put in the spec that it had to be mounted on the top of the mast of ship that would actually go to sea. I mean, why would you?
The result was that the antenna motors kept failing - they weren't waterproof. And the first time a ship with one got struck by lightning the gold plated fibre glass waveguide they'd used blew up. The reason why older radars had had massive lumps of brass for the rotating joints and waveguide was because they made good lightning conductors. You couldn't make it up. The problems were all put right in due course, but they were pretty pathetic problems to have in the first place.