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AndrewS

Brigadier
Registered Member
plawolf said:
At 5 knots, you can only travel 222km per day. In reality it is going to be a lot less due to currents and the fact that you often don’t want to or even can’t just travel straight line while submerged.
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At 5 knots, 2days of transit gets you 440km.
At 7 knots, 3days of transit gets you 930km.

Both are viable given current Lithium battery densities and a 30 day typical patrol time.

plawolf said:
Also you need to consider that under battery power only, you have a total mission endurance of 30 days. Whereas a sub that sized could easily have room for provisions for triple that length of time if desired. Sure it’s perfectly serviceable, but why not vastly reduce your transit time and increase your on station time?
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Because you're better off buying multiple SSKs and also using the diesels to charge up completely.
You end up with more overall on station time, if you're talking about Green Water operations.

plawolf said:
Not necessarily. You could built charging points as far from your coast as you want, but the issue of security and secrecy is going to be hard to get around the further out you push your charging points. Which is why I don’t think fixed charging points is a good idea.
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If you look at a map, you physically can't build charging points in the deep waters past the 1st Island Chain.
And in the South China Seas, it's a Chinese air/maritime bastion anyway with secure bases.


plawolf said:
What does cost have to do with it? I assumed it goes without saying, but the whole point of a SSN recharger is that the SSN can and will disconnect from the SSK once the batteries are charged back up.

Also, that 39h of endurance ould become meaningless if the SSK can run at 20Knots while using mains power supplied by the SSN in piggy back mode. In which case the SSK could theoretically run at 20Knots for as long as it’s motors can sustain that speed if power is no longer a constraint.
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Cost has everything to do with how many submarines you can buy and operate. That is obvious.
If SSKs are dependent on SSNs as an ongoing charging base, that ties down an expensive SSN ($2.8 Billion Virginia) for the sake of a less valuable SSK ($0.6 Billion Taigei)


plawolf said:
So rather than have a single SSN charge up SSKs, you want an entire surface fleet to go babysit it instead as it charges up using diesels on the surface?!
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No. You would only need a single ship to this as a secondary duty.

For example, a Type-056 Corvette only costs around $0.1 Billion. Contrast that to a Virginia SSN at $2.8 Billion, which is 28x as expensive.
So that ship could sit to the rear of any naval formation for added protection, but they are completely independent of each other.

Alternatively, you might go for a larger Type-054 hull instead, which could also act as a picket or node
Or possibly a submarine tender or some other support support ship.
All of these options are much lower cost and less risk than using an SSN.
 
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Gloire_bb

Gloire_bb

Captain
Registered Member
How, where, and when to charge batteries isn't exactly a new problem without multiple known solutions. There are more than a few loud places at sea, and the sea itself is pretty large.

Furthermore, one of important li-ion advantages is not just power density, but also charging speed. Charging up may take slightly over a dozen of minutes, and even a few minutes before interruption may give more than enough to make it worth it.

We don't live in the era when MPAs fly around in hundreds everywhere.
 
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