How many Joint projects could Britain have done?

There was actually a nuclear strike 'Gnat' sketched out. Inverted commas as it was a scaled up, twin-engined version. Of course, that still meant that the bomb was almost as big as the aircraft....
Is that the one where 3 Gnats were carried by a Vulcan - effectively manned Blue Steels.
 
Given that the Sea Slug was a successful 1st generation design could any of the proposed spin offs have been successful, like Blue Slug or Green Cheese?
 
You could probably get a single missile adequate to all three requirements. It would cost more in development than any one of the three separate programs, though probably less than two, and take longer. There would be compromise across the board, but not too bad.
IIRC:
  • Bloodhound Mk 1 and Thunderbird Mk 1 entered service in 1958;
  • Seaslug Mk 1 entered service in 1962;
  • Bloodhound Mk 2 and Thunderbird Mk 2 entered service in 1962 too or it was 1964;
  • Seaslug Mk 2 entered service in 1966.
If the joint missile didn't enter service until say 1962 then Fighter Command would not have any SAMs to protect the V-bomber bases between 1958 and 1962. That should please the anti-Sandys faction on the site because the run down of Fighter Commands manned aircraft force would have to be slowed down to compensate.

Instead of buying 13 squadrons worth of Bloodhound Mk 1 missiles the RAF might be forced to buy the equivalent capability in Lighting fighters. IIRC the whole Bloodhound Mk 1 force was scrapped in 1962 due to improvements in Soviet ECM. AFAIK the same didn't apply to the Lightings which consequently might be run on a few years longer.

I wrote this before, but its worth repeating that Bloodhound Mk 2 was to have been replaced by a land based version of Sea Dart, unimaginatively called Land Dart. It might have been planned to replace Thunderbird Mk 2 as well, but I haven't read it anywhere. Land Dart was a victim of the 1974 Defence Review. The Army disbanded its Thunderbird regiment in the late 1970s and the RAF its Bloodhound Mk 2 squadrons in the late 1980s, both missiles weren't replaced.
 
IIRC:
  • Bloodhound Mk 1 and Thunderbird Mk 1 entered service in 1958;
  • Seaslug Mk 1 entered service in 1962;
  • Bloodhound Mk 2 and Thunderbird Mk 2 entered service in 1962 too or it was 1964;
  • Seaslug Mk 2 entered service in 1966.
If the joint missile didn't enter service until say 1962 then Fighter Command would not have any SAMs to protect the V-bomber bases between 1958 and 1962. That should please the anti-Sandys faction on the site because the run down of Fighter Commands manned aircraft force would have to be slowed down to compensate.

Instead of buying 13 squadrons worth of Bloodhound Mk 1 missiles the RAF might be forced to buy the equivalent capability in Lighting fighters. IIRC the whole Bloodhound Mk 1 force was scrapped in 1962 due to improvements in Soviet ECM. AFAIK the same didn't apply to the Lightings which consequently might be run on a few years longer.

I wrote this before, but its worth repeating that Bloodhound Mk 2 was to have been replaced by a land based version of Sea Dart, unimaginatively called Land Dart. It might have been planned to replace Thunderbird Mk 2 as well, but I haven't read it anywhere. Land Dart was a victim of the 1974 Defence Review. The Army disbanded its Thunderbird regiment in the late 1970s and the RAF its Bloodhound Mk 2 squadrons in the late 1980s, both missiles weren't replaced.
I suspect Sea Slug was ready by 1958, the reason it didn't officially enter service until 1962 is because the first ship that carried it didn't enter service until then. Most naval weapons that depend on new ships to carry them are like that, the weapons are sometimes available much earlier than their service entry date. This is particularly true of the Royal Navy (but sometimes the opposite is true with other navies, as they sometimes put ships into service without key weapon systems operational because they're not ready yet- but that's a more recent problem).
 
There was actually a nuclear strike 'Gnat' sketched out. Inverted commas as it was a scaled up, twin-engined version. Of course, that still meant that the bomb was almost as big as the aircraft....
Without laying eyes on the proposals it sounds vaguely like the Northrop F-5. Seems like the best progression would have gone LWTSF Gnat, Mk II with improved wings and reheat, nuclear Gnat, then Hawker Siddeley Hawk.
 
I suspect Sea Slug was ready by 1958, the reason it didn't officially enter service until 1962 is because the first ship that carried it didn't enter service until then. Most naval weapons that depend on new ships to carry them are like that, the weapons are sometimes available much earlier than their service entry date. This is particularly true of the Royal Navy (but sometimes the opposite is true with other navies, as they sometimes put ships into service without key weapon systems operational because they're not ready yet- but that's a more recent problem).
There may be something to that.

