CV-18 Fujian/003 CATOBAR carrier thread
- Thread starter Jeff Head
- Start date
OMG ... you say yourself, you know it's from Minnie Chan and in the same sentence you say it seems credible!
It is completely against PLA doctrine to commission a nuclear carrier right now. if anything, China has taken the lessons of the US when they first commissioned CVN Enterprise to heart. Its not reasonable for China to build a nuclear carrier right now especially as it still has zero experience with any CATOBAR operations. The 4th carrier construction will start in 2-3 years, assuming the usual 5-6 year tempo and there is no way 003 can reach any sort of IOC with catapult aircraft by then. China would be essentially building 004 without the operational experiences from 003, just like how 003 was built only with operational experience from 001 but not 002.
China will do as it has always done, using incremental steps to reach an end goal. To that end, they will probably overbuild the nuclear icebreaker to ensure they can build a powerplant that is of the same scale as a CVN. The first CVN will represent a much bigger risk than even Liaoning or Shandong did. PLAN could screw up a subsystem on Liaoning and Shangdong and it wouldn't be the end of the world, either those carriers would have had a lower useful life anyways. Major missteps with CVN 1 design would be something the PLAN would need to live with for 60 years, or into 2080. Remember there is only one nation on earth right now that can build a CVN supercarrier (others might build supercarriers or CVNs, but not both).
By the time of China's first CVN, it can't still be a developmental/interim design... it needs to be functionally equivalent on a one-on-one basis to the American peer. If China cannot build a ford-class carrier by the 2030's, it does not make sense to build a RR or GWB late-Nimitz carrier as those will be useless well before end-of-service in 2080. It would be better that China build a few more conventional CVs so that when it takes the CVN plunge, it has a proper carrier that can serve for 60 years.
Until we see the island with (or without) a smokestack, you can't say that without some people getting triggered.
But there is also the possibility that you can designed a conventionally-powered carrier's exhaust akin the that of IJN carrier Akagi, so the island can be small enough to reduce RCS.
Okay okay, I retract it. Man this Minnie Chan, i swear i think she does this everytime so to see who is stupid to believe her.
Well it was my turn to get burned for believing her nonsense
The island is primarily for radar and other signals masts, putting the exhaust elsewhere wouldn't make it much smaller.
Yes, it would, Conventional power increases the size of the island not only by the volume of the smoke uptake in the island structure. Boilers need a large amount of air to support combustion. The boiler room air intakes trunks are usually also clustered around the smoke uptake inside the island. The exhaust must also be placed suitable far from the radar mast to avoid smoke corrosion.
Compare the island of the nuclear USS Nimitz in its original 1977 configuration, to that of the conventional USS Kennedy, which immediately preceded the Nimitz and was otherwise very similar to the Nimitz but for the conventional oil fired power plant.
Putting the exhaust outside the island has been tried by not just the Japanese. However, the effect of turbulence generated by the hot exhaust at deck level was always deemed unacceptable. Also the hot exhaust makes the working environment at deck level behind it unacceptable. Moreover, horizontal trunking of the exhaust takes up much more space than trunking the exhaust straight up the island.
With the shadow, we can see clearly that they have added more upper modules.