Something that must be considered is the spin-off benefits that developing the ‘revolutionary’ technologies used in the F22 would have for future projects. In fact, the F22 and F35 used and benefited hugely from technologies developed in the F117, and more significantly, B2 projects.

The F22 price tag might sound astronomical at $250m+, but thats only a fraction of the B2’s $2bn+ unit price. Future projects, purhaps UCAVs, would also likely benefit from technologies developed for the F22, and their unit costs may well be lower as a result.

The technolgies developed by the F22 project would not be lost or wasted with time, the planes built would be, especially considering the chances of large quantities of such potent ac be needed.

Sancho Pancho

How about you take the hint and go start your own rant thread somwhere else? If you want to keep posting in this thread, stick on topic.

I never said we shouldn’t write manuals nor thurst them. My point have all along been, that not all can be learn from books, that there is important factors and methods that are never officially printed anywere. Those things don’t surpass the manuals, but completes them.

We both agree that manuals do not, and cannot contain everything, the difference is degree. You seem to think that a manual is next to useless and insist that people have to learn everything through trial and error, and I strongly disagree with you on that point. I think training material, the properly written ones at least, are written by professionals who base their work on first hand experience of from interviews with people who have done the job before.

I think your judgement have been greatly effected by the, frankly, astonishingly poor training material you got when you were serving, and to some degree, you have the a similar lack of confidence in all formal training material.

Of course not everything will be written in books, but then not everything need to be. People are not idiots and can quickly learn and adapt all of their own accord. Also, past experience working on similar activities, while not completely transferable, does help a great deal.

The very prupose of ALL training manuals is to give the reader as much relevent material as possible and practical, and a mature verson should be able to very least be able to allow the reader to complete the duties expected of him if he has properly absorbed the material. The notion that it will take decades for fresh crews to get to grips with a ship even with proper training material is plain stupid (no offence), and a quick look at reality will easily provide ample evidence to the contrary. Take the introduction of a new ship class, the first crew might take a several years to get to grips with it, but crews on follow-on ships will find the transition far smoother and quicker, why? Is it because the first crew are pulled out of their duties to go on every subsequent ship and teach his counterpart everything or is it because the experience of the first crew is collected, distilled and put into revised training manuals so that subsequent crews can benefit from their knowledge without needed them to teach every last one of them in person?

Just because you got lausy or no manuals does not mean that all manuals are bad, and manuals on carrier deck ops are amounst the most strick and precise anywhere by the nature of the task at hand.

But as you seem to accuse me of not reading your post properly, the same thing aplyes to you in this one. I said in my previous post that the issue isen’t the chinese skills of operating the ship itself, but how well they can operate the carrier operations in whole package, including the aviation assets over sea.

Oh have I? Operating planes from carriers will be different from operating them on land, obviously, but that does not make the operations so different and alien that past experience from land ops cannot help to add in the ‘little things’ that manuals might noy include.

In here I cannot agree with you. Carrier aviation operations differences alot of those in made in ground. it’s almoust silly to state othervise. Why did russians spend almoust two decades to learn the stuff when they certainly knew how to operate Flankers in ground? You cannot expect that the experience of russians or brazilians will pass directly to chinese. They MIGHT sell some manuals or send some advisors, but it wont make the fact that chinese will need at least a decade to get everything run properly dissapear.

I see you have totally aviod the FACT that the russians were majorly cash-striken during that two decades. How many flight hours did the managed to clock in those two decades? Hell, how many of those two decades did the carrier spent at sea at all?

Aditionally, the Russians had to pionier everything themsevles, the PLAN won’t. The russians have already demonstrated in the past that they are willing to sell training with their hardware, so why not again, with a major order for Su33s at stake.

And also, when did it become a ‘fact’ that the PLAN will need a decade, ‘at least’, to get a carrier running properly? The 10 years was just a number I chose as my most pessmistic expectation of how long it will take the PLAN to get a carrier up and running assuing they had to learn everything themselves and that they are all an astonishing dumb bunch of idiots. When did that speculation gain factual status? :rolleyes:

But isen’t this thread purpose to compare these two from our armchair admirals point of wiev? Ofcourse both indian and Chinese officals thinks these sort of silly compare “which is better” issues are completely unimportant and irrelevant to real life.

That is assuming that in some distint future AFTER both ships went into active service. There never was any timeframe.

