HMS Pembroke

On this thread it may also be worthy of note that warship design is a completely different type of engineering that will require that systems are battle hardened and duplicated all over the place so a damaged vessel can continue to fight. It really is massively different to horse and cart ships. There is a reason for everything in the design process plus a very robust organisation to rectify design faults.

And few Navies are as good at it as the one you are paying for......
 
I have been quoting from the description of the refit published by Babcocks.

I am able to read, and indeed to write, a refit spec. for a ship. There is a limit to how complex the refit spec. for a six hundred ton ship with Paxman Valentas, Voith Schneiders and Schottels can be. The engines are well known to Britain’s railways, and the Voith Schneiders and Schottels are everyday harbour tug stuff, but in this case operating at much lower horsepower.

She’s made of GRP, a material well known to most of us here, she carries a diving suite and some remote MCM stuff according to the Navy and presumably she carries some nice comms equipment. None of that needs the little ship to be out of service in order for it to be refitted or upgraded.

I have every respect for her complement and for MCM people generally; it’s a job that needs cold courage and a good deal of expert knowledge.

But I cannot see why she was in refit for six months five years ago and for nine months now. There seems to be a certain lack of urgency about getting things done and a definite lack of respect for the tax payer’s money.

You don’t seem to be able to do anything other than bluster.
 
Sheesh it's got nothing to do with bluster. You may well be capable of writing a refit spec for a merchant vessel but you still have no idea what was involved in the minesweeper package. Until you stop pretending that you know it all, this conversation will go nowhere.

Little does not equate with highly complex. Another example of how unqualified opinion breaks a thread......
 
Kukri said:
But I cannot see why she was in refit for six months five years ago and for nine months now. There seems to be a certain lack of urgency about getting things done and a definite lack of respect for the tax payer’s money.

You don’t seem to be able to do anything other than bluster.
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There are a couple of reasons 1. Scale of refit, 2. Problems identified that need resolving or new complex equipment and have been put off until said refit. Five years ago was very likely just routine changes no unusual problems just standard in, check, fit, out.

The military have no respect whatsoever for tax payers money and nor should they with all respect. They are doing a job that protects lives and if SHTF, will directly save lives and like the RNLI you can't do that by being thrifty. You have to have the decent equipment, you have to have the right supplies and the right skills. All of that needs administration and an appropriate reward package. No country in the world has a cost effective military because like lifejackets, they're deadweight until you need them. So yeah, they're going to hoover up cash like it's going out of fashion.

Of course, we could have a symbolic military that if SHTF wouldn't be capable of anything but to me, that's even worse. Better to be expensive but useful, than cheap and dead.
 
This has gone on for long enough. Feel free to carry on without me.

Thanks to Luminescent, we have learned that a routine refit takes six months. We might ask why.

But think how much better our military and naval forces would be if those charged with procurement for them did a better job, and spent those wads of tax payers’ cash more wisely.
 
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capnsensible said:
On this thread it may also be worthy of note that warship design is a completely different type of engineering that will require that systems are battle hardened and duplicated all over the place so a damaged vessel can continue to fight. It really is massively different to horse and cart ships. There is a reason for everything in the design process plus a very robust organisation to rectify design faults.

And few Navies are as good at it as the one you are paying for......
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If it only worked so smoothly! Aside from Pembroke, in 2015 the MoD concluded that they required twelve new Type-26 frigates, all costed and planned. Then they added a sequence of extras up until the point they realised they could only afford only eight! Enter the Type-31, where arguments continue regarding how to best balance cost against capability.

The Type-31 will provide a less potent forward presence, leaving a smaller number of the Type-26s to support and protect the new carriers and other critical assets. Consequently, the two new carriers are appearing against a backdrop of insufficient assets to adequately screen them. One solution might be to put only one carrier to sea at a time, or perhaps ask a foreign navy to help.

To be fair, overruns are inevitable in the Navy’s Captain Luc Pickard’s-like mission to explore strange new worlds and boldly go where no one has gone before. That said the National Audit Office has repeatedly called the MoD out for overspending and inadequate cost control. In 2010 the “MoD black hole” contributed to the early retirement of the Navy’s last carrier, HMS Illustrious, which was sold for scrap in 2016. In 2016 the MoD had built-in a near-£11 billion reserve for “unexpected costs”. By 2017, despite the cuts, this had all but disappeared.

As a consequence, the Royal Navy as currently configured may be expected to have near-zero slack in times of war there, a situation which will soon turn critical as ships are lost as, sadly, some surely will.

By no means is the MoD to blame for all of this. It is, however, most certainly part of the story.
 
