Patreon 53: Comparison of Future Warships for the RN/RAN/RCN/RNZN

Probably a faster Queen Elizabeth-style battleship, potentially developing toward an N3-like design with 18-inch guns, rather than another 36-knot battlecruiser.

Its general posture might have stayed similar, but the later balance could have made a battlecruiser raid into the Baltic more tempting.

The comparison is rooted in each navy's strategic setting, historical habits, and political constraints rather than a wish list of ships.

As lasers begin defeating drones, protection and counter-countermeasures may evolve much as First World War spotter aircraft developed into armed fighters and bombers.

Only indirectly: the RAF would support exposed eastern allies, while Britain's principal answer remained deterrence rather than a deployed ballistic-missile shield.

No. Carriers remain part of both roles because aircraft add launch range and approach options, while the carrier can be replenished at sea in ways that vertical-launch cells currently cannot.

A trawler-sized uncrewed vessel acting as a force multiplier under the air-defence and command cover of a larger ship such as a Type 26 or Type 83.

No. Air launch can extend reach and give the weapon the altitude and initial speed otherwise supplied by a separate booster stage.

Modern missiles must be lowered into exposed cells with far greater precision than robust shells, while ship motion, wind, and limited handling equipment make damage likely.

Not significantly, because most maritime regions remained under the control or patrol of one dominant fleet or another.

Not in the open ocean, but it could form the core of a useful forward replenishment and repair site in protected waters.

They remain similar through a shared architecture; national hull size and equipment can vary because the expensive common value lies chiefly in design and systems integration.

VLS offers faster reaction and a much higher firing rate, making it better suited to defeating saturation attacks.

Australia combines rich uranium reserves and a commodity-export economy with no civil nuclear-power sector and substantial exposure to Chinese demand and imported energy.

Australia's coastal population and vast maritime responsibilities make sea control and power projection central to its defensive depth.

The lack of a civilian nuclear-power sector complicates Australia's ability to sustain the skills needed for a nuclear-powered submarine arm.

Canada combines a large, trade-integrated economy and diverse energy base with exposed Arctic geography and a diplomatic culture that can be tested by coercive powers.

Coal supported a large employment constituency, while nuclear generation would sustain fewer direct jobs and therefore faced a strong political disadvantage.

A population of about five million must support responsibilities across a large EEZ, Antarctic interests, Pacific island relationships, and trade routes far beyond New Zealand's shores.

No. It also operates two frigates, HMNZS Canterbury, and other supporting ships.

It depends on the radar generation and range; stealth is not an invisibility cloak, and radar designers continue working to detect the aircraft farther away.

Britain's overseas territories and trade-dependent economy turn distant shipping disruptions into national security problems.

Regional funding can sustain the schools, roads, and railways needed by nationally important industry where the local tax base alone is too small.

Australia's armed forces are characterised as compact, adaptable, and suited to hard-hitting allied operations, while the surrounding ocean remains the country's strategic security zone.

It is probably a return to defence in depth, reversing the earlier concentration of defensive reach close to Australia.

Domestic construction supports strategic independence, but gaps between programmes repeatedly destroy the workforce and infrastructure that the next project must pay to rebuild.

If the force survived later reviews, Australia might eventually have chosen a Queen Elizabeth-class carrier or an F-35-capable Canberra design, but the outcome is highly contingent.

Canada's claim to the world's third-largest navy rested chiefly on its enormous escort fleet rather than on cruisers or other prestige ships.

Fleet numbers must cover operations, transit, training, and refit, so small classes produce fragile availability even when each new hull is much more capable than its predecessor.

Dominion units were valued as shock troops for cohesion, fitness, and extended unit training, not because commanders simply regarded them as expendable.

It helps crew endurance, but it costs more personnel and training infrastructure and does not remove the ship's maintenance cycle or vulnerability to loss.

Achilles at the River Plate illustrates how New Zealand's small forces entered the Second World War from the beginning and made an early naval contribution.

Probably not, because New Zealand would be unlikely to sustain a separate carrier type, but the ship could carry a substantial RNZN contingent and formal crewing traditions.

Britain's claim to global military reach rests less on having the third-largest force than on possessing the auxiliary, land-logistics, and airlift systems needed to sustain deployments.

British strategy repeatedly balances trade-dependent economic strength against defence investment, often leaving forces modernising for a later war when conflict arrives early.

Not necessarily. Nazi Germany in 1939 shows that the state starting a crisis may still misjudge when and how a larger war will begin.

A shortfall in Hobart-class air-defence numbers pushes Australia to add more air-warfare capability to the ASW-focused Hunter design.

Operating F-35s would require weapons, magazine, and sustainment changes designed out of the Canberra class, far beyond use of its ski-jump bow.

Australia's small Hobart and Canberra classes were sized to contribute to allied interventions, not to absorb losses and sustain a peer war.

The proposed answer is not a dozen destroyers but roughly six to eight: enough for availability on both coasts without exceeding Australia's sustaining capacity.

