verbatimI won’t derail this topic anymore, but I would point out the a Foudre, being a LSD a-la-“Widbey Island”, make little sense as a LPD, lacking any provision to sustain any troop or vehicle it can deploy ashore.
It’s a worst choice, IMHO.
It’s a huge force multiplier for the Mistrals, providing a huge first amphibious landing force, even well motorized or mechanized, but it makes little or no sense at all if take it alone.
By the french point of view, I suspect the only real rational behind the disposal of the Foudre class for a fourth Mistral is to provide a big and rather needed help to french yards.
verbatim@Soyuz1917
The common engine between Dozor 600 and Predator A is an austrian engine, not an american one.
Indeed it’s a Rotax, a leading motorcycle’s engine manifacturer.
It’s Predator B the one that replaced the Rotax engine (a four strokes- four cylinders engine) for a small turboprop produced by Honeywell.
Anyway, the engine is not problem at all in the course to develop a MALE, provided the overwhelming commercial availability of top notch civilian engines fromm automotive and motorcycle industry.
There is all the freedom of choice everybody can dream of about power, weight, SFC, specific power and so on, and making or customizing them for aeronautic specifications and needs is a no brain issue.
There real challenge is in the payload (weight and dimensions vs, performance) and the automatic control laws and devices (as above), until you won’t like to develop an UAV weighting like a Su-24 to do the same job of an Heron and with little chance to come back to base is something is going wrong with the control datalink.
verbatimWell, in the Marine Corps and Navy lexicon LPD, LHD and so on are not neither mutually exclusive nor optional.
All LHDs have like their main reason to provide vertical lift, and command and controls functions for the amphibious assualt.
All LPD should provide core logistic support, second wave anphibious assault, and with LPD-17 four ships out of eight will provide command and control functions as well, that’s the reason behind the four Harpers Ferry logistic LSDs (being four San Antonio class ships deprived in logistic capabilities to make room for the C3I centre, they put an Harper Ferry beside a C3I-augmented San Antonio).
First assault is demanded to an LHD and a Widbey Island class LSD, sencond wave and sustainment is mostly done by LPDs, plus assets from an LHD, optionally an Harper Ferry class, and other ships.
About LHA6: they are purchasing lots of F-35B, they will need some good ferry to move them on theatre, and will need some technical facilities, but they are not giving up the LHD or LHA main role, i.e. the air assault.
verbatimI suppose Austin was referring to the cross section of YD, aft of the sail it has no longer a perfect elliptical cross secton to make room for VLSs, like most former soviet SSBNs.
verbatimSorry Swerve, but I strongly believe that saying “is it really sustainable to have 5 or 6 separate frigate programmes running?” and saying “the rapidly filling gap in financial and economic capabilities between developed and developing countries will mean in a quite short time, unless breakneck reversals in trends, that even the technological and military capabilities will be evened out” actually means the same as seen from opposite points of view.
The growing economic means available to developing countries, many of them enjoing near-two-digits economic grow rates, imply they get far more relevant in the “weapons market”, and even provided it is not a free market, still their market quota, as customers, is day by day more relevant.
To add a mess to another mess, developed countries are finding harder and harder to secure enough workload for they naval yards.
It’s the same trend already followed by the aerospace complexes: growing costs and complexities, reducing domestic orders, growing global (i.e. foreign) economic value of the market.
Putting it simple, no medium sized developed country can indefinitely sustain its own naval yards without gaining a good share of the global market, because no internal order could compare with the ever growing demand (and economic value!) originated in the developing countries.
So, yes I strongly believe european yards will face within one decade a big string of merging and consolidations, and because there is no longer room for such a process within any single country, it will mean cross boundaries mergings, i.e. any single developed country will lost some expertise to retain others.
An I would like to stress one concept: the destabilizating factor is the growing economic power of the developing countries, requiring developed ones both to mantain technological and military advantage, and to pursue a good share of orders originating from developing ones.
