As you can see, judging based on the crewmen for prospective, the doors to the hanger is more than wide enough to allow the torpedo launchers to swing out with room to spare, and the two doors only account for about half the length of the whole hanger.
Actually, the width of the torpedo areas in both photos are almost exactly the same, both of them just slightly more than double the width of a torpedo launcher.
The FL300 launcher on top does not appear to have a mechanical reload system in place, thus it should not need much deck penetration, neither should the small mast. That leaves plenty of room to store a UAV there if so desired.
Whatever that space is in between the torpedo launchers, it’s not for a UAV. The biggest reason IMO is common sense. Why would they make things harder on themselves by moving UAV’s out the sides where the launchers are, then back towards the helipad, instead of creating a hangar door directly facing the helipad? There are two windows there instead, one of them presumably for a control station. The other could easily have been a hangar door, if that space in between were actually for a hangar. This alone makes it extremely unlikely there is an actual UAV hangar on that ship. There is basically no good reason at all not to have put a door facing the helipad. Unless of course the reason to put a door there does not exist because there is no UAV hangar there in the first place.
I am not sure what construction photos you are referring to, perhaps you would like to post them or link to them as it is a lot more helpful to get your point across if you can show us exactly what you are talking about.
I’m referring to the first photo you just posted, where you can clearly see the wall in the back of the torpedo area. Not necessarily ironclad proof, but it definitely does not look deep enough to make it to the starboard “vent” or whatever it is. Besides, even if there was extra space directly forward of the torpedo launchers, it sure wouldn’t be for the storage of UAV’s. Instead, what they would have done is move whatever they are using that area in between the launchers for now (the area beneath the HQ-10) and relocate that to the areas in front of the launchers, then use the cleared-out area for a UAV hangar, with a hangar door that directly faces the helipad.
However, if you look at this picture, you can clearly see that there are doors leading into the hanger so it would appear that the hanger is through and through so I really have no idea what you are talking about with close passages.
I’m talking about doors FROM the helipad to the rest of the ship. More specifically from the wall facing the helipad. There are none. So if you land on the helipad there is no other way for you to get to the rest of the ship except through one of the passageways right beside the torpedo launchers, which is why I said those areas need to be wide enough to both accommodate the swing of the launchers as well as the movement of personnel. Which is exactly what that other photo of the PLAN torpedo launchers I posted is meant to show. They are the same width and serve the same dual purposes.
Now having said that, it is also possible that instead of keeping that space clear for a future UAV, the PLAN will store munitions, spares and equipment needed to service and resupply any helos that lands on the helipad.
That however, reinforces the question of just what exactly they are using all that space in the lower aft decks for. There are two full decks below the helipad, if they did not need that space for something, it should have been perfectly feasible to find the space needed for the torpedo launchers on one of those decks. That way, all they needed to do was make the hanger a little taller and they would have had themselves a full helo hanger instead of the curiosity they do now.
That possibility would not have somehow escaped the notice of the designers, so it was a deliberate choice to forgo the full hanger capacity in order to have more room below decks. Would be interesting to know what was so important.
Neither of us being ship designers, I’m not sure how you can make any definitive conclusions about designers choices based on assumptions of ‘extra space’. Neither you nor I know what they are using most of the area inside the ship for. The best we can do is whatever can be seen from the outside. The little Paintshop 056 floorplan I made up was purely speculation. There could be dozens of things that I don’t know about and could need a lot of space inside a ship. Whatever we can conclude with reasonable certainty is whatever we can directly observe right now. Anything else is just speculation. I would give sailors more credibility in their speculation on the internals of a ship (e.g. BD popeye), but I am not, and I’m guessing you are not either.
So we've seen mods already being made which I think makes it fair to say we shouldn't discount any more changes. Under that premise, what's to say the torpedo launchers can't be moved one deck below and be fired from the openings at the back of the ship? Wouldn't that in theory also help lower the ship's center of gravity as the torpedo launchers are now riding lower in the ship? Space on the right of the RHIB be used to store additional torpedoes?
I don’t think there is enough room on the port side for a torpedo launcher, unless you want to mostly or totally obstruct the mooring area on that side.
Even if the torpedo launchers stayed on the same deck within the "UAV hanger", what's to prevent a UAV from being stored in the middle and having crew merely roll them out through left or right door when being deployed and vice-versa? That shouldn't block the torpedo launchers then.
See above for the answer to that.
Also, not trying to bring back an ASW argument, but couldn't sonar buoys be launched on miniature rockets? I'm talking about the buoys that usually get launched from an ASW aircraft like the P3s. If that's possible, couldn't a UAV be the eye in the sky that picks up the signals from the buoys and forwards back to ship?
They could, but this ship does not possess any rocket launchers, so how would the ship launch these sonobuoys? Unless you design some that can replace the SAM’s in the HQ-10 launcher. Though I highly doubt the PLAN would be interested in that. It would make far more sense to have a UAV that can carry both a dipping sonar and a torpedo, so that you have a rapidly-deployed means of both detecting and attacking a sub in one complete package. The UAV would fly out to a suspected location, lower its sonar, and if a sub is detected, drop its torpedo immediately to commence the attack.
