Not true. They were designed the other way around. They were always STOVL with the potential to be ‘cat and traps’ later. In truth the ‘cat and traps’ conversion requirement was dropped very early on. Detailed design work was not undertaken. The Government did an incredibly stupid about turn at one point (costing…

I do wonder how may alterations were made for the Russians. We know the ships are ice strengthened, with the dock different to French Mistrals. That may not be a bad thing. But for the rest of the systems? I’m only joking about the RN buying them, by the time we’d refitted them to UK specs and added in UK systems we…

They’ll be using SRVL (shipboard rolling vertical landing) when thay land. Basically a low speed rolling landing. Vertical can obviously still be used, but SRVL means greater bring back capability. They’ll be using the new Bedford Array instead of a mirror landing sight.

Thats for 2 70,000 tonne carriers plus additional elements such as dredging portsmouth channel, rebuilding a good portion of Portsmouth naval base. The contract was always low balled and every one knew it. Including the government.

There aren’t many F-35’s on order as the UK has taken the smart procurement route of only buying enough initially to train pilots and maintenance personnel on. As the QE isn’t due out of trials until 2018 it’s good that we’ve taken the right route for once. The next batch of F-35B will be from LRIP 8. It will be more…

You’ve not heard of GW1 and GW2? The Iraqi’s used Soviet artillery methods, their guns were superior in many ways (but not all) and more numerous. They didn’t have decent recon, they didn’t have decent counter battery and they had poor doctrine.

That was against the Ukrainian Army though. They use the same tactics, equipment and doctrine as the Russians, only at a far lower level. Against the US though? Or the UK? They’d have next to no intel, they’d be combating an army who can move faster than the Russian systems would be able to target and co-ordinate.…

Not a hope, more fool them as well.

I disagree that the Russians are frightfully good at artillery. They’re good at having lots of it. And that’s about it. Same as in WW2. Their artillery arm was ineffective given it’s huge size. But the US and Britain in particular are miles ahead of them, decades ahead in fact. It’s no good if you have lots of…

Really? What great dogfighter did they make before the SU-27?

Early 2020’s at the current moment. The UK is the main driver as they need their FAA F-35B’s to use it off the QE and PoW. They also want to remove AMRAAM from service as soon as possible as they only saw it as a stop gap for the Typhoon (the Typhoon AMRAAM’s are mainly carry overs from the FAA FRS2 fleet, they’re C4…

On what basis are they ‘arguably the best in the business’? The combat performance of Russian missiles has been nothing to brag about. Apart from a brief period in the late 1980’s to late 1990’s when the AA-11 was superior to the Sidewinder they have not had any missiles that have approached the level of Western…

The Meteor will out-range AIM-120D by a very significant margin. It will out-range the long range missiles on the Russian graphic by an even larger margin as they don’t yet exist....

You are aware that most of these weapons are either a) very old or b) don’t actually exist.

The first all-aspect heater was the British Red-Top in the 1960’s. The first really effective all-aspect was the AIM-9L.

F-35 will get Meteor integrated in the4 early 2020’s. It’s a requirement for the FAA. The UK also wants to do away with it’s AMRAAM’s which were only bought as a stopgap.

To get to our AAR assets they’ll need AAR themselves, or decent targeting.

Absolutely. The poster is full of vapour ware. The F-35 weapon posters are for actual existing weapons that are in production (in some cases yet to be integrated with F-35). The Russian poster is pure fantasy. They’ve been exhibiting the AWACS killer missile since it appeared at Le Bourget in the mid 1990’s. How many…

The AIM-54 Phoenix actually hardly ever worked. The early years of the programme were a disaster. Hughes had to undertake a massive amount of (secret) work to make the AIM-54 work properly. The truth is, it never did. The AIM-54C in the 1980’s was designed to fix the missile and make it work.

The best Vulcan picture ever...