Is there any way to avoid the development or at least introduction of the Vickers Valiant in favour of the Avro Vulcan and Handley Page Victor? Now I understand that the Vulcan and Victor were technologically more complex so the Valiant was the lower-tech stop-gap version just in case anything went wrong and delayed them, combined with the fact that Britain was if not desperate for then at least urgently trying to get a nuclear capability, but building three bombers was rather expensive so I was looking to try and cut costs a little.
Now from I can see the British didn't even have a nuclear device that could be dropped from an aircraft until several months after the Vulcan was introduced so for the first year of its life the Valiant was mostly used to train up pilots and perform technical tests. Is it possible to get the government to see that as the Valiant is about to enter service the Vulcan is on track and only roughly on year away, and with no actual bomb to drop the duplication is too expensive so they should just wait for the Vulcan without using too much hindsight? The general idea was to let them fully develop the plane but then as a cost cutting measure the government decides not to place an order, or for just a limited few to use as test beds, and as a consolation prize and thanks to the government realising as in our timeline that they're going to need jet transports and aerial refueling to get the most out of the V Force Vickers is asked to develop their V-1000/VC7 jet-powered cargo aircraft to meet the specification. This would have the benefit of saving some fairly serious money since you won't be stuck with a large number of bombers that weren't designed to operate at low level thanks to advances in SAM technology and therefore suffer wing fatigue, allow you to roll the cash saved over into the V-1000 project and then buy more of the other two V bombers when they arrive, and throw some major butterflies into the international jet market.
Now from I can see the British didn't even have a nuclear device that could be dropped from an aircraft until several months after the Vulcan was introduced so for the first year of its life the Valiant was mostly used to train up pilots and perform technical tests. Is it possible to get the government to see that as the Valiant is about to enter service the Vulcan is on track and only roughly on year away, and with no actual bomb to drop the duplication is too expensive so they should just wait for the Vulcan without using too much hindsight? The general idea was to let them fully develop the plane but then as a cost cutting measure the government decides not to place an order, or for just a limited few to use as test beds, and as a consolation prize and thanks to the government realising as in our timeline that they're going to need jet transports and aerial refueling to get the most out of the V Force Vickers is asked to develop their V-1000/VC7 jet-powered cargo aircraft to meet the specification. This would have the benefit of saving some fairly serious money since you won't be stuck with a large number of bombers that weren't designed to operate at low level thanks to advances in SAM technology and therefore suffer wing fatigue, allow you to roll the cash saved over into the V-1000 project and then buy more of the other two V bombers when they arrive, and throw some major butterflies into the international jet market.