I’m well awere of the russian situation after soviet collabse, but it’s hardly any excuse. If the carrier program would have had more funds directed to it, i still doupt the time of learning all the stuff would have been considerably narrower, perhaps few years…But then you have to remember that Russian/soviets had operated aircrafts overseas since 1974…So not all was new to them, unlike to china…

Please, thats just desperate. They didn’t even have the money to send the ships to sea or give their pilots much hell, they didn’t even have the money to stop their ships rotting away at ancher, but they somehow managed to find the funds to pioner fastjet ops on carriers? Find me one source that said that the fall of the USSR had so little an effect on their carrier ops that its ‘hardly any excuse’ for spending two decades getting their carrier fully operating.

Ofcourese chinese wont trow infantry soliders to run Carriers, nor is the question anyway that chinese wount be abvle to handlle the ship as ship. The question is, how much china needs to be able to operate the carrier’s airwing properly? And how big lead India enjoys in this field. China haven’t operated any sort of fixed wing aviation onboard carriers and India have, period. There is no excaping of it, and stating that India doesen’t really enjoy any advantage is living in petty denyal.

Again, I must ask if you have actually read my posts properly. Throughout, I have never tried to deny the fact that the IN enjoys a considerable advanatge in terms of its carrier ops experience, so where did this ‘denyal’ stuff come from?

You mentioned the high stakes on carrieroperations, thats true. But you cannot expect chinese to just miracleosly adopt properly fuctioning airdeck operations by just simply reading books…They need to learn it from the hard way, just like Indians had to learn it in the sixties. Now Indians haven’t operated the STOBAR system before and making the Gorky fully operational takes time. But it wont take as much time as chinese have to consume as Indians already knows the “little things”, the overall flexibility to ensure the airoperations goes as planned. There is no other way to learn those than expereince, and China doensen’t have it, India have it.

I am not a little astonished by some of the sentement expressed above, the most basic foundation of human civilisation is our ability to learn from past experience and avoid making the mistakes of our predecessors, and the key to that is WRITTEN language and not word of mouth. The superority of the written text over mental recollection and verbal expression is manyfold and comprehensive. Memory fades, some people are better at articulating their ideas and thoughts then others etc. But a text well ‘never’ fade and always express itself in a clear and procise manager that the vast majority of humans can understand with perfect clarity. Operation manuals that have evolved over the course of decades are in effect the collection of distilled knowledge and experience of generations of seamen. The whole point of going to the trouble of making a manual in the first place is so that future generations can avoid the exact ‘make the same mistakes and learn it all the hard way’ pitfall you insist the PLAN have to suffer.

As I have said before, the PLAN is not alien to the requirements of operating large warships, and much of that knowhow is directly transferable from destroyers to carriers, just as much of the funderamental flying skills learnt in a turboprop trainer can be applied to advanced multi-role jet fighters.

And of course there are things that will be completely new to the PLAN, but it will not be so fundamentally different that past experience in other fields cannot to ‘imported’ and adapted. Maintaining a jet in the hanger of a carrier is not that different from doing the same job on land; storing and moving munitions and fuel on a carrier is not that different from doing the same on land etc. Add to that the fact that those procedures that are most unfamiliar, namely, deck ops, have extremely detail and procise operating procedures that I have no doubt would be recorded in excessive detail in a whole host of manuals and handbooks. That is because those ops are high-risk and cannot leave anything to chance or leave ambiguities, as even tiny errors have led to major accidents or problems in the past. Reading and following those manuals will allow PLAN crews to know all the most critical elements needed to get things running smoothly without incident. And the little things like, ‘spitting into the exhaust of an Su33 is a bad idea’ etc, Im sure they would be able to figure out for themselves quickly enough.

But if we look the issue in bigger scale, there is only one way that china could narrow this lead that India enjoys, and that is to get the Varyag operational before Gorky…Gorshkov should be ready in 2010, but Indian warship building industry (as the final refitting is supposed to carry out in Indian shipyards) is know for it’s long building times and lacking behind schedules so who knows? If China can get Varyag operational in let say, 2008? Then there is theoretical few years plus to chinese. But then again is few years making any difference? Russians had Kuznetsov running trials since later part of the eighties, but it was only in 2003-5 when the airoperations were fully in hand…

Why would the PLAN care when the Gorky is ready? The activities of the IN is, to be honest, something they couldn’t care less about right now. The PLAN’s primary concern is Taiwan and the Yellow Sea, that is why I am highly spectical of the notion of them getting the Varg into frontline service – there is just no justification for the costs such a venture would need, as it does not add any significant improvement to the PLAN’s ability to meet the threats and challenges they are likely to encounter in the above mentioned regions. It is possible that the Varg will be put into service as a training carrier for PLAN crews to gain real operation experience as part of the PLAN’s long term modernisation plan (whicn includes a blue water navy with carriers), but it seems a little too early for that right now judging by the stage where the PLAN is right now, put in another way, the PLAN have more important things to do with its money and people.

