Re: Ideal chinese carrier thread
The cost of A-gear and duplicate landing aids is not as insignificant as you imagine. The A gear takes up considerable under deck space and requires heavy machinery. This is not a trivial part of the design or the cost of a carrier.
My point was not to say it was trivial or minimize it, rather, simply to point out that relaive to the cost of the whole vessel and its aircraft, it is small in comparison to that. Certainly that equipment (along with the expertise to operate it) is not trivial in either cost or installation.
The ability to launch and recover is essential. The do-all end-all of a carrier is it's daily sortie rate. All else is secondary. Go back and have a look at the RN analysis of their carrier in the CATOBAR and STOVL versions. Their original design with two small superstructures was adopted to maximize deck space for servicing and arming aircraft utilizing STOVL operations. Since the F-35B wil perform a vertical landing all the way aft, the rest of the runway area can be used for a rolling take off over the ski jump. In this manner aircraft may be launched and recovered similtaneously and over 100 sorties per day ( depending of airgroup size ) may be launched and recovered. When the ship is configured for cats and A-gear, if you look at the diagrams in that link I provided, you will see that both cats intrude on the landing area. Because of the placement of the forward island of the Queen Mary, the bow cat cannot be placed on the starboard side of the flight deck ( keep in mind the C-13B cat is 95 meters long, a shorter cat cuts into payload as the French discovered with their Charles de Gaulle class ). The double island configuration of the RN design forces the forward cat to port, and thus the JBD and part of the cat intrude into the landing area. This configuration will never permit launches and recoveries at the same time. The RN analysis of this states that the sortie rate of the CATOBAR version is only around 60% of the STOVL version. What saddens me about this is that had the RN adopted a single island aft, they could have built a flight deck much like the similarly sized USS Midway. On that old girl, neither bow cat intrudes into the landing area and it can conduct similtaneous launches and recoveries. The RN will be ok with it's STOVL ops on that design, but the French version with cats and A-gear will not support the pace of opertions of it's RN sisters.
All well said...but in the end, the British and the French (and most other nations) have to make trade-offs, economically, technically, and politically (which sadly too often drives the others) and then get the best that they can acquire. Those factors certainly limit most other nations from being able to do what the US does in this area...and also impacts US development as well.
This is why I will tell any who are interested that unless you have the resources to build something the size of a Kitty Hawk or Nimitz with enough flight deck acreage to accomdate full length cats that do not intrude into the landing area, and a long enough landing area to recover a modern twin engined fighter with it's ordinance ( so you do not have to throw away good ordinance to make landing weight ) it is more productive to build a good STOVL design. With STOVL you can land on a spot and use the bulk of the flight deck for your free deck take off. It is an easier technique to learn as well. RAF pilots picked it up in a few days during the Falklands Island war. China and any new carrier operator will be fully occupied just trying to sort out the many othere details of operating airplanes at sea. Flying instrument approaches to a moving navigation aid, where the "Marshalls" or holding patterns move in space along with the ship is a new skill for the land based pilot. Managing the flow of airplanes out of their marshalls onto fiinal approach ( deciding the "push time" for each aircraft ) that does not overwhelm the flight deck crew takes time to develop the necessary judgement. There are details like designing magazines and ordinance elevators that can move ordinance from the mags to weapons assembly areas ( usually a mess deck ) where fins and fuses are applied, then move the weapons up to the flight and hanger decks in sufficient quantity to meet the needs of an airwing. You do NOT want the ordinance department slowing your sortie rate simply because there is gridlock in the ordinance handling process, but you never want to take ordinance out of the protection of the magazine until right before it is needed ( Midway anyone ). There will be lots to learn about the job of "Mr Hands", the crew that has a mock up of the flight and hanger decks with models of the different aircraft who move these around to simulate recovering or launching aircraft. When a plane returns Mr Hands will already know where that plane must go to clear the landing area for the next recovery ( a plane who will now be low on fuel because they just dumped their fuel to make landing weight ). Mr Hands will give the yellow shirts on the flight deck directions on where to spot the plane after landing to prevent gridlock. You have no idea how crowded a flight deck is and how easy it is for planes to bump into each other if the process is not well thought out. These are tough skills to learn, and are more easily and safely accomplished on a STOVL design.
Again...very well said. And in the fictional scenario I represent, the STOVL version may be a better choise...but then that would have required a STOVL aircraft that the Chinese do not have and so I too dealt with trade-offs in that regard while trying to consider the other factors as well for the sake of the overall story.
Your comments provide great insight into carrier operations and further punctuate why the US is
so good at what it does in this area and has been able to sustain it. Sustained capabilities like, R&D, technology base, manufactuoirng base, quality control (despite whaytever failings creep in from time to time), expertise (both technical and operational), regular and rigourous training, damage control (as we recently saw on the George Washington), economic strength to be able to afford it (including the aircraft, personnel, escorts, logistics, etc.), political will to project it...all of these factor into the things you have mentioned and are areas where the US has excelled when it comes to Naval matters in general and carrier development and deployment specifically.
