SS(G)Ns are just better. Semi-submersible provides no benefits.
Chinese USV Development Thread
- Thread starter Dfangsaur
- Start date
That's like kinda of expensive though, these relatively small drone ship could be built en masse for much cheaper and be unmanned.
If it is just something to tag along with other ships and provide VLS magazine, rely on other sensors for targeting, be very survivable, then this is almost the optimal solution. SSGN can do it but it is also much more expensive.
IMO offloading VLS to a separate drone ship has a few more benefits:
1 - Fleet magazine size can now be scaled at much lower cost compared to building more DDG hulls
2 - It allows effective increase VLS count of existing ships without need to build new DDG
3 - At equal tonnage new DDG designs can carry less VLS and have greater volume / tonnage for sensors, power plants, etc
4 - New DDG designs can have lower tonnage with less VLS and be potentially cheaper.
5 - Surviability of DDG can be much higher if munitions are kept on a separate drone ship instead of expensive manned hull.
6 - Much more flexible mixing of fleet composition depending on task force mission
7 - Cheaper to upgrade arsenal drone boats by building new ones than upgrading DDG hulls with sensors built in.
8 - Effective continuous at-sea rearming / effective infinite magazine depth by cycling drone arsenal ships back and forth while keeping DDG on station
9 - Land attack / ASM missiles can be loaded into drone ship while DDG which needs greater protection carry only air/missile defence
10 - New tactics open up where drone ships are sent much farther out from fleet for strike while keeping main fleet at standoff distance.
It's not easy to do, a lot of technical challenges obviously, including communications, servicing, maintenance, cost control, etc, but technical challenges can be overcome, conceptual benefits will always remain.
1 - Fleet magazine size can now be scaled at much lower cost compared to building more DDG hulls
2 - It allows effective increase VLS count of existing ships without need to build new DDG
3 - At equal tonnage new DDG designs can carry less VLS and have greater volume / tonnage for sensors, power plants, etc
4 - New DDG designs can have lower tonnage with less VLS and be potentially cheaper.
5 - Surviability of DDG can be much higher if munitions are kept on a separate drone ship instead of expensive manned hull.
6 - Much more flexible mixing of fleet composition depending on task force mission
7 - Cheaper to upgrade arsenal drone boats by building new ones than upgrading DDG hulls with sensors built in.
8 - Effective continuous at-sea rearming / effective infinite magazine depth by cycling drone arsenal ships back and forth while keeping DDG on station
9 - Land attack / ASM missiles can be loaded into drone ship while DDG which needs greater protection carry only air/missile defence
10 - New tactics open up where drone ships are sent much farther out from fleet for strike while keeping main fleet at standoff distance.
It's not easy to do, a lot of technical challenges obviously, including communications, servicing, maintenance, cost control, etc, but technical challenges can be overcome, conceptual benefits will always remain.
plawolf
Lieutenant General
The drone magazine ships will be supplementary additions to primary fleet element VLS carriage. I seriously doubt the PLAN will seek to cut down VLS cells on its further FFGs and DDGs. At a minimum VLS cell count will remain the same as tonnage is increased to improve operational range, endurance, crew comfort and mission flexibility etc.
The semi-submersible nature of the drone ship is to essentially make them immune to AShMs, as i don’t think any existing AShM can effectively engage the main hull even if it remains above water. If at maximum submergence, the primary hull will be immune to AShM attack. The worst that can happen is that the two islands gets hit, but those are almost certainly going to be designed to be disposable, so even if you take out both islands, the drone ship will always certainly have additional retractable comms antenna it could deploy to continue the mission.
In any major combat operations, these drones will accompany PLAN fleets and basically be the first munitions that will be deployed. So the PLAN can conduct pretty intensive and sustained combat operational without even touching its own onboard VLS magazines.
As combat drags on, additional drone ships will move up to provide munitions replenishment for the fleet to swap out drone ships that have expended their magazines.
Since these drone ships would be basically immune to AShM attack, they don’t actually need escorts and can just sail by themselves.
The only thing that might seriously threaten them would be enemy subs, but there should be a pretty significant and persistent PLAN MPA presence in the AO, so any sub that engages a drone ship is going to put itself in major danger. Even trading several drone ships for an enemy SSN is a very good trade.
The semi-submersible nature of the drone ship is to essentially make them immune to AShMs, as i don’t think any existing AShM can effectively engage the main hull even if it remains above water. If at maximum submergence, the primary hull will be immune to AShM attack. The worst that can happen is that the two islands gets hit, but those are almost certainly going to be designed to be disposable, so even if you take out both islands, the drone ship will always certainly have additional retractable comms antenna it could deploy to continue the mission.
In any major combat operations, these drones will accompany PLAN fleets and basically be the first munitions that will be deployed. So the PLAN can conduct pretty intensive and sustained combat operational without even touching its own onboard VLS magazines.
As combat drags on, additional drone ships will move up to provide munitions replenishment for the fleet to swap out drone ships that have expended their magazines.
Since these drone ships would be basically immune to AShM attack, they don’t actually need escorts and can just sail by themselves.
The only thing that might seriously threaten them would be enemy subs, but there should be a pretty significant and persistent PLAN MPA presence in the AO, so any sub that engages a drone ship is going to put itself in major danger. Even trading several drone ships for an enemy SSN is a very good trade.
The latest one spotted at the shipyard only has a single island and even that seems to be very low profile, it'll be very hard to hit and find especially if they added some stealth treatment to it.
Command and control shouldn’t be a problem at the area of operations if the drones remains in the line of sight distance. Having drones further out makes no sense since they don’t have their own sensors.
These drone ships could be armed with ASROCs, active sonar and even torpedoes.
I would expect a modular VLS setup, capable of launching many types of payloads.
Some thoughts
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I would expect the primary payload to be antiship missiles?
These missiles have to rely on offboard mid-course guidance anyway, so all you need is the hull and comms.
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On vulnerability, a subsonic cruise missile could penetrate ~5 metres of concrete.
Water acts almost like a solid when faced with an incoming Mach 0.9 object, although water is somewhat less dense than concrete
A heavyweight torpedo implosion bubble looks <16 metres, although there will be further shock effects as well.
But I expect a missile arriving from the air will expend most of the warhead force upwards into the air.
I also see commercial Chinamax-standard ships have a 24metre draft in the water.
So building a pressure hull to handle modest submerged depths shouldn't be very expensive or demanding.
But if unmanned, would it even have a pressure hull? The XLUUV doesn't bother with one.
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A Type-056 Corvette costs ~$100 Mn, but is significantly larger and would be far more complex.
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The cost of adding a towed array sonar and variable depth sonar should be negligible compared to the cost of the ship.
If you have 2 of them sailing together to/from port, they can triangulate sonar contacts and cue MPAs, so that solves most of the enemy submarine problem.
As part of a CSG or SAG, they would likely be the most expendable ship in the formation, even accounting for the cost of the onboard missiles (eg. DF-17 class missiles ~$2 Mn, HQ-9 SAMs probably a bit less). So they could be used aggressively to screen against incoming submarines.
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If there are 2 islands, perhaps 1 is for submerged redundancy?