CV-18 Fujian/003 CATOBAR carrier thread
- Thread starter Jeff Head
- Start date
These increases could be for commercial shipping, which has seen a huge surge over each year and the year before. The turnover for commercial ships can see ships being new to scrap in about 20 years, some less some more. Container ships are only around 10 years, bulkers around 16 and tankers around 17. This means what you know as the world's container ship fleet as of 2010 are now being scrapped and replaced, and the world's bulk freighter fleet as of 2004-2005 are now being replaced. The high costs of steel we have seen recently led to many ships being scrapped prematurely because there was more worth in their steel than in their maintenance, and this contributed to the recent and ongoing logistic crisis. Then factor that China's market share for new ship build continues to increase, which at this point, roughly 50% of all global new builds are now in China. After South Korea taking another huge chunk, the rest of the world is now under 10%.
Warships are generally far more smaller than commercial ships. A Type 075 might be 30,000 to 35,000 tons but a commercial ship can easily be 60,000 to 70,000 tons empty but is capable of reaching 3x to 4x when full. Yet despite this a 075 is built in an old shipyard. 054As and 056s are all built on small, old shipyards. The vast majority of the PLAN's warships can be built on old shipyards that are too small and non viable for commercial ship production. For aircraft carriers, the PLAN isn't building them like Big Macs off the grill, they are building them one by one, build one first, access then improve on the design and build again, which is sufficient to be slotted with existing spare shipbuilding capacity.
Of course, its much easier to make an alarmist headline to get better views by directly tying massive shipyard expansion to massive naval expansion, instead of a huge surge of commercial ship production.
Another reason for this expansion is the value of real estate. The old sites of both shipyards are located on the long bank of the Huangpu River, close to the Bund. Nowadays, the price of property here is sky high. Large sums of money can be raised by relocating shipyards and replacing land
The price of the real estate on the old Hudong Zhonghua shipyard, where the Type 054A is still currently made and the Type 075 was finished, the area there would be sky high. It was planned to evacuate this area for the Changxing once the Phase 2 Changxing plan was completed.
However, those were the plans before the PLAN decided to embark on a new wave of expansion, while at the same time, we are having a new surge in shipbuilding demand, thanks to the logistics crisis, the transition to 'greener' ships and so many older ships being replaced. Then coincidentally we also have a crackdown on the real estate developers like Evergrande, and all across the board, the stock of all the property developers have dropped. They may have a hard time securing the financing to buy up the old Hudong Zhonghua lot.
So yes, changing winds. I foresee the old shipyard being used longer, with ships transitioning from the 054A to the 054B, while the new yard will do more container ships, LNG carriers and if they are to build new warship, possibly new 075 and 076. One cannot underestimate the fortunate consequence that HDZ has become very good with ships using LNG, either LNG carriers or LNG powered ships, and these ships are going to be high in demand.
The CIWS platform successfully lost weight lol
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Type 003 CIWS platform/deck design change, before and after. ⬇⬇⬇
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Type 003 CIWS platform/deck design change, before and after. ⬇⬇⬇
If anyone does not think I am serious about the huge surge of commercial shipbuilding, ultra large ships and how it concerns Hudong Zhonghua, and all the shipbuilders in Changxing Island, and why these are the primary reasons why these shipyards are dredging and expanding further, this just came out.
These are the largest container ships in the world right now based on TEU measure. If you want to know what is the largest container ships in the world based on Archimedean displacement, that would be the CMA CGN Jacques Saade class, which are also built Hudong Zhonghua and Jiangnan shipyards in Changxing, some of which are still being built.
Since it's from google earth we should be able to find exact date of it though I don't think it would be an update over the latest photo we have before.An undated image, but it should be fairly recent.
Intrepid
Major
The photo was taken before installation of aircraft elevators.