PLAN Aircraft Carrier programme...(Closed)

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latenlazy

Brigadier
bd popeye said:
I served for 20 years with the USN and still....oh well.

The basic technology of a steam cat has remained the same for over 60 years. Did you know that only one of the six USN retired CVs still has it's catapults installed? That would be Kitty Hawk. The rest have been removed ,refurbished and are standing by to be used to repair catapults on active Nimitz class ships. In fact the cats have been removed from Midway which is a museum ship.

Those "old steam catapults" on Shangri La[/] could launch these bad boys....

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A-3D SkyWarrior also know as a the Whale.. she tipped the scales at 39,000lb(17690kg) and a max take off weight of 82,000lb(37195kg). This one is pictured aboard an Essex class CVA. J-15 max take off weight is 33000kg..

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Is China developing an EMALS catapult.? I think so. When will we see it in operation? Who knows for sure??..
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If China had access to the Kitty Hawk they might have done a 1:1 copy of that system and we would be seeing them testing a steam catapult in land somewhere, perhaps for years already. Instead the catapult they got to inspect was the Melbourne's, a system that was designed for much smaller payloads. Furthermore this was all the way in the 80s. Granted the fact that effective steam catapults are not state of the art technologies should make it easier to develop one than a technology that's conceptually newer. However, I would actually argue this is further evidence that China won't go with steam and instead jump straight to EMALS. It's been thirty years since they've inspected the Melbourne and not only have we had no real news of a steam catapult being developed, but we've had news suggesting they ended up deciding a steam catapult wasn't reasonably workable at the same time as we're hearing about developments in EMALS.

In a way this makes a lot of sense because even if steam catapults are an old technology by the standards of the industrialized world, both steam catapults and EMALS are new technologies to China. Furthermore, China has MUCH easier access to foreign assistance on the technologies that go into EMALS than for steam catapults, because the specifics of the former has a dual use nature while the specifics of the latter are strictly military. This is in line with the observation that any field that China has made reasonable advances in has required foreign knowldge capital to jump start their process. This is reflected in how China already operates the basic technologies that underpin an EMALS. China on the other hand has zero technologies that operate the underlying technologies of steam catapults, to my knowledge at least.

I don't doubt that steam catapults are a good and workable technology, but I suspect that given the steps that might have been necessary to go from a catapult at the Melbourne's performance level to something like the Kitty Hawk's China simply decided that money and time could have been better spent elsewhere. Whether that was a wise decision or not, I think the preponderance of evidence is suggesting that this is the case.
 
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Jeff Head

Jeff Head

General
Registered Member
Engineer said:
If PLAN isn't ready, then PLAN shouldn't be building a CATOBAR carrier. It's that simple.
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That's exactly right.

But the point of building CATOBAR is not about using EMALS, it is to about launching combat aircraft into the air, off of the carrier deck in a safe, fast, and reliable high tempo operation.

If steam cat technology arrives at the point with the Chinese to do that first, reliably, over and over again, and for years, then they will go with it.

If EMALS arrives at that point for them first, then they will go with it.

It is not a matter of not building CATOBAR when they are not ready...they will build CATOBAR when they ARE ready. They can be ready with either technology.
 
Engineer

Engineer

Major
Jeff Head said:
No, it is not.
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Sure it is, and your next statement stated why it is.

Jeff Head said:
If you build two 70-80,000 ton carriers and use them each for fifty years, you will recoup the expense of every single item you have invested in in those carriers. You will not have wasted a dime.

Then, fifty years from when they were launched, you roll two of the new class nuclear powered, EMALS carriers into their position and continue on.
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Keeping obsolete technologies going for 50 years is no different than shoveling money into a pit for 50 years. All that money that could have gone to EMALS instead. That's only part of the waste. The other parts are what I have mentioned earlier -- wiping all those efforts in bringing the technologies into fruition, on infrastructures, on ships, and on manpower.


Jeff Head said:
I expect:

1st, we will know soon whether they go for two STOBAR carriers in the near term, or if they go for a High-Low risk type build.

2nd, depending on that choice, we will next know when they will introduce EMALS into their carrier development, either now, or later when they do introduce CATOBAR, if it is then, or later after 1st starting with steam cats. We can discuss it more then, when we know more.

As I said, I expect they will introduce whatever they are most comfortable with having developed to the point at the time that will put their aircraft into the air most reliably for high tempo operations...and I expect they are working both paths right now to try and get to that goal.
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We need to remember that carriers require enormous amount of investments. Solutions that worked on destroyers do not necessary work for carriers.
 
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Blitzo

Blitzo

Lieutenant General
Staff member
Super Moderator
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Jeff Head said:
No, it is not.

If you build two 70-80,000 ton carriers and use them each for fifty years, you will recoup the expense of every single item you have invested in in those carriers. You will not have wasted a dime.

Then, fifty years from when they were launched, you roll two of the new class nuclear powered, EMALS carriers into their position and continue on.
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Jeff, I think whether CATOBAR would be a waste of money or not depends a few things:
-How difficult/how much money is expended on developing a steam catapult and the relevant infrastructure, knowledge
-The difference in time "X" between a mature and operation ready steam catapult and when a mature and operational EMALS is ready
-The necessity of CATOBAR carriers in time period "X"


That is to say, if X = let's say, three years, then would the money expended on steam cat development be worth it? That depends on how important those three years were, and also how much money was spent, of course.

