Why would you think that?. Find a chart with shipping lanes for the South China Sea plotted. Most Chinese traffic transitting the SCS for Shanghai follows the inshore lanes along the Taiwan Strait. The spotting of a patrol zone, as I’ve previously stated, north of the Spratleys between the Paracels and Scarborough Reef would allow a hunting pair to threaten traffic approaching and departing Guangzhou, Haikou, Shantou, Xiamen and Zhanjiang. Guangzhou being of particular significance naturally!. Will a pair of SSNs be sufficient to eradicate everything flying a Chinese flag from the South China Sea – no obviously not. They dont have to though.

If a neutral merchant ship is inside a legally declared maritime exclusion zone at all its running a risk and is, likely as not, uninsured. If it is inside that zone without clearly displaying its nationality its captain is so stupid that he probably constitutes a hazard to navigation. Like I said convoys are a dead giveaway and individual merchants on a clear heading for Chinese ports through an established blockade line could be considered worthy of intense scrutiny!.

please! just because chinese shipping tend to prefer one lane in peace time dont make that lane chinese, nor do chinese merchants have to stay within that lane, or any lane at all for that matter.

together, japan and SK have more merchants then china, and all these ships will pretty much be using the same lanes. so chinese ships can just follow japanese or SK lanes until they are anywhere up to the SK EEZ and then turn towards china.

even if the RN has 10 times the number of SSNs as it does, it wont be able to mount an effective patrol of the entire chinese coastline, and you have serious delusions if you think that japan and SK are going to sit on their butts and do nothing if you declear the entire chinese coastline off limits to neutrals.

also, one cant just ‘legally’ declear any bit of the sea an exculsion zone at their whim, not even the US. nobody has to avoide an exculsion zone set unless there is disputed territory nearby and their government has accepted that there is a dispute.

another major headache with setting an exclusion zone is that even if no-one disputes it (extremely unlikely), you will be effectively telling the PLAN where abouts your boats will be, meaning the PLAN can concentrate their assets on those areas, greatly increasing their chances of success (even more so if the PLAN arent that worried about trading boats). and with the small number of RN SSNs, one or two boats sunk or badly damaged and your entire blockade strategy rises going down the tubes.

Think higher on the number of weapons carried by an RN SSN. According to CIA the number of oil tankers, of all sizes, in the Chinese merchant fleet is 272 hulls. One SSN can put nearly a 10% dent in that figure so 4 or 5 SSNs over a period of 6 months would be quite capable of decimating a fleet of that size. Chinese shipbuilding capacity being as impressive as it is could replace the lost hulls without doubt but the time and expense of a modern day ‘liberty ship’ programme would be significant to say the least!

I’m glad you mentioned the logistics issue here PLA as its one of the REAL assets an SSN brings in terms of deployment. An SSN on a speed run can cover nearly 700 miles a day. That means the transit from a Chinese oparea back to home waters, if no UNREP where feasible (unlikely as that would be), would be about 2 weeks. This means a rolling deployment with boats returning from patrol, refitting/rearming and redeploying to relieve on-station boats is entirely feasible on a 6 or 7 week cycle. Like I said maintaining 4 or 5 boats on station for a duration of 6 months plus is entirely feasible run like this – even with only a ‘small’ fleet of 10 boats to call on.

modern oil tankers and supertankers are huge and built extremely tough, so it’ll most likely take more then one or two fish to sink one. also, as iraq has shown, its not a very time consuming or difficult task to convert other merchant ships into tankers if needs be.

if it really came down to it, the chinese can have all their tankers stay home after a month and have converted merchants run oil. now you have the problem of finding out which ships are carrying what. an impossible task for any purely underwater fleet.

also, having boats come back to a fixed base on a regular basis in times of conflict is a major gamble. the PLA can just sit its SSNs a few hundred miles away, have a couple of guys camp near the sub base and call in via satellite when a boat comes in. cruise missiles follow, one boat down and the rest only got whatever supplies they have left as their home base is most likely off bounds for a couple thousand years. (well you were the one who said political realities dont matter) :dev2:

What makes you think an SSN would launch on a PLAN escort within range of its ASW rockets or torpedoes?. I’d doubt it would get within range of an escorts’ hull sonar to fire on a warship target. The launch transient counter-detection you speak of would be a low probability hit, or, the work of a very sloppy RN skipper….and there aren’t many of them on our fleet boats!. ‘Hounded by SSK’s’ is a good chuckle too – please PLA if you dont believe anything else I ever write on here believe this simple truism – SSK’s dont run!. As weve already noted the current PLAN ASW chopper inventory is modest at best and our T and S class boats have evaded RN ‘pinger’ Sea Kings on exercise. Not to disparage the skills of PLAN ASW chopper crews, but, those Fleet Air Arm HAS Mk6 lads were, by reputation, very good indeed!

