Nuclear powered guided missile battlecruiser

crobato

crobato

Colonel
VIP Professional
Look. Go straight to the numbers. The kind of tensile strength on steel and structural engineering needed to handle 200,000 metric tons is in a scale different from that needed to handle 90,000 tons. That's just plain math and engineering. Resistance against missiles and explosions is not something tensile strength handles. That's just armor. And by the way, you can guess the tensile strength involved on a ship by comparing its empty weight vs. loaded weight, and if that ratio is quite high, meaning the ship is very light when its empty, then tensile strength is higher on the lighter ship. A ship with equal strength and less weight has a higher tensile strength than a ship of equal strength with more weight. You will find the ratios on that the highest on tankers.

Since the 80s, thanks to the tanker wars (Iran-Iraq) and embarrassing oil spills like the Exxon Valdez, the safety and fail safe requirements for tankers have seriously gone up towards all sorts of compartmentization. You can't take tankers from the eighties as examples, as safety features took a large jump since then. The Valdez and tankers in the eighties for example, were single hulled. Today, they are double and multihulled with honeycomb construction, with tanks that are made of stainless steel to resist corrosion. As for automation, you are talking about ships with less crews than some diesel subs handling a ship larger than aircraft carriers.

How tough are modern tankers? Nearly impenetrable for antiship missiles.

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!


Modern oil tankers are pretty sturdy

Dennis Blair and Kenneth Lieberthal argue that it is harder to close the world's shipping lanes than many people think: Smooth Sailing. The World's Shipping Lanes are Safe in the May/June Foreign Affairs (subscription required to read more than 500 words).

Part of the reason is that there are a lot of oil tankers, and that they're pretty sturdy. In a section of the paper titled, "Floating Fortresses," Blair and Lieberthal write:

Recent trends concerning oil tankers make it even more difficult to disrupt maritime oil shipments. The size and the strength of the global tanker fleet have increased markedly over the last two decades. From 1980 to 2006, the number of tankers grew from 2,516 to more than 10,400, and the average capacity of each tanker increased by 400 percent, with a disproportionate amount of the new tonnage having been added in recent years. Single-hulled tankers are being phased out in favor of more resilient double-hulled ones.

The greater number of tankers traveling at higher speeds and in more congested shipping lanes makes it increasingly difficult to identify and intercept them. This is especially true for submarines, which have a limited ability to identify surface ships and have only a small onboard supply of torpedoes and antiship missiles. If a submarine attacks a ship using just two torpedoes, it will have exhausted more than a tenth of its standard arsenal. Meanwhile, other potential targets nearby will disperse, forcing the submarine to relocate. A single conventional-power submarine (Iran has only three) facing no opposition could realistically expect to damage about half a dozen oil tankers in a busy sea-lane several hundred miles wide over the course of a month, disrupting at most a tiny fraction of the oil deliveries made during that period. Conventional-power submarines, moreover, are relatively slow and cannot catch modern tankers, which travel at 15-20 knots.

Mines and conventional-warhead missiles are even less effective now against large modern tankers than they were in the past. During the Iran-Iraq War, several oil tankers ran over mines in the Strait of Hormuz, but they sustained little damage due to their size and the protective effect of the liquid petroleum they carried (petroleum is not explosive in the airless tanks, and its weight holds the hulls in place). Even the most modern antiship missiles have relatively small warheads that are designed to damage the sensors and weapons systems of surface warships but are not capable of sinking or disabling a large tanker. Most missiles shot at a tanker would explode on its large deck, causing minimal damage. Even if they penetrated the deck, they would explode inside tanks where the liquid oil or the water in ballast would absorb the blast without igniting. In order to disable a modern-day tanker, an attack would have to include a salvo of eight to ten missiles with conventional warheads; a sustained campaign would quickly exhaust the missile stockpile of a medium-sized military power.

It's not clear from this if torpedoes are more or less of a threat to an individual tanker than mines or missiles, but the authors clearly think that there are important limits on the ability of most nations to target significant numbers of tankers with torpedoes.

Blair is the former Commander in Chief of the U.S. Pacific Command, so he's in a position to know what he's talking about.
Click to expand...
 
bd popeye

bd popeye

The Last Jedi
VIP Professional
Wel..we all can believe what we want to. There's words of truth in all this discussion. But as someone who sevevd on 5 USN CVs I can't imangine any ship on this planet with more surviablity during an attack.

I just hope , for the PLAN sake, that they build any sort of ship of their own design from the hull up as a warship.
 
A

AmiGanguli

Junior Member
This sounds an awful lot like a debate that took place here ages ago (that I participated in - been mostly lurking for quite a while).

I think you need to separate technology from engineering.

The technology available to the Chinese today is clearly better in every way than what was available to the Americans when they designed the Nimitz-class ships 40 years ago. The design equipment is better, the reactors are better, the materials are better. I doubt there's a single category where the Chinese would be behind. That's just the reality of time passing.

Engineering of military ships is a different matter. The Chinese will have plenty of access to engineers with experience in large ships from the commercial ship-building industry, but less access to engineers with military ship-building experience. And nobody with carrier experience, unless they can find some consultants in Russia.

So if you put some of the best engineers from the 094, 52C, and 071 projects, plus some people with experience in designing massive commercial ships on the same team, would they be able to overcome their lack of experience and design a decent nuclear powered surface ship?