Allied help is most credible when Australia can make a meaningful contribution to its own defence and to a combined force.

Canada's preference for heavily armed frigate- or destroyer-sized ships reflects a smaller navy's need to extract maximum capability from every deployable hull.

Canada's fleet must be divided between two distant coasts while meeting separate Arctic requirements, limiting how quickly ships can reinforce one another.

Canada fielded capable forces at about 1.3 percent of GDP, while comparisons with mass-produced American ships obscured the cost of domestic construction and Canadian-specific design work.

Canadian, Australian, and British Type 26 variants share an architecture while adapting it to national needs, spreading development benefits across the partners.

The Royal New Zealand Navy is presented as a small, well-trained service built around two Anzac frigates, patrol vessels, and a multirole sealift ship.

For decades, distance, friendly Australia, and American predominance in the Pacific made maritime support aircraft a more rational priority than a small fighter arm.

It is at least as important, but the choice is a false dichotomy: New Zealand needs a funded balance of both functions.

Force structure must account for what other states could become and do over a ship's lifetime, beyond the intentions of today's leaders.

Replacing five aviation ships with two highly capable carriers reduced availability, leading to a proposal for complementary LHDs that can support amphibious operations and limited strike aviation.

Britain built an excellent nucleus for global carrier operations but too few escorts to form every full battle group without allied ships.

Probably none at first; patrol vessels and perhaps uncrewed underwater systems would be more sustainable than conventional submarines.

A hybrid carrier with mixed crewed and uncrewed aircraft is more likely than a fully uncrewed air group for the foreseeable future.

Three carriers and four ski-ramp LHDs can be justified at the high end, but two carriers with two or preferably three LHDs is a more realistic target.

Cooperation helps, but both navies still need more hulls because Britain cannot commit both carriers east of Suez while retaining an Atlantic capability.

No practical candidate exists, and even a Nimitz-class ship would require roughly 5,000 personnel with its air wing compared with no more than about 1,600 aboard a fully loaded Queen Elizabeth-class carrier.

It is theoretically viable but unlikely because the two independent states have different governments and foreign policies.

Modern warship prices are driven heavily by design, integration, and industrial continuity, so spreading development across more national variants can reduce the cost attributed to each hull.

No. A roughly 70,000-ton Queen Elizabeth-class ship is a strike or fleet carrier; light carriers sit much farther down the size and capability spectrum.

An Italian Trieste-derived design could provide the starting point, then be enlarged and adapted for Britain's wider operating conditions.

A joint submarine programme could pool technology and personnel resources, while Canada's Arctic mission gives it a distinct case for under-ice capability.

The troubled Horizon project shows that multinational procurement works best when partners share operating requirements and permit national variants rather than forcing one compromise ship.

Not with an established design suited to their distances; available conventional boats did not provide the required long-range operating scope.

Technology-transfer and treaty concerns were the main barrier, but allowing Australia nuclear submarines makes continued exclusion of Canada much harder to justify.

That is not the argument here; the available policy space is the roughly 0.7-percent-of-GDP gap between current spending and the NATO target.

The Type 26/Type 31 high-low model could give New Zealand a practical replacement route while supporting a wider common procurement framework.

Common research and design work can lower costs without requiring Britain, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand to buy identical ships or fleet numbers.

The timing of Britain's Type 83 and Australia's eventual Hobart replacement could support a shared destroyer family, with Canada buying only enough large ships to lead each coastal force.

Shared uncrewed surface, subsurface, and aerial systems could patrol the enormous ocean areas faced by all four navies and perform ASW, mine, sensor, and aviation tasks.

Very capable on paper but operationally overstretched; the viable model is independent fleets that cooperate in procurement and combine for selected wartime task groups.

Yes. The United States had already tested a laser at sea and Britain was planning for later ships, but neither service had funded broad installation.

Headline defence expenditure can overstate money available for present forces when pensions, memorials, and other obligations are counted inside the total.

The choice between carriers and LHDs, crewed and uncrewed aircraft, or SSNs and SSKs is often false; services win funding by showing how complementary systems meet a strategic need.

Doing so would expose a deterrent submarine's location and create avoidable ambiguity between nuclear and conventional missions.

It should sometimes accept a proven 90-percent solution such as CV90 instead of pursuing a bespoke theoretical 100-percent solution that arrives late or fails in practice.

It already sits between the Japanese and American models and may reduce crews further, but probably not as far as Japan.

Yes. The working scale given here is roughly six crews for four boats, keeping one submarine at sea while preserving crew recovery time.

There is no proof offered here, only scepticism: South Africa built and dismantled weapons and Israel is widely suspected of retaining them, so Taiwan's case should not be treated as certain either way.

Yes. An attack on an SSBN is treated as a strategic strike and can trigger a response, so navies devote exceptional effort to helping the boat disappear safely.

The decisive threshold is a highly accurate model of ocean behaviour; only then can satellites distinguish a probable submarine from ordinary variation.