well for one, the futher away you launch, the longer it takes for the fish to get to its target, and the longer the warning time. meaning the greater the chance that the target would have moved. if we are talking about tankers then its not likely they will be able to move out of the killbox, but they might be able to move the ship enough so that the fish dont strike the most critical part, so the ship dont sink. (entirely possile if the fish is not being wire guided, since the launch ship wont be able to move much if it wants to keep the wire in one piece).

if it is a convoy, then i would expect there are at least one ASW helo in the air at all times with more on 5 min alert, and at least 2 silent SSKs nearby (unless the PLAN commanders are all a bunch of idiots, which they are not).

while PLAN escorts might not be able to pinpoint where the fish came from to the metre, but they will have a pretty good idea, and that ASW helo will be over the area pining in a matter of minutes. with SSKs around, its also not a very good idea to speed out of the area at max speed. wonder if RN boats tried that in training.

PS, i think you need to work on your ‘jokes’ a little. 😉

That is only the case if there happens to be a chopper right over the SSN when it fires or an SSK that has remained undetected within firing range. Again only a sloppy SSN CO would prosecute an attack in that scenario. Otherwise even IF the SSN’s launch transient is detected an ASW chopper has to be launched and transit to the target datum. That takes time and, again, you have to remember that an SSN top speed gives it mobility. Even IF your chopper is over datum 15 minutes after the detection a 30knt SSN is over 15,000yds away – a serious stretch for a helicopter pinger.

well, if we’re talking about near the chinese EEZ, then i think there will be Y8 converted ASW planes plus a lot of helos in the air at all times. Y8s can move in and drop sonar bouys over a pretty large area, and still have room for a fish or two.

remember, the PLAN only need to be lucky one or two times to cripple the blockade, while the RN boats need to be lucky every time to keep the blockade going.

Of course its politically unrealistic – how many times have I said that myself on this thread. The point that I’m making is that a modest fleet of competent SSNs is a powerful enough ASuW capacity to be able to pull off such a blockade.

er, i thought i also made it clear that i was putting aside the political consquences. in ‘economic’, i was refering to the economic needs of the other nations that will be affected. japan and SK rely on the sea for their lifeline, their economies will collapse and their citizens will most likely starve if they were cut off from the sea.

this means that war or no war, exclusion zone or no exclusion zone, their merchants will be take the same roughts from the ME as china’s, and that means any purely underwater fleet will have a very hard time telling who’s who even if everyone if flying a flag. (who said everyone has to fly their own flag? :diablo: )

and so, even if based on as a purely military engagment as it is practical without removing the scenario so much from reality as to make it irrelevent, the RN’s SSN fleet will still not be able to effectively or conclusively cut off china’s sea oil lines. in fact the RN will need some extraordinary luck just to keep any sort of a blockade in place for any significant periods of time.

Severodvinsk

Again I’m not talking about driving SSNs right into China’s 12 mile limit!. What I am saying is that it is perfectly feasible for RN SSNs to perform sea denial operations to enforce an economic blockade of China’s sea lanes. For this there is no need to operate inside Chinese territorial waters!. Neither is it necessary to stake out the eastern end of the Malacca Straits with all the obvious targetting headaches that would create.

Simply put an operational area, as one example, in the South China Sea, north of the Spratleys, would allow for a watching brief to be kept on traffic that would be predominantly Chinese in origin or destination. If the PLAN instituted a convoy system then that positive targetting issue just gets easier.

The real-world scenario then is that, if Chinese warships are present shepherding merchant vessels, they (the merchies) can be reasonably assumed to be Chinese. If there are no warships there then there is little reason to believe that an SSN would have a problem getting to 8000yds or so to make a visual ID of a target before firing. After all HMS Conqueror took its shots on the ARA General Belgrano from 2000yds with straight-running torps!

well as soon as you move away from the chokepoint of the Malacca Straits, then even the USN’s SSN fleet will have a hard time blockading china!

take a look at the map and see what a massive coastline china has, even if the PLAN is unable to safegard its merchants in the open sea, the RN doesnt have nearly enough SSNs to patrol the entire chinese coastline never mind stopping to check ever passing ship.

china is already the second largest ship builder in the world, with a massive percentage of its ships being exports, this means that you cant tell which ships are chinese based on build or prop signitures, meaning you have to get right up and check the flag, and that takes time. based on how few SSNs the RN has and the amount of shipping activity near china, there is no way the RN’s SSN can even check a small percentage of the number of ships passing through if the boats arent staying where the shipping congregates. a major problem also results if the ship isnt flying a flag. what do you do? sink it? let it go? surface and ask to see their flag? none are very appealing options.

