Posted on 07/03/2008 1:00:33 AM PDT by bruinbirdman
A deal to build Britain's biggest ever aircraft carriers is expected to be sealed today.
The Ministry of Defence is poised to sign contracts worth around £3 billion for two 65,000-ton ships.
The Queen Elizabeth and the Prince of Wales will be built at Govan in Glasgow and Rosyth in Fife, as well as Portsmouth and Barrow-in-Furness in Cumbria.
Measuring more than 300 yards in length, the ships will have a flight deck the size of three football pitches and space for 40 aeroplanes.
They will be similar in size to the QE2 and are more than three times the size of the existing Invincible-class carriers.
Each vessel will have a crew of 1,450 sailors and airmen.
The building of the two aircraft carriers is expected to secure a total of 10,000 jobs across Britain. They are due to come into service in 2014 and 2016.
At first the ships will carry the ageing Harrier jump jet before switching to the new Joint Strike Fighter aircraft once it becomes ready.
The Navy regards the new carriers as its future flagships to replace Ark Royal and Illustrious, enhancing Britain's ability to operate in hostile waters.
However, the MoD's decision to press ahead with the carriers - which could cost a total of £4 billion - has caused controversy.
It currently has a £1 billion hole in its budget and some fear the Navy will struggle to provide enough frigates, destroyers and submarines to protect the carriers.
The Army and Royal Air Force are expected to face cuts in their supply of new equipment.
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
No Obama is Britain.
Good. We need a strong Britain. 65,000 is a big ship...still smaller than Nimitz class: 78,280 tons light; 101,196 tons fully loaded
Heartening news. Won’t do much good, though, unless the operational orders are changed to allow the captain authority to give the “go” order the next time some pipsqueak pirates decide to shanghai Britsh sailors!
I like it!
Kenya bought one of Britain’s old carriers and are currently beating it into millions of spear heads. Just kidding. ;-)
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Then they'll use their new toys against the Great Satin.
Are they going to battle Liberace?
I imagine the Brussels bureaucrats are slavering at the idea that the English are building them a really big luxury yacht. Now if they can just redesign it, like they did the Airbus A380...
...Because everyone knows that bureaucrats are better engineers than engineers. Get rid of all those guns and radar and stuff.
A navy that can’t afford to operate frigates can’t afford to operate full deck carriers. I have posted repeatedly I don’t believe these ships will ultimately join the RN. If they are even completed, I look for the Brits to sell them off.
France is already making noises about taking one of the two. India might also in the future wish for something better then Russian cast-offs.
Those ships are still tiny compared to our super carriers of 90-100+tons .
Are they still planning on sharing the new carriers with the French?
LOL!
“France is already making noises about taking one of the two.”
Just to correct you here, the deal that you are referring to involves 3 carriers being built by the UK, 2 of which (HMS’ Queen Elizabeth and Prince of Wales) will be used by the RN to replace the 3 Invincible Class carriers we are using at present. The other one will be built to French specifications, but broadly following the same lines as the previous 2. We will then sell this vessel to the French Navy, to complement her Charles de Gaulle.
Its going to be more cost effective to have 2 carriers than the 3 we currently operate. The cuts that the RN are having to make involves the FSC project to replace the Type 22 and 23’s (multi-role frigates), but they are modernising the current vessels to extend service life. We have new nuclear submarines being built (Astute Class), new Anti Air Destroyers (Type 45), new littoral patrol vessels (River Class), a new class of amphibious assault ships (Albion class), new Bay Class support vessels for the Royal Fleet Auxilliary. All of this can be checked out @ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_the_Royal_Navy
See above
Britain 3% Muslim
America 3% Muslim. Also: the US govt could be taken over by a Muslim this November.
bump
Both my great grandfather and grandfather worked in the shipyards at Govan, Scotland.
Yet we still have our sovereignty unlike the EU fools.