Developed countries will make use of their technological strength, developing ones will make use of their economical one to get the most they can attain.
verbatim… Its completely irrelevant whether anyone is going to use the stuff of not, its the fact that they would have the capability to ultimately stand up to a superpower and command that respect.
The real question is: are your big allies (U.S. like a straightforward example) going to let you take such a stance?
Or like in Suez ’56 will they open the gates of hell to you, if you just try to take it?
Because when you talk about nuclear deterrent, you have to walk the whole path until the very end, that’s a global nuclear war, involving almost any place around the world and first and foremost the more prominent countries around the world, such as U.S., Russia and so on.
There are far more ways to bring you to your knees than even the least military menace, and I would have an hard time imaging any country waging a nuclear war because a bigger country (and a far bigger nuclear power by herself) defeated her by financial or diplomatic means.
Otherwise in the last eighties, URSS would have just to open its nuclear silos asking western countries to open themself to commerce with Warsaw Pact’ countries and to stop unilaterally and w/o conditions any balance shifting military program such as stealth fighters and precision weapons.
verbatimYes, they did.
As for anything else, and as any other developing country in the world, they are making provisions to cut up to the very last piece of flesh from the bone of the so called “first world”.
They will just play France, Italy and United Kingom each against the others to gain a badly needed bunch of contracts to sustain an overwherlming unsustainable naval yards complex.
Because the harsh reality is that the rapidly filling gap in financial and economic capabilities between developed and developing countries will mean in a quite short time, unless breakneck reversals in trends, that even the technological and military capabilities will be evened out.
Not because developing countries will gain new and exotic capabilities, instead quite the opposite: most of developed countries will lost their owns since long accoustomed capabilities, because they will become no longer affordable.
verbatimThat may be due more to these ships employing more fully distributed systems than due to integration issues: In the German Navy, it’s mostly an evolution from dedicated mainframe architecture (F122) through a distributed specialized-hardware system with a unified central bus (MEKO, F123) to more-and-more software based distribution with specialized interface structure (F124, F125). The problems stem from the new base layer of the F124 software architecture – unlike other ships, F124 uses a fully distributed system. I.e. the base layer has to coordinate available resources here in addition to the usual stuff. The hardware isn’t just a single system with multiple redundancy backups, but about 30 different cores spread throughout the ship. Intention is that the ship can lose like half its processing hardware due to damage and still have the same processing available to the CMS. The CMS of Horizon and Daring use similar systems. Interestingly, while both F124 and LCF use Tacticos, the latter has not experienced the problem the former has.
That should be enough to prove system integration is never a trivial issue, even when deploying a well estabilished system.
Or we could assume german engineers, and most of ducth engineers as well, aren’t that good at this task, and while succeding with the De Zeven Provincen, the same task was performed quite disappointingly with F124.
That’s not to start a flame war, it’s just to note that pending just rumors about troubles with Steregushy, without any clue about their ground (if there is some ground at all), and provided that the CMS deployed with Steregushy should be the so called “Sigma E”, a distributed one evolved from the previous iterations of Sigma CMSs, inches with system integration are a likely suspect.
verbatimHe is using metric tons, as for the international kg-m-s (Chilogram- meter-second) standard applied in sciences.
One ton = 1000 Kg.
verbatimWeights and volumes are one matter, system integration in a whole different matter.
I can try and succeed installing a huge amount of weapon systems, and still fail to accomplish system integration.
Provided it’s a matter of bigger magnitudo, all european DDG developed in the last decade, from german F124, to british Daring and french/italian Orizzonte, are ways far from being really operational, in spite of years of efforts, simply because theyr CMSs crash almost every time they simulate a tactical scenario.
The F124’s CMS was infamous in its first years because it crashed just trying to plot something, let alone depicting a complex scenario…
And having CIC and CMS highly automated and integrated does not help you sorting out troubles, it does quite the opposite indeed.
verbatimLekiu class apart, they are all vessels with little or no AAW weaponry and some of them with no real ASW capabilities, Ulsan class being the only one with an almost full ASW suite, and still lacking both hangar and elipad.
