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Old 09-08-2020, 06:04 AM
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StainlessSteelCynic StainlessSteelCynic is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by micromachine View Post
The scariest thing about this is the loss of manufacturing capability and the brain trust of the designers. Let us remember that after World War I, the British thought that the tank had seen its day and the antitank gun was going to put the tank on the shelf. It took until the mid-1940s and the Centurion tank for them to get the equation back into equilibrium, as the thinking in the design department was firmly cemented in the last war.
This is probably the most significant factor, something similar occurred with the RAF after the 1957 Defence White Paper which concluded that manned, air-defence fighters and manned bombers where going to be obsolete due to advances in SAM technology.
That view was wrong and they finally got back on track but not before some potentially promising aircraft projects were cancelled and various aeronautical companies were "encouraged" to merge (thus reducing the number of people involved with R&D). The British lost the opportunity to operate, in the 1960s, a Mach 3 capable recce & bomber aircraft in the Avro 730.

The Avro 730 could very well have provided the United Kingdom with the same sort of reconnaissance capabilities as the SR-71 did for the USA as well as being a bomber capable of delivering nuclear weapons.
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