Vulcan MR: a possible maritime patrol aircraft (what if..?)

Because I am fond of the 1950’s Avro Vulcan strategic bomber (the shape, the sound…) and I have this book, ‘Nimrod’s Genesis’ (see the picture), I decided I needed a ‘What if....?’ Vulcan miniature for my modern Naval Wargaming. Not as a strategic nuclear bomber, but as a Maritime Patrol Aircraft (MPA).

The book describes the history of the British ‘Operational Requirement 350’, the replacement proces of the Avro Shackleton Maritime Reconnaissance (MR) plane of the 1950s and 1960’s. One of the possible replacements was apparently an adapted Avro Vulcan B2 bomber, as ‘Vulcan MR’. Anyhow, ‘Requirement 350’ stirred up some discussions so a better OR was issued in 1963: OR 357. And another, OR 381… Finally it was decided in 1966 to develop the Hawker Siddeley ‘Nimrod MR’ out of a civilian airliner, the ‘Comet’. And the rest is history as they say.

As I mostly use the ‘Naval Command’ rule set for modern Naval Wargaming, I tried to develop some statistics for the ‘Vulcan MR’ (as this is obviously not in the fleetlist UK). The ‘Vulcan MR’ was developed with a 9-person crew (including 2 pilots) with forward and rear-looking radars, 120 sonobuoys and 8 torpedoes. The data is not conclusive about which radar would be used, so I decided to take a radar rating between ‘Shackelton’ (+1), S-2 'Tracker' (+2) and P-2 ‘Neptune’ MPA’s.

EW-value: 8; Defence: 9 (mainly because of high speed); Air-to-Air: 0 (speed); Air-to-surface: 0; Radar: +2; ESM: 1 (?)

Loadout: ASW; 8 x Mk 44/46 torpedoes or depth charges. Sonobuoys (Sonar: +1, 4 turns on scene); possible MAD (pod under the wing?)

What do you think?

The other pictures are of 1:600 scale models of Vulcan bomber (painted as a Vulcan MR) and a Nimrod MPA.

Actually... in the 1970's Vulcan B2 bombers have been used a couple of years (1973-1976?) in a 'MRR' role (Maritime Radar Reconnaissance). The H2S Mk9 (bombing) radar of the Vulcan could perform wide area surveillance from high altitude to provide a 'surface' picture. This was very handy to keep an eye on the expanding deployments of the Soviet Navy, control the Exclusive Economic Zone and during the 3rd 'Cod War' (with Iceland). But those Vulcans had no additional operators on board or anti-submarine capability as the 'MR' version would get...