My instinct is that they'd do an ok but not brilliant job. Probably better than the original Nimitz in ways that benefit from better materials and access to modern CAD tools: better strength for a given weight, for example. Probably not as good in smaller, non-obvious details that affect the operational effectiveness of the ship.
 
crobato

crobato

Colonel
VIP Professional
bd popeye said:
Wel..we all can believe what we want to. There's words of truth in all this discussion. But as someone who sevevd on 5 USN CVs I can't imangine any ship on this planet with more surviablity during an attack.

I just hope , for the PLAN sake, that they build any sort of ship of their own design from the hull up as a warship.
Click to expand...

The Nimitz class was designed decades ago. The modern tanker of this decade has access to technologies the Nimitz didn't.

Tensile strength is not what you need for ships to handle damage control. Tensile strength is about load bearing. For ships to actually withstand damage you don't want high tensile strength because it means the metal is more brittle and prone to fracture and crack. You actually want a bit of flexibility because you want to absorb impacts. Absorbing impact isn't the same as load bearing.
 
crobato

crobato

Colonel
VIP Professional
AmiGanguli said:
This sounds an awful lot like a debate that took place here ages ago (that I participated in - been mostly lurking for quite a while).

I think you need to separate technology from engineering.

The technology available to the Chinese today is clearly better in every way than what was available to the Americans when they designed the Nimitz-class ships 40 years ago. The design equipment is better, the reactors are better, the materials are better. I doubt there's a single category where the Chinese would be behind. That's just the reality of time passing.

Engineering of military ships is a different matter. The Chinese will have plenty of access to engineers with experience in large ships from the commercial ship-building industry, but less access to engineers with military ship-building experience. And nobody with carrier experience, unless they can find some consultants in Russia.

So if you put some of the best engineers from the 094, 52C, and 071 projects, plus some people with experience in designing massive commercial ships on the same team, would they be able to overcome their lack of experience and design a decent nuclear powered surface ship?

My instinct is that they'd do an ok but not brilliant job. Probably better than the original Nimitz in ways that benefit from better materials and access to modern CAD tools: better strength for a given weight, for example. Probably not as good in smaller, non-obvious details that affect the operational effectiveness of the ship.
Click to expand...

PRC development projects are know to be meticulous, doing things in a conservative, methodical, step by step procedure. Think of the way they did the space program.

First they will study a model. They got a few, the Varyag, Kiev, and Moskva.

Then they produce their first effort. The design is intended to be exploratory rather than be the best. The experience is then applied on the second ship, and the experience on the second ship is applied to the third.

Once you have a large enough knowledge base, then you start gunning for more ambitious programs.
 
bd popeye

bd popeye

The Last Jedi
VIP Professional
Tensile strength is not what you need for ships to handle damage control
Click to expand...

I never mentioned tensil strenght as a mode of damage control. The only reason I know anything about the tensil strenght of steel is because of a discussion in another forum. All I know is that military specs are are of a higher standard than civillian specs.

Damage control?? The ships well trained crew is the best way to handle damage control.

I'm old..It's time for bed...

edit...10 minutes later

The Nimitz class was designed decades ago. The modern tanker of this decade has access to technologies the Nimitz didn't.
Click to expand...

Really?? Yes it was..served on her in 1991. The Nimitz has recieved many re-fits including a Refueling Complex Overhaul (RCOH) at Newport News VA from 1997-2001. Nimitz class ship are all scheduled for RCOH.

Now I'm off to bed.
 
Last edited:
crobato

crobato

Colonel
VIP Professional
bd popeye said:
I never mentioned tensil strenght as a mode of damage control. The only reason I know anything about the tensil strenght of steel is because of a discussion in another forum. All I know is that military specs are are of a higher standard than civillian specs.

Damage control?? The ships well trained crew is the best way to handle damage control.

I'm old..It's time for bed...
Click to expand...


Tensile strength has nothing to do with survivability. Its all about load bearing. The tensile strength for the keel of an 80,000mt ship is going to be much higher than that of an 8,000mt warship. That's just plain math.

The ships with the highest tensile strength are submarines. They have to deal with immense underwater pressures. The deeper they go, the higher the strength has to be.
 
crobato

crobato

Colonel
VIP Professional
Really?? Yes it was..served on her in 1991. The Nimitz has recieved many re-fits including a Refueling Complex Overhaul (RCOH) at Newport News VA from 1997-2001. Nimitz class ship are all scheduled for RCOH.

Now I'm off to bed.
Click to expand...

I'm referring to structural technologies. There are things you can't refit.
 
A

AmiGanguli

Junior Member
bd popeye said:
The Nimitz has recieved many re-fits including a Refueling Complex Overhaul (RCOH) at Newport News VA from 1997-2001. Nimitz class ship are all scheduled for RCOH.
Click to expand...

I don't think anybody is arguing that the first PLAN carriers would be comparable to the current U.S. state-of-the-art. That would be an unfair comparison.

But the discussion was about whether or not the Chinese could design and build a decent large nuclear powered surface vessel. If you think the original Nimitz (c. 1975) was a decent vessel, then I think it's reasonable to say that PLAN could build something comparable today.

For another data point... I did a bit of Googling and found that the Nimitz was launched about 20 years after the first U.S. nuclear sub. If the Chinese launch their carrier in 2010 then 40 years will have elapsed since their first nuclear sub. Obviously the Chinese have had the Cultural Revolution and basic lack of resources to cope with during much of that time, but still, 40 years is a long time for technology to mature.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top