Re: PLAN Carrier Construction
Maybe you'd save some deck space, but the cat system below deck is just going to be as massive as a full cat, so you complicate ship layout by requiring that installed plus the ski jump.
If you looks at Liaoning compared to Nimitz (to borrow Jeffs pic):
The bow length used to launch aircraft is more or less the same with cat compared to sky jump. (cat seems even longer in fact) The only reason you can park some aircraft on the bow of Nimitz is because the bow is flat. In that case wouldn't it be better to simple ditch the ski jump and go directly with cat? If you want to park more aircraft, the simpliest way and straight to the solution is to build a bigger carrier with larger flight deck space, like the Nimitz compared to Liaoning even though she had a longer bow for launching aircraft.
Let's look at the Liaoning's short take off positions. They are very close to the curve of the bow ramp. In fact there is not much straight distance from the take off position to when the bow starts to curve. So even if you install cats there how much distance can you save? Gotta remember that if you save distance by moving the take-off position forward, you'd have even less straight distance to install a cat - so you end up with a cat that is short and not efficient in what it does anyway for all the troubles that you'd have to go through installing, operating and maintaining it.
Better to just go big and catobar. Quantity has a quality all its own. I'd say the same thing with size.
