Carrier Prince of Wales

[happy daze john in oz]

Building ships in arts from various sources is common practice now.
No longer all done in the one yard, ready made sections arrive and are fitted.

AS to China and Oz, makes you wonder where the govs brains are stored.

Trying to get back on good terms with them, then today the gov announce a new defense policy which they claim will be needed to stop China ????????????

[j.sabourn]

#10 A hundred years ago submarines were in their infancy and were purely for sinking other vessels and were considered by mariners of the times as a cowardly way of doing it. Today they are a platform for inter continental missiles and rely still on their invisibility. Today however that invisibility is not as secure as it once was due to modern sound and heat techniques plus underwater check points.Instead of more sophisticated weapons of annilhiation , the countries of the world should be thinking of ways of getting rid of them. The perpetrators of war should face a world body of judges and if found guilty be hanged by the neck until dead . Today depending on how high up in the world scale of celebrities the get off Scot free.. JS

[vic mcclymont]

Yes the carriers were a vanity project that the navy didn't want. Gordon Brown was the man who drove the project through when he was PM, against the advice of many.
Vic

[Jim R Christie]

Yes the carriers were a vanity project that the navy didn't want. Gordon Brown was the man who drove the project through when he was PM, against the advice of many.
Vic

The Navy did want them, or at least the top brass did and that's another part of the problem.
It was John Major's government who instigated the Invincible class replacement project back in the early 1990s.
Such projects are decades in the making, they're not cooked up by any one politician on a whim within the space of a few years and pushed through.
For example the RN have already begun the scoping work for the Astute class submarine replacement in the 2040s, yet the last Astute won't be delivered until 2026.

[James Curry]

#7 Yes there is H&W. The size of that building dock the two of them could have been built at the same time. All they needed to do was float one out and carry on with the second one.
Dock size: 556m x 93m Draft: 8.41m depth of water over sill at MHWS
Belfast - Harland & Wolff

The Carriers are 280 metres long and a beam of 70 metres

Yes at the time H&W would not have had sufficient skilled labour for the project, but skilled labour would have been contracted in.

As some one mentioned it was al about politics and the need to keep the Scots happy. If BAE Portsmouth built the stern tube sections perhaps is were it all went wrong.

By using the H&W dock how many millions would have been saved on the costings for the Carrier project , no need to spend a fortune on a facility that was only being used as a RN breakers yard.

[vic mcclymont]

#15. Valid point, don't know the answer.
#14. The go ahead for the new carriers was given in 1997.
2008 they were ordered and there was concerns over manning levels.

[Jim R Christie]

#14. The go ahead for the new carriers was given in 1997.
2008 they were ordered and there was concerns over manning levels.

Yes and those concerns were brushed aside the First Sea Lord and Co. The Navy is no different to the Army or RAF in that the big knobs like their fancy toys to play with and showoff in predictably petty games of one upmanship with the other services. Twas always thus.
Cameron and co very nearly made an exceptionally good decision to reverse the original cheapo plan of STOVL and instead fit them with catapults and arrestor wires which would have made them infinitely more useful vessels - they were designed to be convertible - however they bottled it at the last minute which has sadly saddled us with the F35-B for the foreseeable future.
Cats and traps would have permitted use of the other (conventional) F35 variant as well as other carrier capable types, e.g. F18, Rafale etc. A huge opportunity missed.
Not helped of course once it became clear that BAE had been telling porkies in that the ships weren't as easily convertible as they should have been.

[vic mcclymont]

Google. navylookout.com
Interesting and enlightening article on th POW.
Vic

[James Curry]

Thanks Vic an interesting read,
But confuses me as to why the attached needs to be done. Especially when you consider how many miles these ships steam in a year

Next year HMS Prince of Wales will take over as the fleet flagship and high readiness carrier as HMS Queen Elizabeth prepares for her first major refit.

A Merchant ship would have her hundreds of thousands of miles on the clock by the time she was the age of HMS Queen Elizabeth.
MN ships dry dock at least twice every 5 years. Most dry docking is completed within about a week to 10 days. THe vessel is floated out and any other maintenance issue completed alongiside a layby berth. It is usual a ship will be in and out of dock and lay by berth maybe 3 weeks at most.

RN ships seem to be a couple of years at a repair yard why?

[Des Taff Jenkins]

I suppose that f you look at thing in perspective most of the ships now being built will be out of date by the time they are worked up. Our purchase of Nuclear subs is the same we will get them in thirty or forty years time, for manning they will probably have to rely on Australian Chinese.
That is unlike it used to be. My father served on a Carrier in the first wold war, that was used in the Second, sunk in the Med.
Des