Kuznetsov vs Vikramaditya

Folks,

In this whole debate everyone is forgetting that old saying: Amatures discuss weapons; experts logistics. Does anyone believe that the PLAN or the IN can substain a carrier task force at sea for long? Refuel and Re-Arm it and protect the tankers and supply ships from home port to the CV location? Many consider only two navy really capable of that over the long haul in blue oceans: ie the US Navy and the Japanese Navy. Remember when the Russians sent their one carrier into the Med during the Kosovo Crisis the US Navy had to help them with fixing their fresh water plant and teaching them carrier landing skills. It is a culture. India has some great warships, but does it have the culture to operate ships for long periods at long distances? No one today says that about China. At least as far as I know or have read.

Jack E. Hammond

And why do you suppose PLAN is incapable of substain a carrier task force?

AFAIK, PLAN by far have more support/auxilliary assets, larger vessels than JMSDF.

Just to name a few you’d get the idea the difference in displacement and the availability or lack of support assets in JMSDF

JMSDF
AOE “Sagami” Class 421 Displacement : 5,000t
AOE “Towada” Class Displacement : 8,100t

PLAN
Nancang replenishment ship Displacement: 37,000 tons full load
Taikang (‘Fuqing’) class fleet oilers : Displacement: 21,740 tons full load
Qiandaohu class fleet replenishment shipDisplacement: 20,000+ tonnes

Aside from the relative lower experience operating in fleet formation, PLAN support structure are both more abundant advanced than JMSDF.
PLAN also have auxillary support branches since PLAN do not share naval support assets with PLA or PLAAF and these branches operate seperate systems of naval support.

According to ARMS-TASS agency, Baltiyski Zavod has finished production of boilers for Vikram. The boilers are upgraded KVG-3D type, working on Diesel fuel. Anti-corrosion treated steel is used for tubes as well as non-asbest isolation.

It will be interesting to follow the work on her, may give some clues as to what’s possible for the chinese w.r.t. Varyag.

According to ARMS-TASS agency, Baltiyski Zavod has finished production of boilers for Vikram. The boilers are upgraded KVG-3D type, working on Diesel fuel. Anti-corrosion treated steel is used for tubes as well as non-asbest isolation.

Folks,

In this whole debate everyone is forgetting that old saying: Amatures discuss weapons; experts logistics. Does anyone believe that the PLAN or the IN can substain a carrier task force at sea for long? Refuel and Re-Arm it and protect the tankers and supply ships from home port to the CV location? Many consider only two navy really capable of that over the long haul in blue oceans: ie the US Navy and the Japanese Navy. Remember when the Russians sent their one carrier into the Med during the Kosovo Crisis the US Navy had to help them with fixing their fresh water plant and teaching them carrier landing skills. It is a culture. India has some great warships, but does it have the culture to operate ships for long periods at long distances? No one today says that about China. At least as far as I know or have read.

Jack E. Hammond

Good point. In this respect, the IN has an advantage over PLAN since it has been operating carrier(s) for quite some time. It is probable it has more of a culture of operating ships for long periods at long distances than the Chinese. Whether this culture is comparable to that of the USN of Japan? Hard to tell. Interesting you are not mentioneing the Brits and French in this contexts…

Folks,

In this whole debate everyone is forgetting that old saying: Amatures discuss weapons; experts logistics. Does anyone believe that the PLAN or the IN can substain a carrier task force at sea for long? Refuel and Re-Arm it and protect the tankers and supply ships from home port to the CV location? Many consider only two navy really capable of that over the long haul in blue oceans: ie the US Navy and the Japanese Navy. Remember when the Russians sent their one carrier into the Med during the Kosovo Crisis the US Navy had to help them with fixing their fresh water plant and teaching them carrier landing skills. It is a culture. India has some great warships, but does it have the culture to operate ships for long periods at long distances? No one today says that about China. At least as far as I know or have read.

Jack E. Hammond

but how much space is left for C3I ?

All the processing is done on the ship the Ka-31 is within 150km of… the Ka-31 sends data direct to the ship for processing, though there might be some simple preprocessing done on board just to reduce the traffic.

A 150 km bubble dosent sound much!

150km from the processing ship, which is unlikely to be the carrier itself. The purpose is to provide long range low level radar coverage… you could have 5 helos up at once each within 150km of the cruiser they operate from… it tells the enemy nothing as to where the actual carrier is.

And dosent the airframe of the helo create a barrier ?

The radar folds flat under the hull but when deployed the wheels are raised and it spins 360 degrees and has no part of the helo obstructing its view.

Does the Ka-31 have a datalink with the carrier?

It has a direct datalink to a processing ship… likely a Slava class or Kirov class with a large battle management system. Processed data would likely be forwarded to all vessels in the group.

Any way you slice it. The CTOL Aircraft will be a much more capable platform than a Helocopter in the AEW&C Role.

Equally any way you slice it having airborne AEW&C in rotary form is better than having none or sea based only. Considering the helo based system doesn’t even need an aircraft carrier to operate, it is a much more versatile system. Not to mention more affordable for most navies.

