viewtopic.php?t=7379
This doesn't seem too bad to me, as I understand it -if these changes do go ahead- Illustrious and Invincible will go into a maintained storage period whereby they are available to got to sea at a number of weeks/months notice. We will effectively have only one carrier, though surely this has been the case for some time? will Illustrious mothballed and either Invincible or Ark Royal at sea while the other was in maintenance. The only problem I can see is when Ark Royal is due a maintainance period. The other factor we should remember is that we now have Ocean as an assault helicopter ship, something we've only had in recent times.The Royal Navy will lose the two carriers Illustrious and Invincible, at least two frigates and its 88 Sea King helicopters, and close four naval storage bases.
As for the 88 Sea Kings going, surely this was on the cards anyway as Merlin is gradually introduced to take over the various Sea King roles?
The two Frigates I would imagine to be two type 22's, our least modern frigate type (lets not talk about reloading Sea Wolf though), and at least we are not talking about loosing any more Type 42's.
As for the naval storage bases I can't comment, though I can't imagine this affecting the RN too much as surely these can be relocated to one of the three "core bases".
To me it seems that compared to the "reported" cuts to the forces as a whole, the Royal Navy hasn't done too badly. Just to be clear I'm not saying that these cuts are justifiable in any way, I'm just stating that I think the RN hasn't been cut as badly as it could have been.
anyway, i thought sod the bike, and bought this little baby
