JonesyNow go the whole way and cancel the other one also!
And then start working on a Joint European Navy!
I’m serious.
I’d agree…..just as soon as we get a common European Govt, common European foreign policy and common European Defence policy.
Seeings that no-one with opposable thumbs expects that to happen though its probably a bit of a non-starter!.
Jonesy‘Through Deck Cruiser’ all over again.
I’m sorry to shift the mood here a little, but, this is, in part, brilliant news. The words there that the contracts are too far advanced for the carriers to be scrapped – and that placed clearly in the public domain is fantastic news. The hulls are definitely going to be completed even in the worst case and thats all that matters at this point.
The issue with the second carrier being ‘chopper only’ is absolute bunk. The ship will easily be able to operate F-35B if it is called on to do so. 50 F-35B will mean a full airgroup for the duty carrier available and, as we all knew, the RN was going to have issues manning 2 CVF’s simultaneously anyway. In point of fact then, provided that the second vessel is built with the air ordnance magazines and handling system (that has already been contracted for) the change to ‘commando carrier’ is emminently reversible.
If the finances are shaping up better by the end of the next decade the argument to have the 2nd carrier re-roled to provide cover while QE is in refit is the simplest one for the MoD to put forward. Throw in a 2nd order for an additional 40 F-35B somewhere around 2020 and we have virtually all the capability we are ‘losing’ here back as well – if the global situation warrants it!. If EMALS is proven tech by then, and we have some end product from Taranis/Mantis, it might even be that the carrier airwing could be more efficiently augmented with UCAV’s than manned fighters anyway by that time!.
The other interesting thing here is the RAF dynamic. With only 50 JSF’s does that end the story for ‘Joint Force Harrier’. IF the RAF are to become a single type fastjet service does that put JSF solely back in the hands of the Fleet Air Arm?. We’ve seen that RN squadrons can deploy ashore and work just fine so what is the real need to have official RAF involvement in the F-35B force?.
JonesyNot sure what the missile is. It’s from naval technology and all it says is this
The Type 45 Sylver vertical launch system for the Aster missile.
I’m not sure what else it could be coming from the Sylver launcher? Could it be some kind of test missile.
Its a TLAM being launched out of a Mk41. I fear F35b that Swerve, Wanshan and John may have been yanking your chain just a little there.;)
JonesyI believed that China’s current UAV capability was primarily constrained by the lack of a suitably compact indigenous powerplant?. Has this now been addressed?. If not the ‘leap’ forward outlined is surely more of a ‘hop’?.
JonesyNew apartment/office blocks of this height and much higher are completed in their thousands every month globally using steel pilings with no external bracing.
Naturally….my point was that if one wasnt available there would need to be the other.
..but then who knows what the actual demand or criteria placed upon the architect and builders were?
True. Though it does take some mental gymnastics to try and conceive of anything this structure could do that couldn’t be better done cheaper in other ways.
Either way, I don’t really want to divert this thread into multi story design and theory.
LOL!. Quite! 😀
JonesyI’m surprised they didn’t just find an old airbase, build a ski-jump at one end of the runway and build a mockup of the island next door.
….and build a radar range next door to that!.
That being the sensible, efficient, way of covering virtually any ‘tasking’ that this structure might offer at a tiny fraction of the cost!.
JonesyJonesy..
Keep to ship details.. your view of building structures is far from demonstrating the same level of knowledge….which is a shame.
Fair play. Though I can put up pictures of several traffic junctions I designed that have survived quite well over the past 12-13 years since I designed them (left the RN mid 90’s then got a job as an apprentice civil engineer and spent 5 years at that before getting heavily in datacomms/internet at the end of the 90’s). Spent 3 years day-release studying structures, materials and the built environment at technical college. Apart from snapping bits of metal in a hounsfield tensometer I do remember a few of the more basic concepts involved in building construction – and this structure fits none of them.
The reality could be far different from what you are illustrating… the island, regardless of its location with respect to the remainder of the building will be on its own foundations in order to minimise the potential differential settlement issues between the disparate elements of the building.
