I know this is not public info, I'm just asking the forum to speculate based on past benchmarks & best known practices. Entertaining speculation is what most of us are doing here in any case.
09V/09VI (095/096) Nuclear Submarine Thread
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I know this is not public info, I'm just asking the forum to speculate based on past benchmarks & best known practices. Entertaining speculation is what most of us are doing here in any case.
What I mean is that even asking for that, in the public is impossible because we have virtually no past equivalent benchmarks to compare with, simply because we've never had past equivalent benchmarks to begin with for PLAN submarines.
For past PLAN SSN types we don't know the time elapsed between launch and first sea trial, or the time elapsed between first sea trial and commissioning, and we don't have any indicators as to what a measure of relative success is (i.e.: "what works well and what doesn't"), let alone for a new class of fully clean sheet SSN (though given how big of a revision 09IIIB was relative to its predecessors in many ways it was also a rather large "new" class).
This is different to surface ships, where we can at least see them leave and return to port between sea trials, and sometimes see additional work being done externally between sea trials etc.
But submarines are so much more secretive, so much more isolated geographically (especially Bohai), and so much harder to tell what's going on inside the actual hull of the boat relative to a surface ship, that all of those questions can only really be answered by "we won't get to know, until maybe 60 years into the future when they do a documentary about the 09V program".
Unless of course one has the ability to fund a high resolution satellite dedicated to Bohai itself...
And trying to answer those questions to then project when/if a "high volume production" might occur? Forget it imo. Impossible to say.
Edit: i'm not just trying to ruin the discussion, but rather that speculation needs to occur based on *something*. In this case, for the questions you're asking we don't have anything to base it on. This is quite uncharted territory.
At best, an optimistic scenario for 09V commissioning (i.e.: between launch and sea trials) could be something like 2-3 years for a first boat in class, but for all we know it might be longer. And who knows how many boats of the first batch the PLAN have ordered, and who knows how many additional boats they'll order and when they might order it --- e.g.: will they wait for sea trials to begin, or wait for it to commission first, or are they confident enough that they'll order another batch before the first boat was even launched?
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I certainly have a lot of fun speculating & imagining all the cool possibilities of an SSGN loosely based on the tech that gets deployed in the original 09V, be it an enlarged 09V or modified 09VI.
But as I temper my own imagination a bit, I think an SSGN is probably not the top priority in the short term for the PLAN.
Our biggest immediate gap at sea is our lack of acoustically stealthy & long endurance SSNs that can stand toe to toe with their USN counterparts in a blue water environment.
On the other hand, our anti-surface warfare capabilities are already quite potent, even if our wide variety of anti-ship missiles are mostly not SSN-based.
So perhaps the optimal route is to prioritize fielding as many SSNs as possible that are optimized for ASW, stealth, & endurance.
The 09V's anti-surface capabilities - however modest - is probably good enough for now, as it already presents an additional threat vector that can't be ignored. 09IIIBs also add to this interim "good-enough" capability.
As there are both 9m and 13m diameter hull details observed, it may also mean that 09V indeed has a hybrid/combined hull similar to Yasen-M (which has the same max hull diameter but is longer, between 120 and 130m and has VLS bank aft of the sail). Would be interesting to see the location of torp tubes on 09V - bow or flank.
The idea of 09V being a hybrid hull is possible and a hybrid hull or single hull configuration has always been viable, but the alternative answer (and arguably more straightforward answer) is that the observed 9m pressure hull is for 09IIIB which has been in production for some years now, especially as rumours have stated a while ago that they had ordered additional 09IIIBs beyond the initial batch.
If they do use the tripack tube we've seen in the research papers over the years, it looks depicted with and sized for YJ-20, which in turn means basically UVLS dimension payloads... meaning YJ-17 and the not-yet-seen-but-we-know-it-exists UVLS scramjet hypersonic missile are automatically candidates as well.
I think it is highly likely that the 09V will be equipped with a clean-slate design that max out the 12 meter VLS depth. That extra depth is very valuable and scarce. Maybe it will be backward compatible with smaller U-VLS weapons (or rather 09IIIB VLS weapons).
The total potential tube length may well be a bit longer than the UVLS itself, but chances are it also will not be 12m deep (if it's based on the idea that the pressure hull itself is 12m in diameter) -- after all, if it's a tripack VLS, and if they want to have two columns alongside each other without having a major turtleback, then the total tube length will have to be somewhat shorter than the pressure hull's diameter.
See @Nx4eu 's post a while back that depicted a 2x4 VLS bank for a 12m long tube in a 12m diameter pressure hull -- it really end up creates a rather large hump which was never probably on the cards for 09V.
09V/09VI (095/096) Nuclear Submarine Thread
Not exactly news per se, from SOYO on Weibo. So... Does that mean the JL-4 will become the largest SL-ICBM to enter sevice in the whole world in the coming years? (Watermark: If you don't want any watermarks (on the drawing), then draw it yourself) 14-meter outer diameter hull means...
www.sinodefenceforum.com
As based on one of the more informative papers which I posted before, one possible spec for the tri pack tube is that the overall tube is basically 10m long and 2.1m diameter, packed with three 8.8m long and 0.83m diameter VLS cells.
I suppose in theory there's no reason why they couldn't use the 10m long, 2.1m diameter tube to accommodate a singular larger cell, but that would of course be wanting to have a larger payload but lower magazine depth.
09V/09VI (095/096) Nuclear Submarine Thread
Do we have any hints that they are on the hull instead of on the sail? I ask because I'm making the 09V based off my 09VI model with some tweaks. I put the planes on the sail. 09VI model dimensions: 14m diameter, 159m long, 23,600 cubic meter volume, 2.4m diameter VLS tube, 14m tall tube. 16...
www.sinodefenceforum.com
I agree that 9m most likely is for 09IIIB, nevertheless, at least what I gather from pictures and comments, the number of 13m parts is considerably small, perhaps not enough even for a single, 13m only, 09V hull?
There's no reason to think that the number of 12m diameter pressure hulls that are visible from satellite correlate one to one with a complete 09V boat. After all, we've barely seen any 12m diameter pressure hull segments over the years, yet we see a full 09V boat launched.
Chances are most of the pressure hull segments are fabricated under shelters, and it is entirely luck of the draw or random when we might happen to see some on satellite, given how infrequent it is for us to get high quality satellite imagery, and it just depends on if the workflow for a given unit happens to be caught in the open or not.
That said, we should probably still expect more 09IIIBs to be built and for 09V production to be a bit more conservative, but that doesn't mean that at any one point in time (i.e.: at any single satellite photo) we should expect to see all or even most of the pressure hull segments of a single 09V out in the open.
I would disagree with this prioritisation of the Type-095 to be used against equivalent SSNs in blue-water scenarios, as it is a difficult mission and there are better uses.
If they were to operate as SSGNs in the Eastern Pacific with a 1500km missile, they could now target:
1. The naval bases (and associated stationary ships) in Seattle and San Diego
2. The B-21 factory in California
3. The F-35 factory in Texas
4. The Panama Canal
etc etc
This has a far greater tactical and strategic payoff:
1. Ships in port are a much easier target
2. The US now has to consider the prospect of large-scale attacks on CONUS, if the US declares war on China
3. It forces the US to spend more on air defence and ballistic missile defence
4. It forces the US to deploy its SSNs and provide escorts in the Eastern Pacific, away from the Western Pacific.
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Acting as SSGNs is also an easier tasking, considering that they are actively avoiding contact with any warship or submarine, rather than trying to approach a hostile contact.
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