You'd have better luck selling that to the Brazilians than to the PLAN.
00X/004 future nuclear CATOBAR carrier thread
- Thread starter AETHER
- Start date
A question:
If Jiangnan and Dalian shipyards were to exclusively switch to construction of large aircraft carriers, how many could be under simultaneous construction in the existing drydocks?
Diesel are more economical at lower speeds, gas turbine's efficiency is atrocious at low throttle. 80MW of installed diesel power could allow a carrier the cruise economically via diesel only while only using gas turbine for combat and top speed.
Yes, I know that.
But to get to 80MW, you could have a single 50MW gas turbine operating at 100%, plus the 2 diesels.
Such a combination seems better than operating 4 diesels.
Also, 80MW seems excessive for cruise speed. The QE-class only have:
4x 10MW diesels
2x 36MW gas turbines
Well, QE is a much smaller ship with no onboard EMALS. It also isn't exactly the fastest carrier nor was it designed for next gen weapons in mind due to more advanced plans being cancelled due to tight budget. I'd envision Type 005 to have a hullform similar to CVNs for large hanger space but require more power to propel while also having a large margin for other future advanced systems. Considering it might become the backbone of PLAN's carrier fleet for the next 50-70 odd years you might as well have the best technology can get you right now.
Also on paper, diesel still have better efficiency than simple cycle turbines at all power levels.
The thing is, a doubling of speed requires a fourfold increase in power.
(EMALs electricity requirements are negligible compared to propulsion electricity requirements)
So let's say China's future nuclear carrier has something like the 4 x 50 MW propellors like we see on the Kitty Hawk, Nimitz and Ford-classes. (It could be a bit more though, as it looks a bit larger than a Ford-class)
And for a new conventional carrier design, does it really make sense to have the same 4 propellor propulsion setup? Or would it make more sense to go with 2 propellors and accept a maximum speed of around 25 knots, rather than 32? knots?
In the context of an F/A-18 launch speed of 165 knots, a 7 knot difference doesn't seem that important.
Especially if the carrier focuses on launching ISR or aircraft configured for air-to-air missions.
Just thinking speculatively here:
We've got 12 MW diesels being used in the Type-075 and a new 42 MW gas turbine in 2025.
These are somewhat higher than the equivalents on a QE-class carrier.
If a Chinese carrier were to adopt the same configuration of 4 diesels and 2 gas turbines and accepted 25 knots, they could get to 100K tons displacement?
But to get to 32 knots, that same carrier would need 2 more gas turbines.
It'll be interesting to see what happens.
We've got 12 MW diesels being used in the Type-075 and a new 42 MW gas turbine in 2025.
These are somewhat higher than the equivalents on a QE-class carrier.
If a Chinese carrier were to adopt the same configuration of 4 diesels and 2 gas turbines and accepted 25 knots, they could get to 100K tons displacement?
But to get to 32 knots, that same carrier would need 2 more gas turbines.
It'll be interesting to see what happens.
Said to be the housing/containment structure for one of the reactors. In fact, it has been said that this structure has been seen there by the locals and passerbys for some weeks by now. Posted by Captain on Weibo.
Last edited:
That's exactly what was going around at the end of April in certain groups. Someone had taken pictures of that containment module from across the street of the Dalian docks. But they were too afraid to put it on their weibo. That's what can be seen in the uncensored version of the pic that I posted here:
I think those satellite pictures pretty much but confirm that it's a nuclear vessel. Technically, we still don't have definitive proof that it's a CVN, but realistically that's the only real option.