How do you mean on its own foundations?. A suspended raft or additional rafting/piling in the existing foundations?. If the latter see earlier point….the structural steel would have to be able to resist wind-imposed shearing loads. That means extreme stiffening such as huge steel piles or external bracing. Where the island is sited leaves no margin for external bracing.
We do not know the ground conditions of the location but chances are the entire building is piled and the area beneath the island is on longer and or thicker or more numerous piles…or its on a pretty massive raft as well.
As a minimum it should be piled….you wouldnt anticipate padded foundations on a building this size. At least I wouldn’t. It may be that the building is built on one huge raft foundation, as you rightly say we dont know, the fact is that it doesnt need to be. Even if the ground substrata is modest an office building doesnt need more than healthy strip foundations. If the addition of the aircraft carrier on the roof has forced them to build that deeper (or sink steel pilings all the way through the building) for seemingly no operational benefit where is the sense in that?.
The wind load will be dealt with within the foot print of the island.. there is no structural need (or efficiency) in distributing it to the other parts of the the building..
OK now I am interested. Imposed wind loads will generate shear force at the point of interface between the tower and the building. You mitigate that shear force with bracing or with long cantilever arms (deep pilings). If you cant brace for lack of width how do you transmit the shear force through to the building within footprint?.
In addition the cost of materials and mainly labour in China are so very different from here that this bring a concpetually different way of designing buildings into play.
Aaaah the old cheap materials and cheap labour argument. Of course that makes it perfectly understandable that they would build something of little to no obvious operational value in such a complex and inefficient fashion.
You never know though perhaps they’ve actually filled in the whole top floor of that building with concrete, based on foundations a quarter of a mile deep, and they plan to undertake touch and goes on this installation!!!!. They are Chinese you know and they might just do anything………however bizarre and impractical!. Myself….I give them credit for a little more professionalism!.
Willhelm,
Quickly, and as an example, we have no idea whether the tower has a central structural concrete core with a steel cladding or outer shell. We have no idea whether this is completely independantly piled or whether the entire building has several basement levels that have large pilings of their own with reinforced tie-ins to the tower etc … etc…
Of course a rebarred concrete core to the tower would do, basically, the same job as the deep steel pilings I mentioned myself. I accept that you can make this viable but the practicalities against the complexity just doesnt make sense and I cant believe it would to a professional Chinese civil engineer anymore than it would to a western trained one.
The issue with the point load still exists as well. It makes utterly no sense to put that tower structure where it is other than to make it ‘look’ like an aircraft carrier. Again you can reinforce the structure and the foundations to make it go there, but, why when you can just site it centrally, mark out the outline of the flight deck around it, and save yourself the significant bother and the expense?.
This is a nation that built a theme park building out of concrete that extenally resembles a Nimitz class carrier.
….and do you recall the furore that was kicked off when that was getting built?. It was a template for the Chinese to learn how to build a Nimitz-type supercarrier – we were sagely informed that there would be fleets of Chinese CVN’s within a few years, then it was a radar trainer so that PLANAF pilots could get used to targetting a CVN radar profile and things got wilder from then…..until someone came along and said that well, urm, its a fairground attraction!.
JonesyWe have no idea of the type of internal concrete and re-bar internal construction below the tower.
Short of digging up the replaced earth on the tower side of the building, we also have no idea of the size, depth, and composition of the foundations or footings on that side of the building.
I do not think this type of speculation is wise.
Its not speculation – its basic structures design!. You dont impose point load on one set of foundations unless you can avoid it…..and in this case they can definitely avoid it!. There is absolutely no need to put that structure hard up against one side of the building. You aren’t going to simulate wind-over-deck with a building who’s aspect to the wind tends to be fairly static!.
If you want to build a flight deck with several hundred tons of steelwork sticking out then make the building wider and stick the whole mockup in the middle….where the load is spread out over all of the foundations not just one side!. Also where you can put reinforcement in to counteract the imposed load on the structure from wind action on that rather large sail area.
