Pardon me, somehow didn't see this thread earlier. (how did that happen?)
On Buccaneers built.
Forty-six built between 1973 and 1977, plus three for weapons trials work.
Had RN carrier remained in operational planning beyond the early 70's. Then we can envision a new S.3 variant put into production from the mid-to-late 70's. Likely using a lot of Tornado avionics.
Production line could have remained open for much longer.
Temptation there to either move to uprated Spey development or replace with a RB.199 variant.
It all would depend on the bigger picture.
I'm honestly leaning more towards Tornadoes being built as carrier-compatible than a third round of Buccs. Not that an RB199-powered Bucc wouldn't be fun.
There's also the issue of refuelling. The US Navy has enough nuclear carriers that it can refuel and overhaul them on a rolling basis to take full advantage of the lifespan of the ship and spread its building costs. With the Royal Navy taking a carrier out of service for four or five years is going to create a large hole in the fleet.
Yes, the UK would be hurting to refuel a carrier. May have to talk to the French about how they designed their carriers for quick turnarounds, even though the UK uses HEU.
Also, there's little to no chance that the PWR1 could scale up to a carrier-sized unit, it's more or less an S5W. You'd be looking at something more like an Enterprise layout
with 8 reactors, and the horrible number of personnel needed to run them. Which is honestly very unfortunate for UK reactor design. Making a ~600MWth reactor fit into a ~130ft wide box is not easy.
Speaking of technology, IIUC the 250' BS6 cats were F111B compatible, which was the looming USN interceptor in 1966. By 1978 the F14 was in service and F/A18 in development, would the new carrier need more powerful cats? Given the consensus seems to think the 78 carrier would be closely related to CVA01 would there be room for longer cats? Perhaps the RN might like what the RAN did lengthening the Melbourne's xat from 103' to 112' with the same power in order to reduce the stress of each launch by about 8%, and give the 78 carrier's cats a few extra feet.
There may be room for longer cats but I don't think they'd need to be more powerful.
F-14s are lighter than F-111Bs. Not a lot lighter, but ~6000lbs is still lighter.
I go back to the Falklands as the key mission (and not only in hindsight)... the basic requirements were to put up a 24/7 CAP, ensure sea control, and send some limited strikes against enemy airfields, naval task forces, or strategic ground targets. Even if the Falklands hadn't happened, other potential Cold War conflicts existed in the Middle East (Yemen, Lebanon), Africa, South East Asia. Not to mention the Soviet threat. There has to be some room to replace Ark Royal in the late 70s with something better than the RN's small VSTOL carriers that doesn't cost as much as a full size 50,000+ ton carrier... let's call it the "minimum size Phantom carrier".
Agreed.
The key to this is sortie rates... in the Falklands the Harriers' peak sortie rate was 60-70 sorties/day x 6 days, i.e. about 2-2.5 sorties/day per aircraft. (The CAP-focused Sea Harriers on Invincible flew 2.5-3 sorties/day per aircraft, while the slightly more strike focused Sea Harriers and GR3s on Hermes flew ~2 sorties day). An air wing of 30 Phantoms & Buccaneers should be sufficient to deliver a similar sortie volume, but to much greater effect in terms of weapons load, range, and combat capabilities (relative to Sea Harrier).
So let's set the requirement at 30 aircraft.
- 14 F-4 Phantoms x 2.5 CAP sorties/day = 35 sorties/day
- 16 Buccaneers x 2 strike sorties/day = 32 sorties/day
Total 30 aircraft x 2.25 sorties/day = 67 sorties/day
Ideally add 1-2 attrition replacements for each type, for a total of 32-34 jets onboard.
A Phantom can do a much longer CAP than a SHAR, and that will reduce the needed sorties per day. Buccs as well.
But I still think that ~30 combat aircraft is about the bare minimum. Plus AEW (whichever bird that ended up being) and ASW helos.
An auxiliary steam boiler to power catapults was studied it appears. This document (from 1966) (link
https://library.imarest.org/record/9505/files/v16b3p04a.pdf), summarised findings were:
To supply steam catapults independent of ship's boilers, an auxiliary boiler was designed, developed and installed at the Naval Air Department Bedford, It appeared to work successfully supplying steam to experimental land-based catapults.
It was a La Mont, forced circulation boiler of 110,000 lb/hr evaporation rate and variable working pressure up to 1,025 Ib/sq in. saturated steam. It was fully automatic in the pressure range 550-1,000 lb/sq in. and burnt Diesel fuel through eight 'keyhole' type combustors.
Although a reasonably compact self-contained unit, it was not as small as was hoped and the evaporation rate required to meet a cycle time of 30 seconds was about twice that possible from the boiler.
The key point was that a boiler twice the size, sited in its own boiler room complete with full auxiliaries, was considered to be too
great a penalty in space and weight for back fitting into existing carriers.
So would have one been too great a penalty if in a carrier powered by GTs? Interesting question.
The archive of Journal of Naval Engineering articles on the site linked to has all sorts of interesting historical tidbits.
That does say that
a single boiler twice the size was too big a penalty.
Two smaller boilers may have been a better option than a single larger boiler. I'd need a
lot more information about ship design that I just don't have. I believe it would require more personnel to operate, but less volume.
Boom and bust is the killer, it costs more to ramp up after a bust period than it takes to keep work going (although at a reduced rate) through the design and build cycle.
There is too much focus on value for money achieved through building large batches over a short period of time. Over the long term, it is much more efficient to build what you need to a staggered schedule and replace rather than life extending older platforms.
Exactly. See also the US building a third Seawolf instead of stopping production at 2. Because Clinton was convinced,
after much pressure, that losing all those skilled shipbuilders would be far too expensive to rehire or replace and get their replacements trained up.