So it doesnt matter at all how much space is left for C3I – ALL dataprocessing is done on the carrier.

Not necessarily that the processing is done on a carrier. As I mention, any large ship with a decent battle management system like the Slava or Kirov would suffice. With improvements in processing power and the amount of processing power put on ships these days even a medium sized ship could perform the processing. Some vessels already have air search radars that can detect targets at 300-500km. They lack the ability to spot low flying targets at long range because of their position above the water, but a helo mounted antenna solves that problem.

but how much space is left for C3I ?
A 150 km bubble dosent sound much! And dosent the airframe of the helo create a barrier ?
Does the Ka-31 have a datalink with the carrier?

Yes, it have datalink. This is the whole reason for the helo – datalink. So it doesnt matter at all how much space is left for C3I – ALL dataprocessing is done on the carrier.

The major issue with the RN future AEW is that it is not intended to be a purely defence-oriented platform, it is supposed to be able to fly out with strike packages, like the Americans go with Hawkeye. Basically, if the RN get any chance, they will go CTOL, and get the F-35C and Hawkeye! (In some ways, the current JSF and EH-101AEW debacle is almost similar to the CVA-01s P-1154 problems in the ’60s)

Looking at the latest addition of AFM any form of F35 purchase is starting to look unlikely considering Congress won’t allow technology transfer to the UK.

What scares me is that rather than go for an alternative like Rafale M (personally I think a carrier capable Typhoon is a non starter) the UK gov will use it as an excuse to cann the whole project!

The major issue with the RN future AEW is that it is not intended to be a purely defence-oriented platform, it is supposed to be able to fly out with strike packages, like the Americans go with Hawkeye. Basically, if the RN get any chance, they will go CTOL, and get the F-35C and Hawkeye! (In some ways, the current JSF and EH-101AEW debacle is almost similar to the CVA-01s P-1154 problems in the ’60s)

Would like to see the Varyag in Chinese colours for the simple reason that it would prompt the IN to go in for a bigger carrier after the ADS is completed :):):)

Any way you slice it. The CTOL Aircraft will be a much more capable platform than a Helocopter in the AEW&C Role. :rolleyes:

but how much space is left for C3I ?
A 150 km bubble dosent sound much! And dosent the airframe of the helo create a barrier ?
Does the Ka-31 have a datalink with the carrier?

The Ka-31 can operate for 2.5 hours at a time, up to 150km away from the ship that processes the information it collects. Max patrolling altitude is 3,500m and it normally scans at 100km/h forward speed, with a max flight speed of 220km/h

Scooter , Berlusconi
The reason the nchopper is considered as a quick fix option as an AEW&C is cause the equpment can be put into it and a maximum load can be carried . also choppers can be refueled by the buddy packs carried by other choppers
But these options are “quick fix” .Because these helos cannot operate longer than 30-45 minutes as they can carry only a limited amount of Humint personnel.also the gear carried excludes sonar equipment and hence is not worth the investment.datalink and C3I operations are virtually nil
New research into quietning of the helos will help and so will the STOL version of Boeing tilt rotor…but they are still in the future.
IMHO these could be the A/c used:
Yak-44…Ka-34kamov…N-90sikorsky…E-2hawkeye…S-3 viking…V-22 osprey :rolleyes: ERJ-145(maybe)…EMB-145(now this looks happening)..EA-6B(yes)..Saab-340B..and maybe the An-71
Questions:Can the P-3 orion land on the Kuz or the Vick?
What would be the maximum wing size of an aircraft be to land on either of these carriers within safety margins?
Of the above aircraft which could be modified to land on a carrier?
HERME

can a helicopter really offer the same coverage as the Hawkeye? :confused:

Surely, it could not provide the radar coverage nor the time on station! 😮 Sounds like the RN-CVF’s maybe only able to operate STOVL Aircraft?

I just read that the UK was funding research into a AEW&C version of the Merlin Helo………………. :rolleyes: Does this mean that the RN won’t purchase the E-2D Hawkeye from the US? 😮

can a helicopter really offer the same coverage as the Hawkeye? :confused:

I just read that the UK was funding research into a AEW&C version of the Merlin Helo………………. :rolleyes: Does this mean that the RN won’t purchase the E-2D Hawkeye from the US? 😮

I wonder what type of AEW&C can land on both the CV’s ?
Any of you guys can help me out?
Can all the usual suspects (with the addition of “Tailhook” obviously) be refuelers too?
Kindly consider a/c which can carry considerable load on half their take off weight (have to consider STOBAR carriers too,dont we?)
herme