Unless that ‘tower’ has steel pilings running right through the building and down into bedrock its going to suffer from wind imposed stresses – it can’t not be impacted by them because, sited where it is on the building there is no room for the kind of lateral reinforcement such a tall, narrow, structure would need.
OK so maybe it has huge great steel pilings that run through to bedrock I hear you say!. The question has to be why!!!. That is a very expensive and inefficient way of building something that seems to serve no operational function. I know the Chinese do things their own way, but, this is either lunacy built on inefficiency or someone is on the wind up!.
JonesySlightly off the point does any one have an opinion whether the HMS Sheffield did its job by taking the Exorcet that was bound or the Invincible?
Shiney Sheff took a missile that it should’ve been able to defeat and wasn’t within 20 miles of the Invincible. The ’42’ picket line was there to screen the group and it did its job, more or less, but Sam Salt shouldn’t have lost his command and the officer largely responsible for the missile getting in should have answered for it.
This is not the place to go into detail about this event though Nick. To be honest if you put HMS Sheffield and PWO(A) into the search engine on this site you should find a link to the story anyway.
JonesyWhy ?? … it could be a test-site to train the deck-crews in handling deck-operations
Deck handling on top of a building – where every aircraft would have to be craned up there and where errors would be wasteful and potentially catastrophic?. Inefficient at best and potentially dangerous at worst. Easier, and no less effective, would be to mark out an area on an existing airbase, at ground level, and shunt aircraft round on that. Easier to store the airframes in existing hangars as well!. There is certainly no requirement for a full island mockup when all the deck crew have to do is avoid banging into the superstructure!.
… and additionally the island can be used as a radar test-site to check EM-interferences with other equipment (helis, airplanes, …)
That makes a bit more sense but, again, you dont need to build a full mock up of the island do you?. All you need is an approximation of shape to plot out nulls, masking and hot spots. Also why make it a fixture on top of a building?. Where is the advantage in that to make the cost and awkwardness of doing it worthwhile?. Again why not the simpler expedient of dropping it onto a nice vacated space on an airbase where you can really jack the RF emissions up without microwaving some poor sod who happens to be wandering around the grounds of the building downstairs!
As far I know there currently a similar facility under construction for UK CV-program. :confused:
Not really all that similar!.
Altogether I agree with You that there are some things strange with this site, maybe even unlogical … but I don’t think this is a hoax or a photoshop fake and these guys must have at least an idea for what thei built this beast.
Strange puts it mildly. IF this is genuine someone has a very overactive imagination over there!
JonesyThat wide angle picture REALLY doesnt look right!.
Thats a LOT of steel point load stuck on top of one section of that building right up at one foundation strip without any obvious buttressing or even apparent foundations for it. Unless this is built somewhere famous for never experiencing any wind whatsoever the sail area of that ‘island’ will impose loads that that building is just not going to sustain.
I’ll put £10 on, matching the same from anyone else, that that is a hoax or, if not, that it will be a disaster site within 3 years!.
JonesyDeck handling trainer?. Bit harsh on the prospective deck crews to see their aircraft mockups falling off the side of a building if they screwed it up?. Even harsher on those in the rooms underneath if a wingtip happened to dig in through a window on its journey south!.
Not buying the deck handling trainer concept to be honest. Dont they go in for random artistic expression such as this over there?. Have a dim recollection of them building a mockup of an aircraft carrier in a public park or something just for the hell of it a few years back.
Cant think of any operational reason for this structure in this location, but, if you want people to get familiar with aircraft carriers and what they look like it may be one, albeit novel, way of communicating a message.
JonesyDuring the Falklands war the RAF reported the Argentinean aircraft carrier based on the Searchwater ISAR/Nimrod (1979 in service date). The RAF didn’t report is was a single ship – they reported is a carrier. In fact is was a neutral tanker. If the RAF had reported it was single ship, the RN could have requested additional information….
Yes its a well known story…with a lot of antagonism behind it.
