UK Military News, Reports, Data, etc.

Not if they play in their boundaries.
well with the UK "probably" leaving the EU, it'd be pretty foolish from European countries to collaborate with the UK on weapons, if you asked me

plus of course the last sentence of
Apr 14, 2019
in Japan Thread

you claimed it was great to have so many industrial participants in the program Today at 7:16 AM
while this is a ridiculous idea according to me:
supply chain should be as SHORT as possible, not as LONG as possible
applies

EDIT for those who wouldn't know what I was talking about:
"Of the original nine partner countries – ...,
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..."
The Centerpiece of 21st Century Global Security
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Pmichael

Junior Member
Three Tempest partners? Neither Sweden nor Italy are part of Tempest. Sweden signed a MOU with the UK for a joint combat air development and acquisition programme - SAAB hasn't joined at all. Italy isn't involved but the British part of Leonarda known as AgustaWestland.

If you are interested in talking about the Franco-German FCAS you should post in the Europe thread.
 

TerraN_EmpirE

Tyrant King
well with the UK "probably" leaving the EU, it'd be pretty foolish from European countries to collaborate with the UK on weapons, if you asked me
This is true to a degree but not every member who remains in the EU wants to bend the knee to Berlin and Paris. Even post Brexit, London would be a power player in the EU as the Third and only independent financial and military power in Western Europe.

Three Tempest partners? Neither Sweden nor Italy are part of Tempest. Sweden signed a MOU with the UK for a joint combat air development and acquisition programme - SAAB hasn't joined at all. Italy isn't involved but the British part of Leonarda known as AgustaWestland.
No Leonardo S.P.A.
Agustawestland doesn't exist anymore it’s Leonardo and even when it did that arm was Rotary wing. The arm involved is the main company in particular the radar and sensors. On The 7th of this Month Sweden joined the program and with them that would likely mean SAAB. Of course you are correct they are currently not part of this, Yet.
If you are interested in talking about the Franco-German FCAS you should post in the Europe thread.
You mean NGF don’t you? FCAS was the AngloFranco program requirement. That name is increasingly dropped by the parties in favor of Next Generation Fighter.
I outlined where that name came from.
 

Pmichael

Junior Member
FCAS is the system name which include everything from the manned fighter over loyal wingman and drones and other toys.


If you want to talk about FCAS, do it in the right thread.
 

Brumby

Major
FCAS is the system name which include everything from the manned fighter over loyal wingman and drones and other toys.


If you want to talk about FCAS, do it in the right thread.

I think you need to exhibit a degree of self awareness of your own actions. TE was simply responding to your FCAS comment and then you turn around stating the discussions were off topic.
 

TerraN_EmpirE

Tyrant King
And something that was missed is that on Wednesday, the RAF and Team Tempest announces they were going to start work to lease a 757 for avionics and systems testing. That’s not something the Franco German team are at. That’s not a Industry deal that’s actual work.
 

Brumby

Major
And something that was missed is that on Wednesday, the RAF and Team Tempest announces they were going to start work to lease a 757 for avionics and systems testing. That’s not something the Franco German team are at. That’s not a Industry deal that’s actual work.

You are right that there are a lot more activities concerning the Tempest program including the leasing of the 757. The rest of the content that I omitted earlier.
“Sweden is an ideal partner; few nations work as well together as Sweden and the UK,” said British Defense Procurement Minister Stuart Andrew, formally announcing the signing of the MOU on July 19, the first day of the Royal International Air Tattoo (RIAT) here.

“It is of mutual interest to partner with an actor who is operationally and industrially skilled,” Swedish Defense Minister Peter Hultqvist said, adding that both nations had “recognized each other’s strengths and the need for an equal partnership.”

The UK and Sweden will remain open “for others to join the discussions,” he noted.

The 10-year agreement does not “entail long-term commitments between the countries, but is intended to enable future positions,” the Swedish defense ministry stated.

Micael Johansson, Saab’s deputy CEO, says he expected the partnership to lean on Saab’s experience with “cost initiatives, model-based engineering and digitalization—things we have worked hard on the
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,”

“International cooperation is part of Saab’s strategy for growth, and the collaboration with the British industries represents that way of working also with regard to the future,” Saab President Hakan Buskhe said at RIAT.

Technology developed for the future fighter would also be incorporated into both the Typhoon and the Gripen, increasing their capabilities until the new platform arrives.

To prepare for work with the UK, Saab completed a rights issue at the end of 2018 to generate capital for research and development. The British government has budgeted £1.9 billion ($2.4 billion) for the various FCAS TI technology programs. Tempest-related work is now employing around 1,000 people, with another 800 expected to join the work by year-end.

Officials say that despite the different defense doctrines of Sweden and the UK—Sweden has focused on self-defense, while the UK traditionally has been more expeditionary—the requirements are aligning because of the future threat picture.

“We tend to have different needs, and certainly those were clear at the beginning, but we have quickly moved quite close together,” says
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Group Capt. Jez Holmes, the Team Tempest program director.