Glad to see the RN is upgrading capabilities, but one thing I don’t understand. These are HUGE, over 900 feet..3x the size of the RN’s current ones, and nearly as long as the Nimitz class. Put these ships will operate STOL aircraft..jump deck launches..no catapults, and no arresting cables..so why do they have to be so large? Wouldn’t the RN be better served building 4-5 smaller ones..about the same size as their present ships...each would obviously carry a smaller number of aircraft, but there would be much greater operational flexibility..
Ouch !
Displacement 2,000,000 + tons!! Armament 40 x 2 4.5" DP Numerous light AA Aircraft Up to 150 twin-engined bombers or fighters Speed Up to 10 knots VTS Rating 1 (25) 2 (5) / (3d) Desparately seeking solutions to the U-boat threat, Britain actually planned to build an unsinkable aircraft carrier out of ice! The HMS Habbakuk was the brainchild of Goeffrey Pyke, inventor of "Pykrete", a mixture of ice and wood pulp. Pykrete could be hammered and sawn like wood and was incredibly slow-melting despite being 90% water. The 280,000 Pykrete cubes needed for construction would take eight months and 8,000 workers to make in Canada. The 2,000-foot long monster "berg-ship" would displace two million tons and have an incredibly deep draft, keeping it out of most harbors. The inside would be hollowed out for quarters, hangars, and a massive refrigeration plant with walls 50 feet thick. Twenty-six electric engines, each in its own nacelle with a propellor, were fed by a generating plant. Speed was slow and manuverability nearly non-existent, but Habbakuk could provide an airbase capable of handling long-range, twin-engined land planes, and could not "sink" as it was already water! The high labor costs of construction and breakthroughs in ASW apparatus and codebreaking significantly lessened the U-boat threat enough to melt away official interest in the "iceberg carrier". In "Grand Fleet", however, no Allied convoys had made it through to Arkangelsk by late 1942. Russia is on the ropes and desperately needs supplies to stave off defeat. The fresh frozen Pykrete carrier Habbakuk joins a critically important convoy off Newfoundland and, with other ships, fends off Luftwaffe air attacks and succesfully escorts the convoy to safety. Russia squeaks by and begins to build up for an offensive to repel the Axis invaders. The Allies wondered what to do with the ship, now that her duty was done. The Soviets wanted it as an offshore prison ship in Siberia, but the Americans took it across the Polar Route to Alaska to use as a ready-made housing project for Eskimos displaced by the Japanese occupation of Attu and Kiska. They politely refused. Still relatively intact after the war, it was towed to Bikini Atoll for the A-bomb tests where the above-water portion was vaporized by the explosion. The lower portion bobbed up and caused much concern and disbelief among mariners who sighted the diminishing iceberg adrift in equatorial waters. http://www.combinedfleet.com/furashita/habbak_f.htm
They will operate STOVL aircraft. Initially the Harrier, then the F35 when its up and running.
I think the amount of carriers built was dependent on a number of things;
1. Cost to maintain, operate, repair and arm 5 smaller carriers.
2. Costs in escorts for the carriers. There are about limited number of escorts available for duty, with most of them on patrol in vital areas already in the South Atlantic, North Atlantic, North Sea, the Med and the Gulf. More carriers would mean more Type 45’s to be built, again, increasing costs.
They will operate up to 40 aircraft, so we would only ever need one for any expiditionary force. Once in theatre the vessels are must act with what they have, and an enlarged Naval Air Wing means we can have a greater variety of aircraft available on ship, to adapt to changing circumstances. For smaller missions we would probably base a fleet around an Albion Amphibious Assault Ship, or possibly the helo carrier HMS Ocean. Had we chosen to build smaller carriers akin to our current Invincible Class, no doubt the threads here would have been full of armchair opinions about the lack of size of UK carriers, and that US Navy was the bestest ever. Still, we have ended up with that anyway, so I can see your point!
I love the Invincible Class, really nice looking light carriers and they have done their duty all over the globe, from as far back as the Falklands War. The names are a sight better too; Invincible, Illustrious and Ark Royal far better than the ego-centric option to plaster royal names on the side.
Insane! Fantastic post mate.
