Actually one of the key aspects of the design is to learn from cruise ship designs in terms of habitability, cost effective 'hotel' facilties and all the things that traditional naval ship designers are not very good at. 

Have you looked at the end-user track history of those cruise ships, friend? Fires, sinkings, and explosions.  Real good engineering expertise there. US naval standards are there FOR A REASON.

Presumably Thales has something to offer from French cruise ship construction.  The goal here is to reduce operating costs and have a far smaller crew that US carriers.

After the Chuckles de Gaulle, the Laugh-it-ups and the Forbin debacle,  how can you write that sentence with a straight face? There are goals and there are goals.  You cannot  trade off one characteristic without paying for another in a warship-usually the tradeoff is in BLOOD.


Other aspects of the design seems to have been developed by MoD dealing with expert naval architects and system engineers to ensure the task of operating a floating airfield is as efficiently as possible.

There is NOTHING the French know about aircraft carrier operations that they've invented or discovered. NOTHING. Britain's expertise is historical and may not be current. I can see numerous design mistakes in the QEs from where I sit and realize that Britain's naval architects have badly bungled the QEs design. The size of the hanger footprint and the way you've run the exhaust stacks from your engines in your carrier design are two GROSS indicators. Flight deck layout for STOVL or CTOL is a JOKE, the way you've designed the takeoff runs. You make the ship a HUGE radar target by the way the TWO islands are sited, etc.  And that is just the obvious design gaffes. I hate to see what the pitch roll on that top-heavy design looks like.

 Then there's the whole construction thing of building the ships in larger chunks and assembling them.  This is actually an area where there is a lot of UK expertise, probably as much as anywhere else, it come from the mega structures of the offshore oil industry, and BAE and VT have been working together in a far smaller but similar way on T45. 

I'd also suggest that MoD has a heavy weight IPT in place, with talent from all over, not just defence people.  Their risk management is getting quite good, but the remaining risk area is the ability of the wider defence organisation to act sensibly when the inevitable issues emerge that need resolution.  In the end this will come down to the IPT leader and his SRO, particularly thee latter's ability to keep the wider stakeholders on track.

In simple English, you suffer from the same problems we do, your MoD equivalent to out PEO, has its collective head up its collective ass.  And you actually believe those folks when they tell you they know what they are doing.

All the more remarkable, since the Daring [EXAMPLE] is such an outstanding AAW escort, armed with the WORST naval SAM ever fielded and THEY let that mistake happen.

Thales has its criminal mits in this disaster in the making.

You will BITTERLY regret this mistake.

Herald

You may well be right Herald. We're not experienced any more at constructing Carriers, and the build strategy and consortium certainly seems complex.

Personally I have come to the conclusion that they are over-ambitious. We don't have the aircraft, the pilots, the crew or the money to run to equip and run them properly. Until 2018 or so, they will have Harrier GR9's and goodness knows when the Sea King ASAC's will be replaced. It's all a bit third rate really.

 I feel that we should have replaced the Invinceable's with a ship closer to the size and function of your Wasp class (or our old Hermes) with a load of say 6 fighters and 20 helicopters. That's far more realistic and affordable than the Queen Elizabeth's.  

Our failure in Iraq (with Afghanistan going the same way of being a mixture of small tactical successes but overall strategic failure) shows that the UK simply can't cut it any longer. Compared to the efforts you Yanks are making, we've become an irrelevent joke. I'm not sure I care too much as I never agreed with Iraq anyway, but when I hear that the Iraqi Prime Minister dislikes us because we released prisoners so the the gangs in Basra would let 4th Rifles retreat to the airport without being shot at, it kind of brings home what a shower we have become.