Aircraft Carriers III
- Thread starter Jeff Head
- Start date
Intrepid
Major
More space on deck - the American way.
For Japanese the answer is obvious - Izumo class wasn't built for force projection, it will be operating on home waters with some occasional trainings with US/Royal/Indian Navies. So this move is logical more or less when if you consider it from this perspective. As for Koreans - as I wrote in SK thread it's a mystery for almost everyone why they want aircraft carrier other than 'if everyone has one we want one too!' attitude. Japanese worked closely with USN and Royal Navy before the refit and as for Korean carrier, remember that for now it's only mock-up illustraton and things might change a lot before they will start bulding it in the latter part of this decade.
Mr T
Senior Member
Good points. Although a ramp would be useful, for whatever reason the MSDF has decided it isn't necessary - and it probably isn't, given the F-35s won't be attempting to make long-range sorties.
I'm also unsure why the ROK wants a carrier. "Me too" seems the only logical reason right now. I guess they might like some redundancy in case a NK first-strike damaged most of their air bases near the border, but one carrier wouldn't make a difference.
Intrepid
Major
Wow, 181 take-offs and only 48 landings between failure. That is not to much! 7 days to solve an issue is a long time.
Imagine, if the first operational carrier with EMALS will be Chinese ...
Interesting, I had experience with liner motors prior, and the end result was very similar.
Theoretically they are extremely good, fast and simple, but in practice they collected all kind of metal particle, worn fast and required lot of expertise to fix them.
They looked so bad, the swarf collected on them worn the stators , and made lot of wear on them.
The ballscrew systems was way simpler and easier to maintain, and the performance gain was marginal , compared to the maintenance issues.
I presume it could be a nightmare to replace parts of the linear motor on sea, and make high ampere electrical connections in a salty environment , on the deck of a ship.
I think the biggest issue is the installation of the catapult without prior long term study, with robust design they should install one electromagnetic catapult onto a nimitz class, learn the issues, and after several iteration and when the knowledge is high build a ship around it.
Most likely the linear motors lightweight, lack lot of protection features that require space and weight, and due to that the redesign next to impossible .
Hey, but at least they ordered three more faulty ship , so the manufacturers get they profit.
Whats depressing is it pretty much says that there has been little movement in the last year. Weapons elevators don't seem to have progressed much in the last few months either (perhaps understandably with COVID). Think its been stuck at 6 working for a while..
I do believe the USN will eventually fix it and get it working (and they'd better do), but the odd thing is that all the recent public pronouncements seemed to have implied that the worst was behind them and that it was reaching an acceptable state. If the report is true its hard to trust any more pronouncements from the Navy regarding this. I know there is always a political angle of buying time for a fix to go in etc., and thats to be expected to a degree..... But the report really does clash with public statements to an unwise amount.