- Joined
- Mar 30, 2023
According to visual heuristics if two of the 50 missiles are duds then that would mean at minimum 23% of the missiles are duds. The seven year gap doubles the minimum number of duds to 46%. Since they didn't perform a second test immediately after the first failed, they deliberately chose to conserve their remaining missiles instead of confirming they work. It's possible that they had assumed they figured out why it failed and fixed it, but had failed to test for other issues. If the failure is the same, the number of duds double again to a minimum of 92% of the missiles being duds.But what really blows me away is that if the last test launch was in 2016 and that was a failure this means that for seven years, the British navy have been in the situation of not managing to repeat a failed test. A little maths - I don't know how many missiles we have but I see references with a quick search of having planned to purchase 65. Let us say the the proud kingdom of bongland has 50 such missiles. Now there could be all sorts of factors such as deliberately firing an older one or who knows that but lets keep it simple: the chance of firing one of 50 missiles and selecting the single dud one would be 1/50 (or 2%). Overwhelmingly it suggests there are likely more duds. But, BOTH of the missile tests in the last seven years were duds. Chance of randomly firing missiles and selecting the TWO duds would be 1/50 * 1/49 = approximately 0.04% or 2,500 to 1. It is vanishingly unlikely that there aren't numerous more dud missiles