The Evening Standard article is utter b8llocks, an attempt to spin a revert to B decision and to perpetuate the myth that the QEC is some sort of job creation scheme masterminded by Gordon Brown.
I have seen the original staff target (7068 IIRC), which btw was created in the last days of Majors government, although not endorsed until 98 I think. The size of the carriers (even then) was 40000 te and driven by the need to deliver a meaningful effect as opposed to the tokenism of CVS. That is not to denigrate those who operated SHAR/GR7 and CVS, but merely to point out the obvious. If you were going to fight the wars assumed in the high-level OA and Defence Planning Assumptions, you needed to generate 100+ sorties a day, sustained for several days, as opposed to the 20-odd sorties per day you'd get from CVS.
The 65000te beast arrived in 2000, when it was realised that the previous concept designs had largely crammed the aircraft onto the deck as opposed to spotting the deck properly. Cost in ships is not directly proportional to size (even for warships), but the huge disparity in size twixt QEC and CVS has given two services the opportunity to spend the last decade sniping and presenting the ships as "unaffordable", one from fear (a threat to their fiefdom) and one from lack of comprehension and an understandable desire to focus on the war they were fighting. The Naval staff have also proven woefully inadequate in presenting their case. The cost growth from the original £3.2Bn for the pair first offered by the ACA in about 2002 is almost entirely attributable to this effect, which has led to endless attempted redesigns and programme delays, all of which actually cost real money to no discernable benefit.
Only two yards in the country had a realistic chance of constructing the ships in conventional fashion, Swan Hunter on the Tyne and Harland and Wolff in Belfast. However, Swans destroyed their large berth in 2001-ish to build the LSD(A) in a dock and Harlands was pretty much only a dock with no fabrication facility by 2002. That left a choice between Inchgreen on the Clyde, Nigg in NE Scotland or Rosyth as the only places with a cat in hell's chance of assembling the ships. As the first two hadn't been used for a decade and were essentially bare facilities, Rosyth was a no-brainer and nothing to do with politics or Chancellors etc. Gordon Brown did everything he could to avoid contracting for the ships (thereby increasing the price) and it was only (IMO) a last desperate throw of the dice that persuaded the useless tw@t to allow MoD to place the order.
The ships are big because we learned the lessons of CVS. If you're going to buy something, make sure it has the potential to be used properly, including potential changes of use. CVS was supposed to be a helicopter carrier with 9 cabs and a force of five SHAR. That it managed to eventually accommodate another eight aircraft (just!) was partly due to a good basic design, but also due to a change in policy (permanent deck park). However, building-in known limitations is not generally considered a good design model to follow.
This is a sorry tale even before the present shenanigans. The latest manoeuvrings threaten to lose the chance of a half-decent capability to short-termism based on half-@rsed data, ignorance and malice.
Last edited by Not_a_boffin; 20th Mar 2012 at 10:16.