Riain
Banned
From what I've read one of the major problems with the MRA4 was that BAE spent a lot of time and money making a lot of precision laser cut parts that were completely identical to micrometre tolerances, then found out that the planes they had all been put together by making some bits that were vaguely similar then having people (you, I suppose!) hit with them with hammers until they fit together, Apparently some of the Nimrods taken up for MRA4 had differences measured in metres.
I've heard similar, they were all pretty much hand built. Not that that's a bad thing necessarily, Aston Martins of the same vintage are hand made too, but nobody is trying to make a DB6 into a Tesla.