Seaslug first went to sea in the late 1950s aboard the converted maintenance ship Girdle Ness. As well as being the trials ship for Seaslug she was intended to be the prototype for a series of guided missile armed convoy escorts. Also from the late 1940s to the early 1950s the RN had plans to build Seaslug armed cruisers that would be completed in the late 1950s, but it decided to complete the Tiger, Lion and Blake instead because it was (wrongly) thought that completing half-finished ships to a new design would be quicker and cheaper.

OTOH the first pair of County class destroyers was ordered in the 1954-55 Estimates and the second pair in 1955-56. One of the reasons they weren't laid down until the late 1950s and completed 1962-63 could have been that the design of Seaslug hadn't been finalised so the DNC couldn't design a ship around it.

But that doesn't alter what RLBH wrote, which is that a joint missile might take longer to develop and what I wrote that it in turn might lead to Fighter Command having more fighters in the period 1957-62 because the guided missiles being developed to replace them weren't ready.

However, one of the reasons for developing one first generation SAM instead of 2 or 3 is to save time by concentrating the resources on a smaller number of projects. Therefore I hope that the opposite of what RLBH wrote would have happened, that is the joint missile would have entered service earlier than Bloohound, Thunderbird and Seaslug did. Therefore in my timelines where a joint missile is developed it costs as much as the combined cost of Bloodhound, Thunderbird and Seaslug, but the Mk 1 enters service in 1954 instead of 1958 and the cost savings (if any) are on the production side.

AFAIK many British military projects in the period 1945-1960 took longer to complete than equivalent American projects because they were under resourced. This was mainly because UK wasn't as rich as he USA and it didn't have the scientific and industrial resources to match either. However, the British Government compounded the problem by spreading the resources over what turned out to be too many projects.

As an example of the UKs limited scientific and industrial base in comparison to the USA, Norman Friedman in the Postwar Naval Revolution wrote that the reason why the UK didn't develop its own AEW radar in the 1950s, wasn't for lack of money, it was for lack of scientists.
 
While the Bloodhound and Thunderbird shared a lot of components the requirement to keep Sea Slug in magazines in ships would limit this component sharing; the Sea Slug got around the requirement for huge aerodynamic control surfaces by having its booster rockets impart a gentle spin for stability. However they still may share techniques on guidance, warheads, etc etc etc despite being limited with regard to cutting metal.

Bloodhound
Duxford%20Alfas%20and%20suffolk%20055.JPG


Sea Slug - note small control surfaces.

14406428-Sea-Slug-was-a-first-generation-surface-to-air-missile-for-use-by-the-Royal-Navy-Stock-Photo.jpg


Thunderbird

large.jpg
 
While the Bloodhound and Thunderbird shared a lot of components the requirement to keep Sea Slug in magazines in ships would limit this component sharing; the Sea Slug got around the requirement for huge aerodynamic control surfaces by having its booster rockets impart a gentle spin for stability. However they still may share techniques on guidance, warheads, etc etc etc despite being limited with regard to cutting metal.

Bloodhound
Duxford%20Alfas%20and%20suffolk%20055.JPG


Sea Slug - note small control surfaces.

14406428-Sea-Slug-was-a-first-generation-surface-to-air-missile-for-use-by-the-Royal-Navy-Stock-Photo.jpg


Thunderbird

large.jpg
Stowing large-finned missiles on warships wasn't an issue in the US- their RIM-8 Talos missile just used detachable wings that were fitted just before moving out onto the launch rail. If anything, it was harder to implement on Talos than it would be on Bloodhound or Thunderbird, since their fins were fixed and Talos' were movable control surfaces. The system didn't add much in terms of space required to prepare the missile, since the wing and fin area was also used for setting the arming plug, and I'm sure Sea Slug had a similar preparation area in any case for arming the missile as well. This also means it didn't slow down the rate of fire of the missile (which wasn't important anyway, since the rate of fire was limited by how many missiles could be controlled in the air simultaneously- there's no point in launching 3 missiles in 90 seconds if you have to wait for the first 2 to impact or miss before you can fire the third).

See 10:00 for the wing and fin section of launching.
 
The Talos was fitted in ships of 13,000-17,000 ton, much bigger than the 7,000 ton Counties and therefore had more room to play with, in the USN 7,000 ton is more the preserve of the Terrier/Standard ER, which was much more compact. The Sea Slug probably fits somewhere in between these types, sharing advantages and disadvantages of both.
 
AFAIK a British scientist proposed an integrated circuit in the early 1950s, but could not persuade the British Government or British Industry to take the financial risk and an American scientist made the first one 5 years later. If he had been a better at persuasion and/or some form of joint private-public financing agreement had been agreed would that have put the development of microelectronics 5 years ahead of OTL to this day? In the shorter term would it have increased the performance and reliability of British military equipment from the late 1950s to the middle 1960s? I ask the follow up question because AFAIK the equipment of that era was still using valves so that they performed well when they worked, but were very unreliable, e.g. the Type 984 radar and Seaslug Mk 1.
 
