Glojo
The ski-jump construction for QEC has not and now will not start, ever.
The decision on which ship (or ships) to fit EMALS to is subject to further study work to derive the actual costs to finalise a contract change with the Carrier Alliance. That will report (I suspect) well before 2015. Personally from my (somewhat removed) perspective, I would not characterise the contract as anything out of the ordinary in terms of its cleverness. When Lord Drayson decided to blackmail VT and BAES into merging their shipbuilding operations and Gordon Brown subsequently persistently refused to release the funds to let the contract (until his re-election depended on it), BVT / BAE / ACA were always going to demand some sort of guarantee (the "infamous" ToBA), which actually makes perfect sense.
EMALS will have to be fitted after the flightdeck is constructed (much as the actual cat part of a steam cat is), although certain major items of equipment will need to be installed in 2 deck as the units are built. Stability or space will not be a problem. The stability margin included for the possible fit of cats actually makes the ship "too stable" at start of life if fitted with the ski-jump, so the cats are actually helping. Length of the cats makes no difference, a 90m version (pretty much as per US C-13 steam cat) is planned in the design. Once you get beyond a certain length, it isn't the cats or the recovery deck that drives the design and we're already there.
If the frigates you refer to are T23, the sonar (2031) was removed because it was gash and we weren't buying enough of the replacement (2087) to fit the whole fleet, hence reconfiguring the winch space to a mess.
Am unsighted on the IPP issue - had thought the issue was more likely to be the 175kN of thrust from the main jet nozzle on STOVL. Doubt it will be a show stopper.
Last edited by Not_a_boffin; 19th Jul 2011 at 17:21.