Posted on 05/27/2016 5:11:30 AM PDT by sukhoi-30mki
cjdby.net
Type 001A Takes Shape
The Type 001A carrier, likely to be named after a Chinese province, already has most of its hangar bay installed, the next major parts are the ski ramp, control tower island, and flight deck.
China's first domestically built carrier, "Type 001A", is making brisk progress in its Dalian drydock. Tracing its design to the Soviet Admiral Kuznetsov class of aircraft carriers, the Type 001A will displace around 60,000-70,000 tons, is powered by steam turbines, and will carry between 30 and 40 helicopters and J-15 fighter jets. Type 001A first began construction in late 2014, and is expected to be launched in 2017, with commissioning in 2019-2020 timeframe. Since the beginning of the year, many modules have been assembled, including the below-deck hangar bay, openings for aircraft elevators, and in new photos, the ship's ski jump soon to be welded to the carrier's front.
cjdby.net
Ski Jump Ramp
This part of the ski ramp, hoisted by a crane at the Dalian Shipyard, will enable the Type 001A aircraft carrier to launch J-15 fighters for strike and air superiority missions.
Short Takeoff But Arrested Recovery (STOBAR) type aircraft carriers differ from aircraft carriers like the USN's Nimitz class (which uses catapults to boost aircraft into the skies) in that they use a ski ramp mounted at the aircraft carrier's front to set the launching aircraft at an forward and upwards trajectory. The Liaoning, China's first aircraft carrier, uses ski ramps to launch its J-15 jet fighters.
Gaoshan at GJX5537@163.com
Flying Sharks
Gaoshan, a famous CGI artist of Chinese aircraft, shows two J-15 "Flying Shark" carrier fighters with full loads of anti-air and anti-ship missiles. The J-15 can take off from the ski ramps of the Liaoning and Type 001A with a decent mixed payload of air-to-air missiles, guided bombs and fuel, but it could carry much more if it operated on a catapult-equipped aircraft carrier.
The advantage of STOBAR carriers is that they are simpler to build and operate than a catapault, not to mention cheaper. That comes at a price; they are only suitable for launching fighter/attack jets, which have a high enough thrust/weight ratio to reach high speeds needed to launch off a ski ramp. (Some fighter jets, like the J-15, have enough engine output to take off with a useful surface attack load and decent fuel load.) Subsonic aircraft, such as transport aircraft, airborne early warning and anti-submarine warfare aircraft are unable to launch off a ski ramp. This limits the aircraft carrier's varied support aircraft to slower and smaller helicopter platforms.
tiexue.net
A Chip off the Old Block
The Type 001A aircraft carrier will be largely similar to the Liaoning, its Soviet designed predecessor, in order to same costs, time and crew training while the first truly indigenous Chinese aircraft carriers Type 002 and Type 003 get ready by 2030. While limited in some ways, the Type 001A and Liaoning carriers are still potent air superiority and defense platforms, giving aerial cover to Chinese naval task forces far away from the Mainland.
Of course, the Type 001A is still far from completion, and even when the hull itself is finished and launched, it will require years more of work to install electronics, crew amenities, and aircraft maintenance equipment. However, it should be able to run up to full capacity more rapid than its sister ship the Liaoning, since the PLAN will have nearly a decade of experience in operating carriers by this point. Like the Liaoning, it will play a critical role in building up China's carrier pilot cadre, in addition to providing air defense and limited surface strike capabilities for Chinese surface warfare mission near and far aboard.
The deployment of a ski ramp, though, doesn't mean this is the plan for following Chinese carriers. To look into the future, we need to look south at Huangdicun, Guangdong, where the PLAN is getting ready to test aircraft carrier catapults. Satellite imagery dating to early 2016 shows the construction of two parallel catapult trenches at the test site; the wider trench is suspected to be equipped for a Electromagnetically Assisted Aircraft Launch System (EMALS) catapult. First used by the Ford class carrier, a EMALS catapult uses a linear motor drive, instead of steam pistons on older catapults, to accelerate the catapult shuttle holding the aircraft's nosegear on the flight deck. Compared to steam catapautls, EMALS catapults are less maintenance intensive, mechanically simpler and have greater power and flexibility to launch aircraft of different sizes. If the Chinese EMALS catapult is selected and successful, the future Chinese aircraft carriers would be a truly formidable force.
They must be impressed by the performance of their new toy.
At least they’re not building carrier / cruisers. I have always thought those were stupid ideas.
We are so screwed.
So put ONE catapult (or just ONE Pair of catapults)ANGLED off the side landing/recovery ramp, and leave the ski jump off the front for the rest.
Now, if the catapult area is down (bomb or rocket damage), or the catapult OR recovery systems and retrieval systems OR steam systems OR deck area is damaged, the US carriers can’t launch any airplane at all.
They work just fine. Until damaged.
Obama has probably already given them the catapult designs.
So...you're saying that the Chicoms reverse engineer or flat out rip off other country's technological designs?
Ping
Seems like it would be hard on the landing gear, too.
The Soviet effort to build aircraft carriers was an unmitigated disaster. If you can imagine a ship designed by bureaucrats, not naval engineers and shipbuilders.
For example, they never could master Nimitz sized stabilization, so at least once, one of their carriers didn’t even get out of port before floundering.
So making much smaller carriers, they carefully calculated the minimal deck space needed for landings. Only after building it did they realize that much of the deck space was needed for inactive aircraft, because they could not store them below deck.
The way around this was to cantilever extra landing space to the deck, at the expense of stabilization. But once this was done, the bureaucrats struck again, saying that with that much more deck space, they should be able to carry two more planes.
They never did get around to building a decent carrier. So they never got to experience two really bad problems.
The first of these is the paradox, that a well trained and practiced crew are essential to carrier operations. But the only place they can get trained and practiced is on an operational carrier. America has had a hundred years to learn how to operate carriers, at the cost of many lives.
The other problem is highly expert damage control. In WWII, the Japanese had not yet learned this, which cost them carriers. However, several US carriers had been pretty much blown apart, but were able to recover enough to get to port and repair. This perplexed the Japanese who were certain they had sunk those ships, only to see them returned to duty in relatively short order.
Now it’s freakin’ skateboard ramps. Special Services is out of control again...
It can cope with hitting the deck at 120 knots horizontal and -25ft/se vertical. I think it can manage a gentle 15° slope
I’m more worried about their subs and super cargo vessels myself. The cargo ships simply due to the amount of troops and equipment they could transit to say Central America as a staging area.
I agree
Plus the tensions lately with them and Twain and us are like a powder keg ready to explode. Plus let’s not forget the tensions over the South China sea.
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