The British invented the trackball as well, but it went nowhere.
Regrettably that's the most likely result because AFAIK that sort of thing happens a lot IOTL or it was other countries that got the benefit from it, e.g. penicillin IIRC. But what if this is one of the exceptions?
 
AFAIK a British scientist proposed an integrated circuit in the early 1950s, but could not persuade the British Government or British Industry to take the financial risk and an American scientist made the first one 5 years later. If he had been a better at persuasion and/or some form of joint private-public financing agreement had been agreed would that have put the development of microelectronics 5 years ahead of OTL to this day? In the shorter term would it have increased the performance and reliability of British military equipment from the late 1950s to the middle 1960s? I ask the follow up question because AFAIK the equipment of that era was still using valves so that they performed well when they worked, but were very unreliable, e.g. the Type 984 radar and Seaslug Mk 1.
That might have made the difference between success and failure in ambitious projects like the Red Dean missile (basically an active radar homing missile in 1956- the first fire-and-forget all-aspect AA missile in the world), but from what I understand those were required by the government to be designed around outdated systems, so it wouldn't make too much of a difference in the size and clumsiness of the missile. Still, it might make the missile reliable enough for service, and once something's in service, it tends to be rapidly developed further. Since the Red Dean was Britain's only real mid-range (by their standards) radar-guided AAM under development, they might have a good lineup of entirely indigenous AAMs by the 1960's: Red Top for short-range IR work, and Red Dean/Red Hebe for longer-range (not much longer though) targets.
 
That might have made the difference between success and failure in ambitious projects like the Red Dean missile (basically an active radar homing missile in 1956- the first fire-and-forget all-aspect AA missile in the world), but from what I understand those were required by the government to be designed around outdated systems, so it wouldn't make too much of a difference in the size and clumsiness of the missile. Still, it might make the missile reliable enough for service, and once something's in service, it tends to be rapidly developed further. Since the Red Dean was Britain's only real mid-range (by their standards) radar-guided AAM under development, they might have a good lineup of entirely indigenous AAMs by the 1960's: Red Top for short-range IR work, and Red Dean/Red Hebe for longer-range (not much longer though) targets.
Was the logic behind using outdated systems for Red Dean that they had already been paid for and their reliability problems cured so that it would in theory take less time and money to develop.

Is there any truth to this story? That is the British Government sillicone chip indistry was belatedly set up by Jim Callaghan after he watced an episode of the BBC2 Horizon series called, "Now The Chips Are Down" narrated by the incomperable Paul Vaughn. The story is that after the progamme finished he immediately ran up the Government's chief scientific advisor and asked if what the programme was true. The reply was, "Yes it is!" and nearly everything. IIRC an early act of the Thatcher Government was to privatise the company Callaghan's Government had set up.

The 10-year old me watched it too and nearly everything the programme said was going to happen has.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p01z4rrj/horizon-19771978-now-the-chips-are-down
 
That might have made the difference between success and failure in ambitious projects like the Red Dean missile (basically an active radar homing missile in 1956- the first fire-and-forget all-aspect AA missile in the world), but from what I understand those were required by the government to be designed around outdated systems, so it wouldn't make too much of a difference in the size and clumsiness of the missile. Still, it might make the missile reliable enough for service, and once something's in service, it tends to be rapidly developed further. Since the Red Dean was Britain's only real mid-range (by their standards) radar-guided AAM under development, they might have a good lineup of entirely indigenous AAMs by the 1960's: Red Top for short-range IR work, and Red Dean/Red Hebe for longer-range (not much longer though) targets.
The OTL integrated circuit was invented in 1958 and AFAIK the first applications were the Polaris A-2 and Minuteman I missiles entering service in the first half of the 1960s. IIRC from the Horizon documentary it was the mass production of ICs for these missiles that pused down the unit cost and helped them replace transistors on other electronic products. AFAIK other major users of ICs in this period were the computers used for the NTDS and the Apollo spacecraft's computer.

Therefore if the British invented the IC in 1953 they would enter service as components for systems like the Type 984 radar and the Comprehensive Display System (CDS), which both appeared in 1958, BUT because its a British project and they tend to take longer than American projects in this period it's likely to take longer than that AND because British military equipment was built in smaller quantities the cost reductions that the Americans experienced IOTL might not be duplicated by the British ITTL.
 
AFAIK the RCN's DATAR system was even better than the Royal Navy's CDS and ahead of it in development so do DATAR as a joint project.
 
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