The Navy Thread

Ah yes, I remember that one.

Fun times were had. Well. Not really.

Well at least they are no longer busy torpedoing South Korean frigates and destroyers.

I will swear blind to my dying day I saw a surfaced Typhoon boomer in the Firth of Clyde heading towards Faslane, accompanied by a couple of other surface vessels. The short bit was towards the back of the sub, the long bit towards the front, which are the key descriptors of that class of submarine. It COULD have been a normal sub being towed backwards into harbour and so on, but I've never came across that happening anywhere else.

Well, that sounds a lot like the ending to The Hunt for Red October,

Which, as the film takes time to remind you, never happened.

Yeah. I mean, it's not something I can prove happened - it was way before the days of smartphones and such so no pictures - but I was a bit of sub geek back then and submarines with the long bit at the front and the short stubby bit at the back just screamed "Typhoon!".

And it was going backwards if you consider how submarines in NATO usually travel.

... Maybe that's where Tom Clancy got the idea from.

Given how it was described in The Bible, can something like Noah's Ark actually float in water?

Britain's New Carriers could go to sea without any fighters.

So HMS White Elephant has no teeth. Given the problems with the F-35, she likely won't ever have teeth. That's what you get for banking on the F-35 instead of building it for use with CATOBAR stuff like the Super Bug or Rafale.

Just park a bunch of Tomahawk and Standard box launchers on the deck.

No, no, no, use some old 16 inch gunhouses mounted to the deck. Salvage em from the KGV or some other museum ship if you have to.

I don't think you realize how big or heavy the assembly for a 16 inch turret was. You'd pretty much be better off building a whole new ship rather than trying to convert an existing one into a BB or BC.

edited 9th Feb '16 5:20:51 AM by AFP

Given the costs of converting HMS White Elephant into CATOBAR capabilities...it might cost less to just slap on some guns and call it a day.

@ Tom:

We don't have any of those as Museum Ships, as all the Battleships were scrapped in the 1940s and 1950s. In fact, there's not much of that era in general, or any post-Victorian Battle Ships survive, and most that do are destroyers. I suppose we could use HMS Victory or HMS Warrior, or the light cruiser HMS Belfast — except for you Tom, the main armament of the Belfast is x12 6-inch cannon.

edited 9th Feb '16 11:25:30 AM by Greenmantle

Why am I not surprised by this? I'm shocked at the stupidity of the relevant services, and the spineless ineptitude of those arseholes at the Ministry of Defence, who as usual are denying any knowledge of what's going on, but I. Am. Not. Fucking. Surprised.

Ya know for all the whole "Britannia rules the waves" thing, you guys SUCK at preserving ships. Even the Japanese have a museum battleship (Mikasa) and they damn near suffered a Total Navy Kill in World War Two!

Well that would be better than an empty useless flight deck.

edited 9th Feb '16 7:02:05 PM by MajorTom

Oh Tom.

It's true ain't it? HMS White Elephant without an air wing is just a useless hunk of floating metal. It'd be better off with old obsolete cruiser guns than left as is.

Fun fact about Mikasa. She got dismantled down to the hull after WWII to prevent even the chance that the Japanese might try to put her to military use. What you see on display now was mostly rebuilt in the 1950s, financed in part with American donations as a sort of "our bad" reaction to that.

Tom: It would be even more worthless then. Old shell slingers are more then obsolete. The cost to even try and retrofit it would be prohibitive to the point you may as well pay for CATOBAR. That and more then the F-35B Pigeon can use the STOBAR setups.

It turns out that refitting ships to a new role is bloody expensive.

I wonder if you could take MQ-9 reapers off the flight deck.

edited 10th Feb '16 1:16:40 AM by Imca

It might be cheaper to just weld on some old shell slingers than convert it to CATOBAR.

Then again HMS White Elephant should have been CATOBAR to begin with.

And don't count on the F-35 in any capacity. With as slow and crappy as it is, either the next President or the one in 2020 will likely kill the program entirely. (Seriously, were I President, I would kill the F-35 our allies wanting to buy it be damned. It's a piece of crap boondoggle that costs too much, delivers too little and won't be worth it in the end. That and I would sack every single officer in the US Military who is involved in the program, even the pilots.)

* Shrug *

Then again, I'd also say the Hornet and Super Hornet aren't great aircraft, either.

Better than the Pigeon.

Armed carrier pigeons are better than the Pigeon.