The reports of the ‘carrier’ weren’t believed by the Flag (it wasn’t the only time that the Nimrod lads ‘found’ it!) and the RAF were absolutely insensed that their lads had put themselves at risk and the Navy weren’t going to follow through.
IIRC Woodward sent a singleton SHAR for surface recce and thats when we found the vessels true identity. Woodward went absolutely beserk and, I’m told, passed a message to Northwood advising the Nimrod crews to stay home if they couldn’t do any better. Needless to say that didnt go down too well either!.
JonesyPeter,
Need for resolution. Your resolution, from an aircraft set, improves as range decreases. You can use range profiling from farther out but to get a firm ID of a destroyer sized vessel you are looking more in the 70km range bracket….at least that was what Searchwater was doing and I believe the Israeli sets the Indians use do as well. A carrier, depending on aspect, you might get double that, but, inside the 150km ring from a carrier, whilst emitting on your search set, is scarcely a practical proposition for most MPA’s!.
Bomberboy,
Peter’s questions are pertinent, concise and sensible. In many ways he’s picking up the gaps in what I write!. He’s a sanity check that I clearly need!.
Cheers,
Steve
JonesyYou have the perspective of the Royal Navy capabilities. I’m afraid I didn’t know they have any “real” OTH capability 😉 Sorry.
…and you think that there is a significant functional difference between a Russian radar seeker and guidance section and the same made by the French, British or Americans?. OTH limitations impact all exactly the same. As mentioned on another thread it is these limitations which have stayed the development of very long range OTH missiles in the western services not any lack of technology to develop the weapons!.
Self reinforcing fantasy beats “idiot Russian Navy” theory repairing worthless ships theory. Sorry.
IF those were the only two possibilities yes. More likely is that they are a PR job. The Russian Navy needs assets in the water to give the appearance of capability. A big and impressive hull looks good on TV and excites the public. Those with a bit more knowledge can pick out the inefficiencies and relatively low military value, as we’ve seen on this thread, but for pretty pictures and deploying to ‘show the flag’ they do take some beating.
Prove to me that Legenda is central to effective P-700 use from a credible, Russian source, and I will believe you. The missile is highly secretive, so it’s a rhetorical demand. I mean hell, when did images surface? 2003?
Meaningless. Find another deployed, operational, Russian system capable of providing that targetting data lost with Legenda that is surviveable and has such a wide search scope.
LOL? Are you serious? Now the US can selectively choose which satellite to shoot down out of thousands? This is a joke, right?
Yes of course they can. Space vehicles are tracked on launch, especially military ones, I believe both east and west do this as well. Both US and Russia have long established programmes, mostly in the grey world, for orbital inspection of space vehicles too.
So essentially, you dodged the stupid comment about how “their missiles failed” – since you didn’t have a single example.
Didn’t see a comment to dodge sorry but see earlier point – what makes you think that Russian missiles fundamentally, in guidance terms, work any different than anyone elses?. As I’ve stated on here before the TASM-NG that is being promoted to the USN right now has a quad-mode seeker section to get round the targetting problems.
So approx 11KM? An 11KM difference in position isn’t going to make the Granit hit the ocean instead of its target.
See earlier point about inch-perfect firing solution. In the real world you dont get that as the resolution of the system providing initial target datum will introduce a certain error….as will any navigational drift on the missiles flight path etc. There is ALWAYS error and this adds on to the vessel movement during the flight window.
The MARPAT has to get close enough (approx 400KM?) for a TU-142, perhaps, and survive long enough is what? 1 Minute? 30 seconds? It’s on a mission, it’s not going to sit around and wait to transmit targeting data.
400km?. That is a brochure range for an initial detection….not even a track. If you care about ID’ing a target from a MarPat set you are looking at a range more like 70km for an ISAR snapshot. IF your MPA radar has that capability. Without a good target ID you could easily find yourself wasting your limited supply of missiles firing on the wrong target……..cocked up target ID’s at standoff are hardly rare.
Ah geez. You should write the Russian and US Navies then and convince them to dump all of their ARH weapons.
Might serve you to look at later block Arleigh Burkes and see whats missing!.
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