Might this thing be a fast LST or ground vehicle tie-down fire support ship?
To be honest I would be disappointed if this is not a dedicated drone carrier, I like the idea in a world where UCAV's are becoming increasingly important.
Me too, this platform would be great for training fixed wing AI pilots to land on a bigger deck which has the same markings as this one. Drones could make approaches all day and night, in all conditions, just collecting video and other data which would then be annotated and used for training the next AI pilot to automatically approach any landing strip like this in any conditions. All this can be done without any drones actually landing on this landing strip.
Once your AI can happily approach this landing strip, you can start doing touch and go’s with small fixed wing drones, collecting all the data you need to train your landing algorithms, I suppose.
By then you should have a drone AI pilot that can reliably, automatically approach, land and go, on any deck with these markings.
Another look at the test ships from the air. Posted by @天空船队 in the comment section on Weibo.
Unfortunately no high-res version is available for now.
Unfortunately no high-res version is available for now.