Along with more information about 057/054B, fzgfzy also shared a bunch
.
- He believes, after gather information from numerous sources, that work on the first 002 began at JNCX at the end of last year. There also could be one at Dalian but there definitely is one at JNCX.
- Steam vs EMALS competition has ended. EMALS was deemed superior. However, he personally hasn't heard of the navy ordering EMALS components whereas steam catapult components were ordered years ago. Steam might have won due to sheer readiness. This suggests that EMALS will not be on 002 initially but will be adopted on future ships and might be retrofitted onto 002s during their MLUs.
thanks for the translation, as always.
anyway, those two points are the most interesting to me.
the first, is about what will happen at DL after they're done with 001A. Will they build a second 002 (or 002A?) while JNCX would be proceeding forward in the middle of 002 construction by then, or will there be a delay until after the first 002 is launched or even commissioned etc?
the second point, is more interesting, because I think fzgfzy's logic is a bit off in this case. From my understanding the EM vs steam cat competition only really began 1.5-2 years ago and only really should have proceeded over the last year or so. If steam cat components were ordered years ago, that would likely be indicative of the Navy making the order for the steam cat components well before the EM vs steam cat competition began and possibly well before anyone first thought to do an EM vs steam cat competition at all.
If the EM cat really did win the competition, and if there are no manufacturing issues, then I wouldn't necessarily interpret orders of steam cat components from years ago and lack of awareness of EM cat component orders right now to mean the Navy is going with steam over EM. It could be that the Navy has just yet to make an order for it for various non-technical reasons or maybe the Navy did make an order but fzgfzy has yet to hear about it.
That said, at this stage I think whether the first 002 will use steam or EM cats is still very much up in the air. If EM cat really did win the competition then you'd think there would be a change on this front in coming months, but given it was assumed that 002 would be using steam cats from the get go since years ago and was only recently in last two years considered that it may use EM cat, I can understand why steam cat may be considered the null hypothesis and thus we would need quite a bit of evidence to consider 002 as using EM cat over steam.
also, I wonder if his displacement count is still using standard displacement or full.