Yep, oh well, I thought it was a pretty good idea yesterday!
Looks like the RN will go the Spey Phantom, but without the P1154 debacle so will perhaps find the money to fit Phantoms with Red Tops.
As for the French, there was a proposal for a Spey powered Twosader with a RIO in the back seat, perhaps France cold take this up or perhaps just the Spey as it was much newer and more fuel efficient than the old J57 of early 50s F100 vintage.
Yes, yes, and YES - the Spey Twosader. I think it's the only viable option. From the British side it was a Short Brothers proposal.
From the French side, it is even better...
- Vought LOVED the French Navy since 1939 and the V-156F Vibrator / Wind Indicator / Cheesecake. Later F-4U and AU-1 in Algeria.
- Vought flirted with both Dassault and Aerospatiale in the 60's - they didn't cared, so why not Breguet ?
- OTL SNECMA took a TF30 licence from Pratt for all these Mirage prototypes (1962- 1969)
- ITTL, get them into RR arms and give them a Spey licence (they need to learn turbofans for the coming M53)
- As for Breguet, get them involved through BLC. The Breguet 941, Buccaneer, and French OTL Crusader all had BLC, one way or another
End result: A Vought - Breguet - Short Twosader, with a RR-SNECMA Spey.
Icing on the cake:
- the A-7D and A-7E are coming... with a licence-build Spey, this time by Allison.
- the French Navy OTL was interested in the A-7 by 1972 to replace the Etendard IV
There is some huge potential here, to build two potent coalitions
- the Vought coalition
- the Spey coalition
With these two, post 1965 aviation history can see massive changes.
Some words about SNECMA - in 1959 unable to get themselves out of the Atar ghetto, they flirted with RR, Pratt, Bristol and Orenda to take a licence of a big turbojet, to power a French B-58: the (aborted) Mirage IV-B. SNECMA would trade 15% of its shares... and the winner was Pratt J75. Later (1962) this was re-activated for the TF30.
Now, had SNECMA sold his soul to RR to get the RB.141 Medway for the Mirage IV-B in 1959... in 1963, it might have been Spey, not TF30.
(this did not prevented OTL the 1963 Olympus agreement for Concorde, although that was civilian aviation... SNECMA also slept with General Electric later, CFM56, cough).