Quote:
Originally Posted by XabbaRus
Really? Never heard this one.
Look I've been on quite a few websites that deal with the RN and one of them, the navweaps forum ahs some pretty knowledgable guys, some current and ex-rn whose word I'd take over Lewis Page.
There has been one failure out of numerous successes. For such a complex system you would expect a few failures. We also don't know what constitutes a failure. Lewis Page is to the RN what Karlo Copp is to Aussie military aviation.
Lewis Page basically thinks all stuff American is great and that the UK should just purchase it.
read this link
http://warships1discussionboards.yuk...-missiles.html |
I've glimpsed at the discussion, and while I don't have too high an evaluation of Page's technical expertise (in contrast to Carlo Kopp, which I admit to be rather convinced by) - his Navy background really doesn't show in his work, I think he's more on the money than the gallery on Warships1 this time.
A weapon's success percentage in trials is but a most partial measure of its reliability. In the absence of specific knowledge of what each trial entailed, I'll be much happier with a weapon that didn't work in 90% of a 100 trials, but the last five trials (or even 2 or 3) went w/o a hitch rather than a weapon that was mostly succeeding but the last trial failed.
It is generally the later trials that try and bring everything together. A failure there is much more critical than one (or even 3) in the early stages.
The bigger problem, however, is not so much how the failure percentage than the fact that weapon is still somewhere in its trial program AT ALL even after the ship commissioned. In fact, according to your thread, they hadn't even actually shot one Aster out of a Type 45 yet!
They did this in Soviet Union. It is called "experimental operation". It is generally not thought well of by the West.
But worst of all, even if PAAMS works perfectly, it still won't change the fact the T45 is bloody expensive, and even if Sampson does become the more efficient system in the end it still does not seem to justify the cost. Or the idea of not arming the ship with Tomahawks. Or indeed, while there is a role for surface combtants, that a properly carrier looks extremely attractive versus the cost of those T45s!
And I don't think the board answered those questions at all. It is split b/w ad homineming Page and bland assurances that everything is all right, including propaganda from one self-claimed former worker on the PAAMS program (oh, how neutral!).