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Indeed and I can only repeat that for those who wish to discover more, follow other writings on the link I posted previously. The author is well informed, smart and has a great deal of insider knowledge. His words may not sit well with some but he really does know what he's talking about and makes no assumptions.
 
capnsensible said:
Indeed and I can only repeat that for those who wish to discover more, follow other writings on the link I posted previously. The author is well informed, smart and has a great deal of insider knowledge. His words may not sit well with some but he really does know what he's talking about and makes no assumptions.
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He may well be, as perhaps are many others, not that anybody would cross the line. Something however well in the public domain is that the MoD has many many virtues; efficiency not always being top of the list.
 
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I suppose that cost and time overruns are inevitable when you're trying to guess what will be available and needed in five years time. You do your best but, a couple of years down the line, it becomes apparent that the role your boat was designed for was the wrong one, so you have to cobble something together to make the hull work for a new role. Then there's the dreaded scope creep, that's caused the downfall of many a project. Oh look, there's this clever new toy, let's add it to the ship that's half built...

As for minesweepers, I would imagine that as soon as you add much more than a new set of cutlery, you have to rework the degaussing, so everything becomes that much more complicated.
 
The thing about warship refits is that you are not just maintaining what exists but usually trying to bring the vessel and it's kit up to the latest standards so that it can continue to be effective against the perceived threat. On a mine hunter, I suspect that might mean replacing or upgrading its minehunting sonar and a whole range of other possibilities from better radar to better communications to integration of remote vehicles and so on.
 
mainsail1 said:
The thing about warship refits is that you are not just maintaining what exists but usually trying to bring the vessel and it's kit up to the latest standards so that it can continue to be effective against the perceived threat. On a mine hunter, I suspect that might mean replacing or upgrading its minehunting sonar and a whole range of other possibilities from better radar to better communications to integration of remote vehicles and so on.
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Not to mention that it is also about maintaining the skills of the shoreside workers so that if, in the very unlikely event, we ever get into a conflict that we need them, we still have them. The people employed by babcock need to keep their own skills up too, and the establishments need to be maintained in a form that keeps them in a ready state. Once those personnel and their facilities are gone, they take a long, long time to bring back again.

A regular commercial ship line can, if they need to, just drop an existing supplier of goods and services and go somewhere else. If, God forbid, we end up needing the navy in a shooting war, then the support systems cannot just be bought off the shelf. Heck, even in peacetime it can be problematic. Part of the reason Russia's navy is a joke right now and their carrier spends most of its time behind a tug boat, is that, in a fever of post-communist capitalism in the 1990s, they degraded their support systems to the point that Russia literally cannot build replacements. They do not have the infrastructure anymore. The type of, tabloid decried as excessive, spending and timescales that the RN is putting in is essential to keep the navy running in the event we need it for its actual job. You want it for wartime, you have to pay for it in peacetime too.
 
Kukri said:
Will it still take six months and nine months to refit a mine counter measures ship in wartime?
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No. It wont get refitted in war time. War wont last that long. But the ones operating in the middle east will have regular maintenance periods and rotated to the UK for refit.

Second best is not good enough.
 
Skeffles said:
If we haven't kept the facilities and skilled personnel then it wouldn't be possible to do it at all.
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If we don’t need to refit them in wartime, we don’t need to refit them in the UK, where our facilities are expensive and poorly managed. We could send them all to Japan, an allied nation which is rather good at running a Navy and at building and repairing warships. If our warships cannot get that far without breaking down, we could ship them on heavy lift ships...

HMS Nottingham demonstrates the idea:

 
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You must have seen the complete refit package then to draw that conclusion. I mean no one would base their argument on not knowing the facts, would they?
 
capnsensible said:
I mean no one would base their argument on not knowing the facts, would they?
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Oh, I don’t know. You seem to do quite well at it. Perhaps you come from the part of the Navy that ascribed a mis-aligned tailshaft to contact with a lobster pot, on broadcast television, thereby adding much to the gaiety of nations other than this one.

I am reminded of Sir John Parker’s account of the Royal Corps of Naval Constructors asking Harland and Wolff, which he was then running, to quote for HMS Fort Victoria. There was a blank space on the drawings. He asked «*What’s that?*»
«*We can’t tell you; it’s secret!*»
«*How am I meant to quote for it, then?*»
«*You just guess!*»
 
I am reminded of a car mechanic giving a price to fix a car without even seeing the car let alone knowing what's gone wrong.......:rolleyes:

Regarding your anecdote, I don't believe it.
 
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capnsensible said:
I am reminded of a car mechanic giving a price to fix a car without even seeing the car let alone knowing what's gone wrong.......:rolleyes:

Regarding your anecdote, I don't believe it.
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I have the advantage of knowing Sir John, who has been a keen yachtsman for many years. You evidently do not.

Nor do you seem to know anything of shipbuilding and ship repair. But you can b******t for Britain.
 
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