PLAN Carrier Construction

delft said:

I would expect Gas Turbine Electric now that IPS is available.

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That is highly unlikely. China has not employed IPS on destroyer or frigate, so the chance of China putting an untested system onto an extremely important aircraft carrier is near zero. Even if IPS were to be employed, the more sensible choice of main power would be diesel engines. Gas turbines require huge ducting, which makes their placement in a large ship awkward.

delft said:

Or are the necessary propulsion motors yet to be developed?

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My interpretation of the rumor is that the propulsion plant of the new carrier will be the same as the Liaoning.

antiterror13 said:

TRUE, but also the US navy was a lot bigger then. Reagan managed to build a lot of war ships in 1980s and reached 600 ships, almost twice that of now.

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Well, as popeye said, it never quite got to 600 ships. But the fact is that in numbers, the US Navy is a lot smaller now too...though some of that is masked because a lot of the support ships that used to be numbered in the US Navy are now not "counted" because they have become a part of the Military Sea Lift command and other similar nomenclatures. The US Navy, if all of those ships were included, is probably closer to 350 or 360 ships now, and the surface combatants and the submarines are a lot more effective than they were then.

But, be that as it may, the original contention was simply that the PLAN is not as large or as capable as the large USSR fleet back in those days...and that is so, even thought there is no such fleet in existence any more.

Engineer said:

That is highly unlikely. China has not employed IPS on destroyer or frigate, so the chance of China putting an untested system onto an extremely important aircraft carrier is near zero. Even if IPS were to be employed, the more sensible choice of main power would be diesel engines. Gas turbines require huge ducting, which makes their placement in a large ship awkward.


My interpretation of the rumor is that the propulsion plant of the new carrier will be the same as the Liaoning.

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Thank you. But you would minimize the ducting by have the GT much higher in the ship. Where do the QE's put there gas turbines? I'll go and look what Jeff says about that.
Another way of reducing the ducting, and increasing gas turbine efficiency, is by using heat exchangers. These have been promissed scores of years ago and we're still waiting.

delft said:

Where do the QE's put there gas turbines? I'll go and look what Jeff says about that.

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Engine rooms for the QE class are on the center-port side in the compartments labeled 75 (forward) and 82 (aft). Auxiliary machinery spaces are starboard of those, in the compartments labeled 72 in the following layout.

The gas turbines themselves are located, as shown in the layout, directly below each Island.

The intakes and ducts go up from there as shown.

Jeff Head said:

But, be that as it may, the original contention was simply that the PLAN is not as large or as capable as the large USSR fleet back in those days...and that is so, even thought there is no such fleet in existence any more.

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True, but thats not really surprising, considering that the USSR spent 20% of its GDP on defense during decades. I think that they had more tanks and SAM than the rest of the world combined.

asif iqbal said:

CV-002-CV-003 go to three fleet and Liaoning remains a “training carrier” but can be called upon for action

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While it makes sense that Liaoning is a training carrier at this stage of development (working out and writing the manual for flight ops, deck ops, etc etc), it seems awfully expensive to maintain her as a training carrier once there are at least two indigenous carriers in operations. Training should mostly be done at land facilities and once you pass those, you qualify on an operational carrier. Besides, if the indigenous carriers will be different, CATOBAR, how much training value will Liaoning provide? I rather see her be redeployed as a UAV carrier or LHA+ role. No navy has a dedicated UAV carrier, this may be an area that allows the Chinese Navy to leapfrog others. Personally, I don't want to see the day where all fighters are UAV, I think it's always best to have a mix of both, in case the UAVs become self aware.

CATOBAR allows planes to take off with more weight that STOBAR. Chinese carrier construction should slow down at this point till they overcome any internal challenges with building CATOBAR. It's not like Liaoning has an airwing yet so they can focus on building out the airwing and training multiple sets of crew while R&D hashes out a working CATOBAR design. The first island chain can mostly be covered by land based air assets. So going beyond, they should go big with large carriers (100,000 tons) like the US carriers to give them the ability to deploy a large enough force and sustain it far away from home base.

Jeff Head said:

Engine rooms and gas turbines for the QE class are on the center-port side in the compartments labeled 75 (forward) and 82 (aft). Auxiliary machinery spaces are starboard of those, in the compartments labeled 72 in the following layout.

The intakes and ducts go up from there as shown.

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The gas turbines are not housed in the main engine rooms, but directly underneath the islands as shown in .

delft said:

Thank you. But you would minimize the ducting by have the GT much higher in the ship. Where do the QE's put there gas turbines? I'll go and look what Jeff says about that.

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Yes. The gas turbines could be placed underneath the island or even inside the island. The problem is that there is very limited space at those areas. Those same areas are also contested space for electronics as well as command and control facilities.

The Queen Elizabeth class still uses diesel engines for main power.

kroko said:

True, but thats not really surprising, considering that the USSR spent 20% of its GDP on defense during decades. I think that they had more tanks and SAM than the rest of the world combined.

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Yep. literally spent themselves into oblivion.

Speaking of their tanks...for a few years I worked on the US MLRS project at Vought. What a tank killer system that is (to this day).

Developed specifically to address the tank number inequality along the iron curtain. The tank killer munitions that thing could put down range with its missiles were simply awesome.

Engineer said:

The gas turbines are not housed in the main engine rooms, but directly underneath the islands as shown in

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.

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That is correct. I misspoke. But the layout I included does show it correctly.

Showing the gas turbine spaces there below each island (just as you indicate) where the intakes pass through.

joshuatree said:

While it makes sense that Liaoning is a training carrier at this stage of development (working out and writing the manual for flight ops, deck ops, etc etc), it seems awfully expensive to maintain her as a training carrier once there are at least two indigenous carriers in operations

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I believe once their training regiment and capability to train at the land-based Naval Aviation Training Facilities and then graduate to an existing carrier is fully in place, and once they have a 2nd and 3rd carrier in place, that the Liaoning will be used as an operational STOBAR carrier.

I believe their second carrier will at first be STOBAR too, and look similar to the Liaoning, but perhaps have provisions for waste cats once they are ready for them, making the 2nd carrier at that point a hybrid STOBAR/CATOBAR carrier.

I believe with their third carrier they will go full CATOBAR.