We also have to consider that money invested into steam cat development might have been better spent on EMALS in the first place, which might bring forwards the EMALS readiness date.

If X = multiple decades, then there could be something said for sponsoring steam cats alongside EMALS. But if X were only a few years, then one may wonder whether it would be more prudent to use that money elsewhere and simply be a little more patient for a unified CATOBAR fleet beginning with EMALS rather than "false starting" with steam.


OTOH, if the demand/necessity of CATOBAR in period "X" (even if it were only a few years) was very high, then steam catapults might be a reasonable choice, but this would only occur if China were getting ready for war, requiring a "surge" of CATOBAR capability (in which case there wouldn't be any EMALS investment at all)
 
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L

latenlazy

Brigadier
Jeff Head said:
If steam cat technology arrives at the point with the Chinese to do that first, reliably, over and over again, and for years, then they will go with it.

If EMALS arrives at that point for them first, then they will go with it.
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I think, to take this discussion away from hypotheticals, what some of us are saying is that the evidence is increasingly looking like the latter, and not the former.
 
Engineer

Engineer

Major
Jeff Head said:
That's exactly right.

But the point of building CATOBAR is not about using EMALS, it is to about launching combat aircraft into the air, off of the carrier deck in a safe, fast, and reliable high tempo operation.

If steam cat technology arrives at the point with the Chinese to do that first, reliably, over and over again, and for years, then they will go with it.

If EMALS arrives at that point for them first, then they will go with it.

It is not a matter of not building CATOBAR when they are not ready...they will build CATOBAR when they ARE ready. They can be ready with either technology.
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Well, it's not just about the catapult but about how and when everything ties together. That is my rationale.
 
Jeff Head

Jeff Head

General
Registered Member
Engineer said:
Sure it is, and your next statement stated why it is.


Keeping obsolete technologies going for 50 years is no different than shoveling money into a pit for 50 years.
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Well, Eng, no offense meant at all, but it is apparent to me that you have not been involved in this type of real world, large budget, military program.

I have been, and have done the ROIs on these types of systems.

The over-riding factor here, as I have stated numerous times, is to get the aircraft safely, and reliably off the deck and into the air in high tempo operations. And to do it for years. It is not whether you use EMALS or steam.

The term is fifty years. The cycle is all of those tens of thousands of launches. A part of the return (but not all of it) is the potential wars and losses the carrier and its air operations may prevent. That return is immense.

If the system works and launches those aircraft through that time frame at the maintenance and reliability factors your calculate in, then the system is not obsolete at all...it is working fine to the levels you have calculated.

As I have said, in such an ROI calculation, the money is not wasted at all, and every dime is more than recouped.

The only issue is which of those system gets you to that pointfirst...and what the difference in the time frame is.

If you are working on both, and the steam option (call it option "A"), gets you there five to seven years before EMALS (call it option "B"), then you implement Option A, because your choice is to either have no option for those seven years, or to have a much inferior option and a much higher vulnerability.

If the difference is, say, only one year, or eighteen months, you may crunch your numbers and elect to forego that time frame in order to get to the second option and accept the vulnerability for that short time frame...which would then be a command level decision.

Those are the kind of "trade offs" involved, and the way these decisions are made, because the over-riding goal is not the particular option between the two. This is because, quite frankly, despite the advance in technology, the difference between the two is small relative to each other and no change at all. That's the simple reality of the situation.

Therefore, short of the time lag being very small, you go with the first option you reach, and then, if that option happens to be the older of the two, you roll that option out fifty years later.

Now, this all presupposes that the CATOBAR capability is a relative high priority for the PLAN...if it is not, then they would simply not build a CATOBAR carrier at all until the EMALS capability was ready.

But, like I said, we'll see what happens soon enough.
 
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Jeff Head

Jeff Head

General
Registered Member
Bltizo said:
if X = let's say, three years, then would the money expended on steam cat development be worth it? That depends on how important those three years were, and also how much money was spent, of course.

We also have to consider that money invested into steam cat development might have been better spent on EMALS in the first place, which might bring forwards the EMALS readiness date.

If X = multiple decades, then there could be something said for sponsoring steam cats alongside EMALS. But if X were only a few years, then one may wonder whether it would be more prudent to use that money elsewhere and simply be a little more patient for a unified CATOBAR fleet beginning with EMALS rather than "false starting" with steam.

OTOH, if the demand/necessity of CATOBAR in period "X" (even if it were only a few years) was very high, then steam catapults might be a reasonable choice, but this would only occur if China were getting ready for war, requiring a "surge" of CATOBAR capability (in which case there wouldn't be any EMALS investment at all)
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There is truth in this, depending on the time difference between the two and depending on the priority the PLAN and PRC place on getting their CATOBAR capability into service.

Then, if it is very high, IMHO they would be negligent in not pursuing both and taking the first one that became available to them.

However, if it is low on the priority list (for whatever reason) then it would make sense to only pursue the more advanced technology and accept it whenever it was ready.

If that were the case, and unless they were absolutely on the brink of having it ready like right now in terms of test launches, then I would expect to see both of these carriers they are starting to build right now almost certainly be STOBAR.
 
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