New SSN (09X?) thread

[mack8]

A question about the excellent renderings by @Nx4eu, is the faceted, seemingly Dreadnought-esque design of the 095X your artistic license or the available imagery actually suggests such a faceted design?

 

[plawolf]

I don't think we can see them as a 095 or 093 variant or such because dimension is quite different. Also, it's not really in PLAN's way of doing things to have special variant before the original version even started sea trials.

I think we should just see them as separate sub class. This one may well be a SSGN or something else. That's TBD. I think special mission variant is quite unlikely.

The one thing that nags at me was the amount of smoke around the notion of a mini-sail SSN. Too many big shrimps weighed in with too much detail for the sail to be this big, and it’s hard to credibly argue that even the PLA would be able to have yet another full sized SSN design up its sleeve that we have not seen yet.

One possibility that keeps coming back to me was an almost joking/throw-away comment the CHH trio made about a detachable navigation sail to be added for final manoeuvres into and out of ports. It is theoretically possible that such a detachable sail was added as part of the initial build in the halls to save the trouble of adding it later once the sub was peer-side, and also as camouflage to hide the true nature of the sub, especially one being built at JN, where it was inevitable that pictures would emerge during fit out.

The idea of there being two subs classes in direct competition just doesn’t make sense at this stage given the vast costs of getting both programmes to this stage of development, and also the fact this new 09X is being built at both yards at the same time.