The HMS Queen Elizabeth Class: Britain's Most Powerful Aircraft Carrier...

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[girthbloodstool]

Shall I cheer you up with stories of Canadian military procurement?

[aliens]

Part of the problem with UK Military procurement is contracts.
Some 10 years ago, in Afghanistan I asked, why we used such terrible Wi-Fi antennas on the routers. (To give you an idea just how bad they were, in some situations we replaced them with cheapo metal coat hangers, bent into shape & stuffed into the port and got better performance.)
The answer was, we had an exclusive contract with the manufacture.
I'm sure at the time of signing said contract it was great, they probably got a load for free which at the time were better than others on the market... fast forward to 2014, and they were terrible by comparison and the UK was paying £12, 000 for each!
£12, 000 for something worse than a coat hanger!
But due to the contract, they weren't allowed to buy Wi-Fi antennas elsewhere! (I sincerely hope the contract has expired by now.)

[stevewilliams]

I know the exact reasons why the price soared and the build time ran over.
It took a long retired naval architect to sort out the myriad problems caused by a massive miscalculation on the weight of the aircraft and the deck thickness needed to support that weight.
The thicker deck required more bulkheads to support it which caused its own problems.the architect who solved it all was a good friend of my father's and in his late seventies when he was approached to sort it.

[adamholland]

My dad worked on the original plan for the HMS Queen Elizabeth. At that point, it was nuclear-powered and had catapults. It was advised to use steam catapults from the US Navy, as the electromagnetic ones weren't working properly yet. Then, it was deemed too expensive, and you got this

[bttlecw]

What's really impressive is that the construction of HMS Prince Of Wales actually finished two years before it began

[JDW-wnte]

Does anyone else get the impression that Simon & his writers enjoy knocking the UK?

[colebassett]

16:31 the F35-C is not a VTOL aircraft. The C variant is designed only for catapult assisted takeoff whereas the F35-B model is capable of both VTOL and STOVL depending on payload.

[kaneworsnop]

33% of down time for maintenance and repair is half the expected amount, the problem isn't reliability, its that we have too few of them. With ships, subs and most aircraft you need 3, ideally 4 to gurentee that one is operational at any one time. One is operational, one is in light maintenance, and the third is in deep maintenance.

[ScottySundown]

“About as much use as a chocolate teapot”. Definitely the most British thing I’ve ever heard and I love it!

[chrislong]

As an old First Sargeant once told me. "There's never time to do it right, but there's always time to do it over!"

[fernandoharada]

Well.... At least it doesn't need a tugboat all the time.

[scuddyleblanc]

The best use of a military is to prevent a war. Having the carriers might dissuade aggressors from picking a fight with you.

[mickhall]

British Military procurement disasters! ? That's got to be worth an episode surely?
SA80, Ajax, IVECO Panther, etc etc etc etc

[chigeryelam]

A bit unfair on Prince of Wales at the end there. She was on 30 days notice to sail (so in maintenance after conducting trials with UAVs) before being needed to replace QE and given just 7 days to sail. She sailed in 8 days. Also F35C are not vertical take off capable.

[BlckHed]

The plague of problems doesn’t surprise me, considering when HMS Forth (P222) was found to have sheared bolts on the ship main structure with heads that had been glued back on!

[claytondennis]

Mechanical issues are part and parcel of having a new class of ship. The only thing you could maybe fault the MOD on is how well or poorly they revised the design of the Prince of Wales once a deficiency was noted with the Queen Elizabeth.

[mortoopz]

You say a LOT of outright wrong in this one, but 17:51 is probably the worst.

ALL large military vessels are intended to spend 33% of their time in port undergoing maintenance.

EVERY

SINGLE

ONE.

1/3 - Active.
1/3 - Reserve.
1/3 - Up keep.

Every NATO military (that I'm aware of) does the [approximate] same thing.


Especially given that these things are indented to be in service for 50..80+ years, the first few years are going to involve a lot of bug fixing.

[Hoglips]

This is the problem with the media. People like this guy talking about things they have no idea about.

[vikramrao]

"About as useful as a chocolate teapot" the most polite insult ever. 🤣🤣

[bariman]

As an American, I consider the Queen Elizabeth Class to be more successful than our littoral classes or the Zumwalt class. Then there's the Russian Kuznetsov.... Relatively speaking, UK isn't doing too bad. Additionally: As for financial prudence, people in the US have been saying the same thing about our Nimitz class for years despite its record. The F35 problem is world wide, especially if said country is waiting for the block 4 version which has constantly been pushed back time wise. Navy procurement... I can't speak to the level of issues, but UK is currently not alone in that area.