even if the RN is somehow able to ID chinese ships and sink them, their small number presents the RN with another major problem of just how many ships the RN can sink. with only a dozen or so torpedos per boat, the RN’s SSN fleet need to reload quite a few dozen times to even make a dint in the chinese merchant fleet (which is the biggest in the world). that presents a logistical nightmare.

the RN has too few SSNs as it is, and it certainly cant afford to have them go all the way back to scotland to re-arm and come back again, but any RN supply ship that comes within a couple thousand miles of china will quickly be discovered and can be easily destroyed by flankers with tanker support.

as for the convoy system. personally, i strongly doubt that the PLAn will bother, simply because of the massive number of merchant ships china has. but if it does decide to use the convoy, then be assured that the PLAN escorts will immediately know where an SSN is as soon as a torpedo leaves the tube. if the RN sub servives the immediate ASW rocket attack (which it probably will), it will soon be hounded by ASW helos and SSKs. china’s ASW ability might be far from adequet to detect SSNs roaming around in the open seas, but i am confident they will not have too much of a problem hunting down a nearby SSN once it has been located.

the RN boats can use the wolfpack system, but again their numbers betray them. china can afford to trade an entire convoy for one or two SSNs, the RN cant.

I’ve already covered the probelms SSK’s have against SSN’s. The advantage is very heavily with the SSN as it has one great asset on its side – time!. SSN’s do not go charging into battle at 30knts with active sonar blasting away. An SSN can remain on station for weeks, prior to a blockade, plotting SSK patrol zones, UNREP intervals, sonar performance (ownship and opposing) and endurance. It will be able to do this as, however discrete or advanced an SSK is, it is obliged to snort and as soon as it does, with a competent SSN anywhere nearby, its found! AIP is an option that can extend the snort interval a short while but is limited, usually, by a finite onboard fuel supply.

in theory, you are correct, but in practice it doesnt work that way. you are not talking abour one SSN v one SSK, but one SSN v 10 or more SSKs. as soon as an SSN fires, it will be hunted by a much greater number of SSKs, and once again, the PLAN can afford to trade boats, the RN cant.

Excellent news for them. The issue is though that, today, they have nowhere near the ASW helicopter capability to mount an intensive ASW hunting campaign in their EEZ in fact they barely have enough to cover their 12 mile limit. The RN SSNs do exist though!

again, not really following reality. yes china doesnt have nearly enought ASW airborn assets to cover its EEZ, hell, im not even sure they can find a decent SSN even if it went right up to the mouth of the yellow river. but once an SSN attacks something near china, its not about blindly combing the seas passively, but using active pining to find something in a very small pool of water.

Well leaving aside the 4 Vanguard class boats and their, obvious, country-killing capability I did not suggest for a second that the RN (or all of UK Forces for that matter!) would be capable of killing China!. Enforcement of an economic blockade with two patrol areas and 4 or 5 boats on a rolling deployment is certainly sustainable for at least 6-8 months though. Note I’m NOT saying this is anywhere near a real likelihood – I am saying that, as an academic exercise, it IS possible and an illustration of the ASuW capability SSNs provide.

again, check the geography and the economic realities. even if we were to leave the world wide economy consequences and probable chinese reprisals aside, such a blockade is stilll unrealistic, to be generous.

this is not the atlanctic of WWII when all ships going east were headed for GB. the waters around china are amongst the busiest in the world, with thousands of ships from a dozen countries pass through each day. even if the RN didnt face the nightmare of having to close to ID every ship and were free to sink any they saw, there simply arent enough RN SSNs to sink enough ships to make any meaningful difference in the short or medium term (and thats if the PLAN just stay at home and do nothing and the RN dont loose any boats).

well i was talking about the single seaters in the forground. as far as i can remember, all the Su27sks and J11s i have seen to date has had the standard dark grey touchers to their VS, similar to the UBs and MKKs. the only other instance where i have seen PLAAF J11/Su27s with an all grey VS was the ones that were parked in an AFB somewhere in russia.

that why the blackbird files so high well above 100,000 feet’s.outta range from most AAM.

there’s also the factor that the air if far thinner up there, so fewer air particals will hit the plane at M3 meaning less heat and less wind resistance.