I don’t quite understand the reasoning of the Brits on this. Supercarriers are only a necessity if you use catapult-launched naval aircraft, which have similar range and payload capabilities of land based fighters. But that’s not what the Brits are doing. They continue to insist on using VSTOL planes, which, no matter what you do, are going to have less range an payload than cat-launched aircraft. And if you’re going to use VSTOL planes, the the reason d’eatre of the supercarrier goes out the window. If you’re still going VSTOL, for the same money that you’re spending on two QE2 class ships, you could have 4 or 5 smaller VSTOL carriers like the current ships the UK uses, and greatly improve your coverage of trouble spots across the world.
I’m all for Supercarriers... they’re indispensable... but if you’re using nothing but less-capable VSTOL aircraft, what’s the point?
And F-35 fans... please, no lectures about how the F-35B is just as capable as the A. It’s not. The A can maneuver at 9 G’s. The B is limited to 7. The A has more range and payload because there’s no vertical fan behind the pilot, as on the B model. The B is a little slower than the A, and even the A is slower than current fighters in it’s size class. The F-35B will be an improvement over the Harrier, but it’s not in the same class as a Typhoon, Rafale, or Super Hornet. Only it’s radar system will be comparable. The only true advantage it will have is stealthiness, and to some extent that goes out the window after the first day of a war.
The only logical reason I can see for doing this is that the QE2 design supposedly allows for modification with a catapult. But that wouldn’t be cheap, and Britain is about to invest billions of dollars in F-35B’s for the Royal Navy. So to me, these ships make much more sense for a country like France, with their Rafales, not for a VSTOL fleet.
“There are about limited number of escorts available for duty, with most of them on patrol in vital areas already in the South Atlantic, North Atlantic, North Sea, the Med and the Gulf.”
Since no carrier operates independently and you seem to indicate that the available escort ships for these ships are limited, what will the British carrier task forces for these 2 carriers look like? Are there going to be enough ships?
Well, the new Type 45 destroyers will be the anti Air defence for the carrier in any expiditionary fleet. We are building them as we type, and at final count their will be no more than 8, more likely 6. We have 13 active Type 23’s, but these are in demand for our standing deployment around the globe. 11 aging Type 22’s are still active, but they will need to be replaced before long. So, its not a big navy, so I think that 2 carriers is plenty.
Just about enough ships. We can never have another massive navy, the costs are too great, but a compact and modern one is within our grasp.
Yup, the King George V Class. Great photo, and what a ship. Shame is went down in such an ignominious fashion.
“We can never have another massive navy, the costs are too great, but a compact and modern one is within our grasp.”
I suppose effectiveness matters more than size for the mission at hand. With all the recent cuts in the Royal Navy that I keep reading about, I take heart in seeing these carriers still in the plan (thus my question about the task force that will surround them). May the Royal Navy forever stand for freedom!
Thanks for the comments...and as far as naming ships, well using “royals” is still a far sight better than the USN unfortunate choice of JImmy Carter for one of its nuclear subs..
lol
;)
I’ve not read anywhere that the new French carrier will be built in Britain.
Yep, sorry my mistake. British design, with French input. It woulos seem though that its not entirely clear if the French will go for one, citing ‘cash shortages’.
“The French carrier will be built by an alliance of Thales and DCN from their proposed design: a 283 m long, 75,000 tonnes variant of the CVF.”
“However, in April 2008 French Defence Minister Herve Morin cast doubt over plans for a second aircraft carrier, citing a cash crunch, and said a decision would be taken soon.[3] Further doubts were cast on the project on 21 June 2008 when the French President Nicholas Sarkozy deceided to pull out of the Franco-British project. Sarkozy stated that a final decision on the future of French participation in the Project would be taken in 2011 or 2012. British plans for two aircraft carriers go ahead as planned despite the French withdrawal.”
Fools. All they would pay is a hundred or so million pounds for the design, and then they make it, creating/keeping jobs in their own shipbuilding industry. I ‘spose they think that the Charles de Gaulle is enough. Sorry for misleading anyone with my poor research.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_French_aircraft_carrier
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