Wolfy,
Even for a massive country like China, wih MASSIVE human potential : it is impossible to search for a ship that does not want to be found.period.
A group of ships that do not want to be found must be tailed from the base .even then trying to pin the tail on the donkey is such a waste of time and energy
THERE IS ALWAYS EXPIRABILITY
without time constraints it will be easy for the dog to catch his tail:for a horseman to ride consistently with the sun and circle the earth in 24 hours
A CVBG has time contraints :it has to do a operation in given period of time. else it is a failure
A rival to this CVBG has to recon the entire ocean and detect the CVBG AND prevent it from doing anything in INTERNATIONAL waters .(the word prevent does mean any action taken by the carrier is reported to all the other forces in the area of operation).IN OTHER WORDS, the element of suprise is gone and half the battle is won.
For eg. Consider the situation in the Bay of Bengal during the liberation of Bangledesh: The IN had intelligence that a US CVBG was in the very area as their CVBG…The US bieng an ally of Pakistan at that time.Even with the intel they had to find out their operational area…. …and the end result was Mrs.Gandhi politicizing the incident at an international level.Having the world on your side when the rival carrien can be closely followed by the world press stumps the carrier out. It is like making a buglar work in the presence of everybody.The role of the US was effectively neutralized and they could not do a thing about the incident
Wolf what i would like you to understand is without hard intel the US cvgb would have dissappeared into the night with the country’s leader having to explain why they unnecessarily cried “WOLF”
I think this argument should end now and we should return to the main purpose of the thread i.e.” To find the operational effectiveness of both the carriers vis-a-vis the other and to find the situations to which the countries can respond to using a carrier.”

You have some interesting ideas about the ability of a carrier, but I do not think you are operating in the modern world. As i have said before, past examples can and are constainly renders obsolete by the introduction of new technologies. If you do not update your existing examples and models with new developments, your models, and all conclusions drawn from them, are flawed or even obsolete.

As I have already said in previous posts, you will not need to have people manually scanning every bit of oceon since the advant of computers and software has made that unnecessary.

As for scanning an entire oceon, well notice how that was under the ‘no time constraint’ heading. It was a purely theoretical model to show how a carrier can be found anywhere. If it was a more realistic model, then you can factor in all sorts of additional info, such as theatre of battle, time since hostile carrier left port etc, which will actually help the hunter as it narrows down the search area. Also, if it was a purely carrier v carrier engagement in the middle of an oceon, then there would be effectively no time constraints, its not like either carrier will be going anywhere or attacking anything else.

I also fail to see how your ‘bengal’ example is off any relevence here.

Nope ‘wolf Hermes is pretty much on the ball here.

What you’re describing here is akin to finding this forum by typing ‘aircraft’ into a search engine and going through every single website that is generated one at a time. Will you find this site doing that – probably but by no means definitely!.

All that the SAR setup on the satellite (a low-earth orbiter by nature) will ever do is to scan a line of configurable width across the earths surface as it orbits. While it is overhead a patch of ocean it will scan ships and image interpretation software will, doubtless, be able to identify rough vessel types (using a broad resolution) and probably individual vessels (narrowing the resolution). This is ONLY if it happens to fly across a patch of sea that contains a desired target group.

Again as Hermes puts it so eloquently – that detection “occurs only IFF the CVBG permits the passage of the info”. The tracking and plotting of orbital routes and timing of such satellites is childs play for any serious power. Carrier groups have successfully dodged all manner of satellite surveillance for twenty or thirty years – at times where such surveillance was undesireable.

The problem of finding a highly mobile group from an RF imaging LoE bird are a great deal larger than you allude to – this is where RORSATs come in.

First off, you may have misunderstood me. Where did I say that you will need to have people physically checking every square inch of the world’s oceons with a magnifying glass? With modern supercomputers and image recongising software, you can easily have a computer do that for you and only flag out the possible SHIPS that might be a carrier.

You can greatly reduce the number of hits by adding in additional parametres like a minimum size to weed out the vast majority of small ships; a shape parametre to weed out container ships, oil tankers, cruise liners and the like that have markedly different huls from warships.

Then what you are left with would be a very small number of possibles for your human analysis to check through.

Of course, all this is assuming that modern supercomputers and recognisation software hasn’t already made it possible for the computer to mark out the carrier itself. After all, a carrier has a very distinctive look to it, and even it will not be hard to write a programme to look out for it.

Also, I think you are placing way too much emphysis on the ability if the carrier. Just because it might know when a sat would be overhead will not necessarily mean that the CVBG will be able to get out of the way in time, as if memory serves me right, a sat moves a bit faster then a carrier. 😉

You can try and evade the search by staying just outside the scan area of one pass, and then trying to make a quick dash into perviously scanned area to throw off the searchers, but the difficult in predicting the scan area and getting the ship in the right place and right time would be formatable. And even then this tactic can be easily defeated with 2 or more SAR sats doing overlapping scans.

As for sucessful evading detection in peace time, well the method of dectetion I have described requires a great deal of manuvering from the sats themselves, and so would greatly reduce their useful lives. I doubt that any government or militrary would sacrific so much just to show-off. But just because carriers have been able to avoid casual watchers does not necessarily mean that it can avoid a determined hunter.

As for RORSAT, will that, if I understand it correctly, if just basically the equivilant of a search radar in space. It too will only be able to illuminate a carrier by flying within radar range. The RORSAT may have greater scan area then SAR, but it will only be able to tell you that there are ships there, not what kind of ships they are. So you would end up with a blizzard of contacts. The only advanatge that I can see from RORSAT is greater scan range. But more SAR sats will more then compensate for that.