“I think interaction with Sweden is very positive; we both have a very similar ethos so working together should be straightforward,” adds Holmes.

To progress the work on sensors, systems and avionics, Team Tempest and FCAS TI have contracted with British aerospace engineering company 2Excel Aviation to source and modify a
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757 airliner to act as a flying testbed, in a similar vein to
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’s 737 CATBird. The Tempest 757 should take to the air in the early 2020s.

One of its roles will be testing Pyramid, the Defense Ministry’s open-architecture software system, which it plans to roll out across the Tempest initiative as the backbone for sensors, mission systems and even engine control. The software will be distributed later this year for other platforms, including the Radar 2 active, electronically scanned radar for the
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Typhoon.

“[The testbed] will allow people to see the whole integrated system with the digital backbone in operation significantly de-risking the program going forward,” explains Iain Bancroft, head of major air programs at Leonardo.

Another major factor helping to speed up the Tempest—at least compared to previous procurement programs—is Casnet, a secure classified network linking the major industrial partners in Team Tempest so that secret information can be shared and meetings can be conducted securely online. “The critical factor in this program is time,” says Holmes.

“We have demonstrated toolsets in our design, as well as the ability to iterate up to 20 times faster than we have in the past in various areas,” explains Holmes. “The advances in computational techniques and model-based engineering means that our ability to explore a range of concepts is vastly increased.”

There are nearly 80 classified projects associated with technologies that are directly associated with the Tempest, with some valued at hundreds of millions of pounds. Mordaunt said in her statement that the team is on track to deliver “17 European firsts and seven world-firsts,” noting Rolls-Royce’s work on embedding an electrical generator into the core of an Adour engine. Bancroft says Leonardo is working closely with Rolls-Royce to define the electrical and cooling requirements for a future powerplant and that directed-energy weaponry is still a key consideration in the program.

The British Defense Ministry recently confirmed it will provide further funding for the development of three additional directed-energy weapon demonstrators for lasers and radio-frequency-based systems.

At the Air Tattoo, BAE Systems revealed it has been researching wire-and-arc additive manufacturing of major structural components for a future platform. As an experiment, the company produced a structural member for the Eurofighter Typhoon. The long-lead item, which is normally forged then finished, must be ordered as far as 100 weeks in advance. However, the additive manufacturing process builds the component in just 100 days with considerably lower cost and material wastage.

The company also has been exploring weapon bay designs, showing off a rotary design for the unclassified Tempest concept model similar to one on the Blackburn Buccaneer subsonic maritime strike aircraft that entered service in the 1950s. The rotating design features three sections: one flush with the fuselage to preserve the aircraft’s low-observability characteristics and the other two able to each carry a pair of Meteor air-to-air missiles.

Two side bays flush with the air intakes would be able to launch short-range air-to-air missiles, as do the
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Raptor and the Chinese J-20. Engineers are studying options for bay opening times and looking at the harmonic effects of airflows over shallow and deep weapon bays. The UK is one of the few European nations with experience in producing aircraft with internal weapon bays, but this experience does not extend to releasing weapons at supersonic speeds.

In the Royal Air Force’s Rapid Capability Office, the organization’s Air Information Experimentation (AIX) program is taking the first steps toward a combat cloud. A project called Deckard has produced, in just two months, a cloud-based program sharing information on the UK airspace picture to support air policing. Deckard has been introduced as part of a wider program called Nexus, which hopes to share this information across other platforms.

Britain is continuing its search for additional partners, nations “whose strategic objectives align with our own, including the determination to reduce costs,” Mourdant says.

“We recognize that in an effective and efficient collaboration, there will be an optimum number of partners, which may include those outside of Europe,” she adds.

Challenges remain, however. New Prime Minister, Boris Johnson is a Brexiteer looking to help Britain negotiate an exit from the European Union at the end of October, deal or no deal. A “hard” Brexit could do serious harm to the British economy. However, Sweden’s defense minister says he is not concerned: “Brexit or not, we have this cooperation, and we will make it deeper,” Hultqvist says.

I thought I will just emphasize this statement from the article since there is a belief that releasing weapons at supersonic speeds is just business as usual

"The UK is one of the few European nations with experience in producing aircraft with internal weapon bays, but this experience does not extend to releasing weapons at supersonic speeds."
 
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And something that was missed is that on Wednesday, the RAF and Team Tempest announces they were going to start work to lease a 757 for avionics and systems testing. That’s not something the Franco German team are at. That’s not a Industry deal that’s actual work.
let's wait and see how many billion £ the BAE will be able to pull before the Treasury says there's no money for 6Gen, LOL

(the UK "has already earmarked more than $2.5 billion for Tempest" according to the link inside
Jul 17, 2018
future huh "The immediate problem, of course, is whether the United Kingdom will be able to position itself as a viable partner, let alone leader in such a program given its present political and economic turmoil."
The U.K.'s New 'Tempest' Stealth Fighter Project Already Faces Serious Challenges

July 16, 2018
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)
 
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