And IIRC, it’s the first time russians are trying to develop a quite small vessel with an all around armament, integrated CMS and even little manning requirements (less than 100 hands on board), so some hitches and denting troubles could be well expected.
The issues of automation and multifunction consolles required by such a small crew should be more than enough to cause some serious headache to russian engineers.
verbatim50 ships is clearly utopian and quite unnecessary, even 20 seems a bit high. I don’t know what source came up with these unrealistic estimates, but they’re more likely than not wishful hyperbole. 12 to 16 (i.e. 6 to 8 hulls for the Baltic and Black Sea Fleets each) sounds more sensible, maybe a few more in a lightly armed subclass for Coast Guard duty (where they’d actually make sense in Northern and Pacific waters as well).
Perhaps 50 includes notional export orders (still rather optimistic, but not completely unreasonable)?
20 hulls has been reported several times by RIA and othe russian News agencies, quoting russian Navy’s top brass.
50 hulls has been allegedly reported in the past like a prospective upper limit, maybe like total between domestic and export ones.
Anyway, even 20 hulls are a huge number for such vessels, at least when they are to be deployed only between Northern, Baltic and Black Sea fleets.
Given the utter reality of ageing russian frigates and destroyers, it would seems to me more appropriated to launch some export frigate (Talwar, i.e.) requiring zero development time, zero development costs, yards already busy building them and logistic support already available.
verbatimWhy not co-op use them with Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Brazil, or India? Quite frankly the best thing they could do is renew a global geopolitical alliance that includes India, South Africa, Australia, and Canada. Sharing the burden of one large carrier and one vtol carrier would allow the five to project quite a bit of influence around the world for common goals.
Or maybe they could simply barter off the Invincibles – versus scrapping them – to Australia, Brazil, India, Japan, or Canada. Japan would need to use them without fighters I believe, but they should consider the notion as they are getting more involved worldwide in administrating disaster relief.
Well, Italy and Netherlands are in the process to downsize both their Defence’s expenditures and likely the Armed Forces as well, South Africa could not afford anything like an aircraft carrier both operationally and economically.
Brazil has a clear politic posture as south american leader, and it be will highly controversial any strategic alliance with a Country still seen in the whole subcontinent like a former and post(neo)-colonialist one.
As for India, we have not to mess weapons purchases with political alliances: India is the first and foremost partner of Russia, and the opposite is true as well, it would be very kind to offer such agreement to Russia as well but….
Invincible class will suffer the same fate of any large warship nowadays: too expensive for any second or third tier Navy, too old/obsolete and strategically/industrially counterproductive for any first tier Navy.
verbatimAnd to develop the sort of RCS reduction techniques that LM has been working on for the past 30 years…will take a BIT more than 4-5 years.
This is why the T-50 prototype is anything but impressive. Its a nice super-cruise design, but as far as Stealth is concerned, its overall design is certainly far behind anything the US has, and as far as the DETAILS of RCS reduction…it not only doesn’t show any (which would be fine for a tech-demonstrator), but its parent company has never demonstrated the ability to build it.
———–
The technology in building these, the materials, the RAM types that go over these panels and into those joints etc…are the result of 30 years of continuous improvement from LM (and in fact the production F-35s in the future will undoubtedly have different materials used than these prototypes).
So UNTIL Sukhoi or anyone else in Russia…demonstrates the ability to build anything other than RAM that would have impressed someone in the 1970s maybe…and UNTIL they can demonstrate the capacity to integrate those materials and structural designs into an aircraft…
Any engineer or scientist still doing work in Russia is either a failure or an idiot. You should see them at research institutions here in the US 😉
Yes but you see…we can ASSUME the Russian engineers would have advanced beyond the materials used on the F-35. :p
Why not? I just read here the Russians have the best scientists and its a foregone conclusion that they would have. We don’t need to KNOW this. We can ASSUME it.
