re: PLAN Type 071 LPD & its Landing Craft
Rare glimpse inside the living area of 071:
Should all that cabling just be exposed out in the open like that? If there was a fire in the corridor, the insulation on the cables would melt or even catch fire themselves extremely quickly and could thus cut power to vital systems.
It even looks like they were designed to be in their own enclosed duct as I would have expected, but none of the duct covering seem to have been installed.
Hope they fix niggles like that without having to learn the hard way how important 'little' things like that could be.
This picture is very troubling. Maybe its just misleading because its only one snapshot of that corner and we have no idea what the context of the shot was, but weapons really shouldn't be just left lying around like that and there really should be an armory or at least gun locker inside the dorms for the marines to safely store their weapons during transit.
I also don't understand the design of those bunks.
It just seems stupid to have storage racks on the very top like that. It's not even like they did it to allow for extra storage by leaving a sensible space under the bunk either. The storage rack also lack any sort of built-in restraints or even anywhere to secure rope or webbing to, and I can just see kit raining down on people and getting broken from the fall in rough seas. The bottom bunks are also far too low for people to sit on them comfortably.
I seriously think they just bought some cheap ready-made civilian ferry bunks instead of designing something more suitable to an ocean going ship!
The Bunks are design like that because they are designed for three people to maximize capacity on the cheap beds for overnight ferries, but the ceilings on the 071 are far lower than on civilian ferries and as such could only sleep two people instead of three.
Even if you think marines won't be staying onboard long enough to need their own lockers, at last have the storage racks under the bunk so heavy kit can be easily stowed without risking back injuries, and if things get really rough, no-one would be hurt and no valuable bits of kit get broken because things are falling off of the top bunks.
With these shots, you can really tell that the 071 is the PLAN's first attempt at a LPD, and I hope all these concerns and others are getting passed up the chain and than onto the shipyards so improvements could be made when the 071 deployed on anti-piracy patrols and issues cropped up as I am sure they would have done.