As for russian experience, well Im sure you know that that is a highly misleading and unrepresentative example considering the fact that the period in question is the exact same time when the USSR imploded and soviet/russian military budgets dried up, resulting in major setbacks and delays to ALL projects of the time.

Well Garry did neatly ignore the second sentence of the first post which states the real reason for the whole thread. 🙂 All a bit silly really since there are a lot of things about Vikramaditya’s fittings etc we don’t yet know and the final purpose the Chinese have for the ex-Varyag is still pretty much anybody’s guess. She may not even have engines so all that stuff about staying out range of MiG-29Ks while attacking with Su-33s could so much crap 🙂

Daniel

I have seen quite a few desperate and shameless acts people could do to try and win an argument, and this is certainly right up there with the best of them.

‘Never mind the fact that the Su33 outranges the Mig29k, I say that even if the PLAN does patch the Varg up and put her into service, they will not put engines in her, so the Mig29K is superior! Hurah! I win! HAHA!’

That isen’t entirely true. It’s for fact that experience is tied to person, but the experience and skills are gained somehow and that first hand knowlidge and knowhow is passed on othervise than just in manuals.
If you have been in the army, you know what i’m talking about. For instance during my service, I quite quickly adapted several little things of everyday “survivor” exspecially those applyed in the outdoor training (eg. be in the “woods”) When i later own talked these things with my Fahter, he just laughed and told that they did the exact same things back in the early 70’s when he was in army…So things, little things that ultimately makes the difference passes on althoug none smart-ass byrocrat haven’t writen them down to some manual…

So, did you make this ‘adaptions’ yourself, or did your serg show you how to do it?

As for the ‘little things’ that people learn from each other from practical experience, well, I always took that as a granted, hence my emphysis on the importance of real hand-on experience.

As for doing things differently from what the manual says. Well people always find little ‘tricks’ and ‘better’ ways to do something then what the manual says, but that is a very dangerous approach. Many of the factors taken into account when writing the manual might not be appreciated by a lowly crewman who only has his own little task to do, if he do things differently, it might save him a few seconds, but it might add to someone else’s workload or place himself and/or others in greater danger in case something goes wrong. I supposed that is a major difference between infantry and navy. In the infantry, soilders/units operate largely independently, and how they do things don’t matter all that much as long as they get the job done, but in the navy, often there is no other way to do something, and individuals trying to cut corners may well cost lives or doom the ship itself in combat.

If you were refering to the little ‘routines’ that people develop from long practice, well anyone who have been doing a job for any length of time will develop some formula that he/she thinks will help to improve efficiency/person comfort/minimise time spent etc, but such ‘rituals’ are organic in nature, and what works for one person may not for another, so even if an old-timer did teach his replacement everything he learnt, the replacement may well choose not to adopt some of them, which are lost, but the replacement may well develop some little ‘tricks’ of his own instead. But the most important factor is that the most successful of these little personalised ‘operating manuals’ are usually adapted into the formal training manual itself after time, anything left out will not be of a critical nature, meaning that a carrier crew will be able to function perfectly well without them. That is also not considering the fact that many of the ‘tricks’ would be highly specific to a ship or operation, and moving to a new ship or the introduction of new equipment will make many of them useless.

But, alas, I am getting way too deep into this, the point is that anything not in the manual will not be of a critical nature, and not having that knowledge is not a major hinderence, especially since your own crew will likely develop similar methods all of their own accord after a few years of service.

…So you cannot minimalize the expereince that Indians enjoy in this field. I belive that none here is stating that Chinese will be doomed for inferior carrier operations, but it’s undenyable fact that they have to learn a lots of thing from the scrahts..just like Indians did when they bough the Vikrant decades ago…

Really, refer to post 33 then. But anyways, once again I wonder if you have read my post. When did it state that you can learn everything you need to know from a manual? My point is that the most important and critical lessons that a navy has learnt from its past experiences of operating carriers would have been recorded in manuals. That is the most important thing that past carrier operating experience can teach a navy. All the other little details about the nitty gritty part of actual operation will be learnt after a few years of carrier ops, and that is a far cry from ‘using a sub for the first time’ or ‘riding a bike for the first time’ analergies I have seen been thrown around to describe the step-up.

More L15 pics. Notice the intake.