I’ve already given you Lesson # 2 in life:
2) Innovation cannot be ASSUMED or PLANNED.
When you understand this point, you’ll understand what I’m saying better. And this complicates this a TINY bit more..when you are 30 years behind your nearest competitor. Try as you may…a shoe-string budget and luck…may, just may, not be enough 😉
Actually, nobody but Intelligence agencies and the russian military and security elite knows what Russia aimed to save or expand in their know how and technological base.
Russia is now since almost ten year long in an economic positive trend, and something managed to pump in some project and research department even in the worst years of the 90ies.
Details of RCS, as far I know, are about spikes (antennae, pitot and so on), geometry, reflection/diffraction properties related to materials) and yes, even compressor face and air duct.
And well, nothing in the Earth flying even a little higher of a T-50 can have a look inside the air ducts, because they are far behind and below the wing, meaning around 50% of the whole spatial spectrum concerning compressor face is already concealed.
So, coming back to T-50, it gots quite without doubt the right geoometry for RCS reduction (geometry for supercruise is another matter, with no relation with RCS reduction at all, to a large extent even like limiting factor).
It still lack the capability the get rid with all those antennae and Pitots, acting as spikes and becoming so wonderful radiating sources for almost any frequencies/polarization.
It still lack a proper canopy, and still lack a duct blocker or whatever else they are planning to put in to shadow the compressor face.
About EM waves bounces, yes they bounce, but the more bounce you get, the more diffraction, changes in frequencies, phase and polarity you get.
Otherways, no S-duct on hearth would mask even the tiniest compressor face you can thing of.
And the same would happen to any reflection by the compressor face, meaning outside a frontal sector, there is little or no chance to get a meaningful return from compressor face even in old fashioned A/C.
Or maybe we are talking about liners’ engines, with no air duct at all… then yes, a good surveillance radar can spot compressor reflection even 400 km or more away, and even try to identify the engine maybe.
By the way, standard engineer in Russia would get, post tax payments, something around 700 US$ a month, not a huge amount, but a little more than 150 US$, and by a purchase power parity’s point of view, begin to compare quite competitive with western fees.
Aerospace engineers, specially those related with Defence projects, we could assume are getting a little more…
And still today, if you are working in a Defence project in Russia, or you are eligible to do so, you are strongly discouraged by authorities to go abroad…
verbatimWell, even assuming size and power needs of modern equipment can save you space and weight, they are not saving you money.
Russian Navy stated several times a need for at least 20, perhaps 50 hulls, where are they going to deploy them, and why?
Hardly you can put whatever you like in St. Petersburg and get a chance to survive even if that’s a carrier strike group, so following Poland in a naval race would be a plain waste of resources.
And above all, a military confrontation in the Baltic Sea means either a diplomatic one or a real war between Russia and NATO.
In a diplomatic/military confrontation, you can act properly using Air Force and Army (backed by nuclear deterrence),without any need for actual naval forces deployed in the Baltic Sea and letting Poland and whoever else playing around with their Naval Forces.
In a real war, any fleet based in St. Petersburg will be wiped out the very same day it would try to leave its naval station.
The real (I would say the only one, too) rationale I can think of for a class of large displacement corvettes, is to be able to patrol extensively the whole of the Artic Ocean and prospicient seas, meaning Barents, Kara, Laptev, Siberian and Bering seas
Where there is little or no air threat and the main task would be by far ASW and comprehensive surveillance in a cooperative environment with air and under sea assets.
And I would be really happy with a state of the art ASW equipment, good berthing for crew, long endurance, good Surveillance, C3I, ESM and EW suites, instead of medium range SAM and heavy antiship missiles with related manning, equipment and costs.
Even letting the complement at around 90 men, I would prefer more people available for every single system leaved on, than more (weapon) systems with less people available for every single one, enabling less distressing shifts and longer combat post stations when required.
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