In reply to Evalu8tor, I think it would make sense for the Junglies to get a Merlin replacement for the SK4, particularly in terms of commonality with RN and RAF Merlin fleets.
junglyAEO I seem to remember reading an article in Flight International proposing (in 1995 I think) replacing the Sea King AEW2 with a UAV, slaved to the carrier and feeding back information. But with the more advanced systems fitted to the Sea King ASaCs (and MASC in future) would surely require large amounts of bandwidth to send the information back to the carrier, with no human operators onboard. Would you not still have the same launch and recovery problems? Just asking......
The idea of putting it on a pallet is interesting, but how would you deploy the antenna (or antenna array)?
I think fusing data from MASC, from surface warships, the F35 (via data link), and other available UK or coalition assets (AWACS or Hawkeye) will be important.