Boff,
Disturbing post. I was under the impression that design was far more advanced. A couple of years back Alan West told the Defence Committee that CVF detailed design was (if memory serves) around 80% complete. Then at xmas last year we had the announcements that a further £300m was being spent getting the design ready for the manufacturing stage. This made me wonder what Westy was talking about!
I can understand, given the sorry story with Astute and the Bays that prior to order the MoD would want to nail down costs, ie achieve a high degree of cost certainty- and the best way to do this is to price up a detailed design (the old seperation of design from build that DK Brown seems to favour).
Are we anywhere near a detailed design thats ready for the builders to price?
cheers