PLA Navy news, pics and videos

iewgnem said:

AR seems overkill for this project, between AESA, CIWS and 9m VLS tubes, you're talking about the ability to turn any and every container ship in the Pacific into an hypersonic ASM launcher or AD node, it means US navy's threat envelope just expanded by 2 order of magnitude, they'll now have to worry about being one-shoted by every container ship within 1000 km and their freedom of movement just shunk to only areas they can prevent all cargo ships from sailing.

This IMO is squarely targeted toward global naval dominance.

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People focus on how this isn’t a proper warship, but the underlying concept behind this is that in the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king.

It doesn’t much matter if a serious warship will trump this in all categories except cost and maybe VLS load, if all the proper warships are dead, then these things will overmatch everything else left afloat.

iewgnem said:

Convert? All you need to do is load a few containers onto a container ship, any container ship, and it becomes a destroyer, it might not even need the ship's knowledge.

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The key question for me in how easily and widespread this model can be expanded is on the power generation requirements.

If the whole weapons and sensor suit can run off of the ships own power supply, that will be ideal. If you need dedicated generators for each component, then that will create obvious limitations across the board in terms of how effective this concept can work as warships. However it does open new doors in terms of rapid deploying land based AD systems and the hilarious amount of spare containers that can be used as decoys and shell games.

This is what distributed firepower is supposed to look like. American keeps hyping the concept but their MIC keeps coming up with gold plated solution, now China does it for real.

ChineseToTheBone said:

Throwing my hat in the ring, my prediction is that not only is this a preparation of future all out naval warfare but also something China already needs to experiment with now simply due to its munition production capacity advantage.

Many people often think Chinese production of large destroyers and multirole frigates as quite fast, but their induction probably significantly lags behind the production of shipborne missiles. Referring to vertical launch missile cells in general, each contains one to four missiles depending on their role and each new large destroyer only adds just over a hundred cells.

There was a documentary from some years back showing how just one single automated factory produces a hundred missiles a day, which means it can produce nearly forty thousand missiles every year if ran at capacity. Containerized vertical launch missile cells will take advantage of land based industrial scales that led China to dominate production of industrial goods like passenger vehicles and solar panels. We are not going to be a position in the future where the military will need to wait for the construction of warships even if we are now reaching half the American military total vertical launch missile cells.

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This is what I've been thinking of as well. They need enough systems to launch all those mass produced missiles and the current amount of launching systems, whether it be ship or land based is not enough to keep up with the potential production figures.

This is what the ship looks like when the VLS is laid flat.

Here's a bit from last night's stream about this ship. Note how Yankee confirmed twice that it's not a movie prop and said the intention behind it is more wild than both Trump class BBG and WW2 German auxiliary cruisers.

plawolf said:

The key question for me in how easily and widespread this model can be expanded is on the power generation requirements.

If the whole weapons and sensor suit can run off of the ships own power supply, that will be ideal. If you need dedicated generators for each component, then that will create obvious limitations across the board in terms of how effective this concept can work as warships. However it does open new doors in terms of rapid deploying land based AD systems and the hilarious amount of spare containers that can be used as decoys and shell games.

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Since containerized generators are already a thing, it should be fairly straightforward to get more power.

What I find amusing is that one of these things has more fire power than a P-15B DDG

I was thinking for a second, but is there a reason behind placing the sensors, countermeasures or basically the fixed non-retractable equipment on containers rather than using a different platform? It appears you have to install them onto a fixed platform anyways so why not choose something else. I guess one benefit is that containers are uniform and are stackable.

For the VLS being in containers, this seems to be the most effective component in that it provides the ability to rapidly reload ships after exhausting munitions where you just swap out the emptied container with a fully loaded one in a matter of minutes with any container loading crane at any dock, rather than having to go through the whole process of carefully putting in new missiles one-by-one at dock with special cranes with typical fixed VLS tubes.

It's kinda analogous to old Russian style rocket artillery (Grads and whatnot) with the fixed tubes that you have to reload one-by-one complicating and slowing down logistics vs. modern rocket pods that you can swap out the whole set quickly with a crane.

This containerised method although a bit inelegant and crude on a surface level, seems to accomplish a degree of modularity and adaptability that the US navy has struggled at with their solutions in their LCS.

The only limiting factor now is how many missiles and launch systems that China can produce to effectively equip and maintain in number for these prospective "militia ships".

This is basically the arsenal ship people have speculated on. Only this way you can load up dozens of "stealth" arsenal ships on the cheap and spend a relative pittance to network it all with the PLAN. China's commercial shipbuilding yards can pump these out at a similar rate to USN warships being built. UVLS and missiles are cheap relative to a typical 055's sensors. Arsenal ships never made sense unless you can procure them quickly and cheaply like this.

IAD and anti ship ballistic missile launch pad. Better than that, potentially able to sail around undetected or at least be extremely resource demanding to track.

sheogorath said:

Since containerized generators are already a thing, it should be fairly straightforward to get more power.

What I find amusing is that one of these things has more fire power than a P-15B DDG

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Of course you can add in additional power generation capacity, but that creates additional logistical requirements (even something basic like topping the generator up with fuel can be a limiting factor, since storing and moving barrels of diesel on deck is not as easy as it sounds on an underway ship at sea) and potentially also operational limits (how much pitch and yaw movement can those generators handle while running?).