It is inaccurate to say that Soviet Union invested less in engine development as compared to west. They have much higher proportion of population working in Weopon Industrial complex. Western companies interms of number of workers is far less than Soviet Union.
Regarding Germany. You have to look at its area and population size as compared to Soviet Union. USSR has Siberia and Central Asia to fall back on and other big empire like UK and US was also on the other side. Germany was also under some sort of embargo and smaller coastal area so large ships were not there.

well china and india has the worlds largest populations, hence largest number of people working. this means that if productivity is so relevent to the number of people working, then china and india should be the superpowers. doesnt quite add up does it?

one of the benefits of industrialisation and technological advancement is that production has become less and less labour intensive, meaning one can get more work done with fewer people. this is seen in action almost everyday! notice how all the big companies in the west are cutting jobs while productivity was going up?

the USSR might have devoted more people and a higher percentage of their GDP into their weapons industry, but the west was still putting in more resources into theirs. that is largely due to the west having a much more successful/realistice economic structure, hence they were richer.

the USSR/russians did loose the cold war because they were wasteful and incompotant, they lost because their economy could not support their military expenditure.

and i have no idea what you are trying to say with your Siberia and embargo examples.

i think the Su-30 is more of cash project. the earlier Su-27 were debt/barter arrangement.
The next thing is that Russian are not ahead in any field in introducing new technologies it is just that there products came out much earlier in cruder form while in West life Cycle cost of project is first done. which includes market research for profitability and than highly refined product comes out which needs years of testing to maintain high quality. just compare M-88 engine with RD-33. I have seen figures of 8000hrs for M-88 engine. Business structure is the single most important thing because this unsuccessful business structure bankrupted Soviet Union despite having world largest natural resources as compared to resource deficient France or Japan.

not sure how relevent the M88/R33 comparison is seeing the time difference between their introduction.

as for the claim of russia not being ahead in any feild or not introducing any new technologies, well im sure a few other members will have quite a lot to say about that comment. i’ll just start you off on a few feilds where russia led, and in many of those feilds, they are still heads and shoulders ahead of everyone else dispite not progressing much for over a decade!

-no-one has yet feilded anything even remotely compareable to the supersonic AShMs the russian navy has in service, not to meantion the newer ones that are being developed with foreign funds.

-russia (or rather the USSR) was the first to feild a passive phase array radar on a fighter (mig31), although thats probably one of the very few areas where your comments about introducing crude products might have been relevent.

-the russians were years ahead of the west in terms of tank design, and pretty much wrote the book on it until the M1s came along and re-wrote the rules.

-and of course, the most famouse example of all, the USSR was the first to put a man made satelite in space, they were also the first to send a man into space and bring him back alive, and they sent the first probs to the moon and beamed back the first pictures of its surface. although the USSR later lost the moon race, recently released documents and the accounts of those involved showed that the USSR was in fact still ahead on the US in terms of space tech at the time, and the americans took a huge gamble while the russians played it safe. it could be argued that the spectacular american ‘victory’ could have just as easily turned into a spectacular failure, and there is no doubt in my mind that the russians would have been the first on the moon had the US taken the same level of care regarding the safety of its crew.

also, in many cases, russian weapons were less complicated (and less capable) then their western counterparts because the russians purposely designed them to be simple and easy to mass produce. this is logical extention of the philosophy that helped them defeat the germans in WWII, dispite the fact that german weapons tech was far in advance.

when cost of $12.5m for Chinese version or $15m for western version every thing including R&D(testing in this case) are included in this. Read the Janes report of April.
IN case of pricing issue only $2.5M for RD-33 is the external dollar cost while the rest $10M is internal local money cost. On the other hand the whole $50M of Su-30MK2 is dollar cost. no local currency involved. And the other thing is that i wouldnot buy Radar or EW suite from Russia. First they sell down graded version and secondaly most of there technology is compromised to West. just look at the millions of top Russian immigrants to West or Israel.
There is no corporate culture(stock options) in Russian companies. Engineers and scientist are better off selling secrets to underworld rather than state contacts. US is not bothered by Russian weopons sells. I will trust French or Italian corporate world more because intellectual property is there whole business. Just look how the French has brilliantly rescued the Nissan Motor company.

well unit cost will decrease with increases in units produced, so its hard to say if the quoted figures are accurate. they may go up or down depending on how well the plane sells and/or how many the PLA takes.

also, IIRC, the funds for the MKK/MK2 purchases were largely or in whole deducted from russian debt, which china isnt likely to get back in cash anyways.

as for the disadvanatges of using purely russian kit, well i agree with you up to a point, and it appears that the PLA does as well. and that might be part of the reason for their relentless drive to produce indiginous or at least hybrid systems instead of relying purely on imports.

however, i think the russians deserve far more credit for their work and accomplishments then what you gave. their technical skill is not in question, and they werent far behind the west (and in fact lead in many feilds) right up to the end of the cold war. the current decline is far more a result of a chronic lack of funds as oppsed to an unsuccessful business structure or corporate structure.

I don’t have a good eye like you, can you tell me what you see?

new SSK, most likely a 039A.

again the prop is sticking out for all to see! what are the security being paid for over there? naval experts can gather a great deal of info on how quiet a sub is likely to be based on its prop design.

i know the song’s prop design was leaked out years ago, but hiding the prop on new boats can at least keep everyone guessing about whether the prop has been changed. 🙁