entertaining thread- MJ - love your commentary.
Brilliant stuff. Mike - this may be in the basket of the media you referred to re leasing options -
https://thediplomat.com/2015/11/austral ... us-option/there are many more. Notwithstanding the very real politics that Mike points out about it being a bridge too far to operate a nuke boat, the only other alternative if we wake up and walk away from DCN is to state that local manufacturing here should concentrate on skimmers and the trade-off for the taxpayer is we buy an off the shelf proven SSK - like what the Japanese had offered at 900mil a pop.
You could buy 12 improved Soryu-class SSKs for the cost of 2.3 DCNs. In fact, the Soryu's could have been partially assembled here to a greater extent than the Kia final assembly that is no mooted for the DCNs. Given these eye-watering costs for the DCNs $4.6bn a boat (roughly the equivalent of a Seawolf SSN in today's money), and the T26 is dirt cheap. I can see parallels to the DCN and the Seaspirte F/up.
Yet DCN is far wore than the Seasprite in the fact the magnitude of cost and defence capability loss whilst we sort it out will be enormous.
Always had a gut feeling on T26. I'll be back in Uk in three weeks time, will be interested to see how or
if the local press are still reporting it and if TM is still milking mileage from it. At the moment there are groans from some UK press, pointing out the majority of the funds are not to be spent in the UK.
I'm happier about T26 (regardless of the expense) as I think the shifting role for SEA 5000 could see these ships being forced into more of an ASW platform than first intended as our sub force is craptacular and the DCN project could well be a new world record for taxpayer waste.
Re hulls - yep can see it happening somewhere down the track, but I'd imagine like the AWDs there will be a long league time before plans are allowed to be released.