Type 27 is an idea floated on Think Defence in 2011, AFAIK. Totally unofficial.

Yep….its not even in the correct type number range for a GP hull….should the theorised ’27’ be a simplified, tailless, 26 as oft discussed.

I am not sure why I always see these type of arguments. I don’t think anyone expects the Philippines to go toe to toe with China. I also don’t think that anyone expects Vietnam to go toe to toe with China either but at least they still have a modern military which can offer resistance and a deterrence to a foreign enemy.

Agreed to a point. I think I’ve explained the concept of ‘virtual attrition’ on here a few times before but it is worth reinforcing. Even to an overwhelming military force the greater a commitment of resource needed to undertake a specific mission set, towards specific goals, the less attractive achieving those goals become. Basically if you make yourself a hard target the other guy might go pick on someone weaker first!. Other issues come in to force in the Philippines favour though…Vietnam doesnt have quite the same ‘patronage’ as the Philippines do. You could understand a state with the financial challenges that they face….with a big friend like the US to hide behind….leaning on that friend.

IMHO the Hamilton class ships are worthless in their current state. One 76mm cannon and one 25mm cannon is embarrassing on a 3,250 ton warship.

Here’s were I disagree. The Hamiltons offer three things that are very valuable as they stand. 1st and most important is endurance on station. A poster earlier made comment about the superiority of shallow-draft 1000ton OPC’s in this environment. That was a nonsense. The WHEC is on patrol for, according to the coasties, up to 6wks at a time and it will do it in significant seas. The shallow draft OPC is, more than likely, heading home after 20 days and is alongside if the weather gets up.

Second and thirds points coincide and relate to the ships size. This allows them to deploy organic aviation, if available, and lilly-pad it to extend the reach/endurance of shore-based units if not. Similar as a parent for small boats, useful for the real shallows work, rather than sending the big hull in. Lastly the ships beam allows for a decent mast-height to hoist up sensors nice and high. Mast height is a significant advantage for surveillance/patrol taskings where offboard support may not be available for either side. Basically it is first-look advantage.

The armament involved is, in my view, almost insignificant provided that there is an ability to exercise coercive force (76mm) and an ability to counter a missile to cope with an unexpected, small-scale, escalation or asymmetric situation (ciws or softkill). In busy waters the last thing I’d want is a ship launched long range weapon like Harpoon anyway…I’d far rather a chopper embarked with Penguin, Skua or AGM65 type weapons to allow for posID and control of any antiship engagement necessary. For the Phillipines any engagement with large scale naval task forces is the job of the US 7th fleet and little to do with its naval services design or composition.

Fed

In the end the cost of the Osprey plus an only a moderate performance advantage over a helicopter based solution is the main barrier for non catapult carrier nations….Remember the Osprey isn’t pressurised so it can’t particularly take advantage of an increased altitude, the main advantage it has is its speed allowing a faster transit to station and I presume an increased endurance/payload capability. Considering only the US operate the type any nation wanting it have to stump up the cost to integrate into service. Is that worth it over adapting an already in service medium to heavy helicopter?

Absolutely valid point that the margin of superiority of Osprey over traditional rotary is narrowly focussed…I would be of the opinion though that the specific performance-to-range advantages of the tiltrotor would be most applicable to the sea control mission…but a cost/benefit analysis is going to be a fairly narrow squeak for the most part.

The point I was really trying to make was more the disparity between an ‘almost-in-service’ solution, like TOSS Osprey would be, and something entirely off the drawing board like a medium weight ESTOL gyroplane in the CarterCopter vein. Clearly buying-in and running a fleet of eight or ten radar Ospreys is an entirely different proposition than developing a completely new type of naval air capability from the deck up!.

Pegon,

So the challenge is funding then. Since you have to spend quite a lot for the aircraft, you might as well fork up for CATOBAR. For those that want to have a similar capability to USA, it will take decades and large sums of money.

Thats basically the trap yeah. If you want to do proper blue-water sea control there are no short-cuts. If Japan, Australia, UK, S.Korea, Italy, Spain and India all jointly decided to pool an order for an ESTOL support type or a marinised-UAV-plus-afloat-deployment-gear then maybe that scenario shifts. The chances of this kind of collaboration are unfortunately somewhere between non and laughable though…more is the shame!

It is interesting that the Project 15A destroyer still has a Thales LW-08 radar – not really the newest generation of radar.

When you are introducing lots on new systems on a boat its often wise to make sure one or two well-known and dependable systems are on there as a backup. In this case, if I recall right, theres a local license production deal for LW08 and its serving on several ships in the fleet. Wont hurt the ships capability too greatly and a VSR is the sort of thing that can fairly easily be put on the class upgrade roadmap for a major refit at mid-life or so.

Okay, I have to call out the whole “not able to take off with full load” thing.

Here are some very detailed explanations of the Su-33’s take off loadouts. They can take off from the Kuznetsov’s two forward positions with full load at 25 knots of headwind. I expect the Mig-29K would be similar
There are Russian documents and books which state the Su-33 was tested with full load weights from the ski jump. They are mostly in Russian and I’ve only seen scans/pics of them from my time frequenting various forums, but they are there.

The Ulyvanosk CVN was displayed in various incarnations to have a ski jump with waist cats. Why would they not replace the ski jump with two forward cats if the ski jump couldn’t launch fighters at MTOW?

And here is a very exhaustive list of various flight profiles along with munition load, fuel load, range, take off positions, and headwind, which I translated briefly over on CDF ages ago.
http://www.sinodefenceforum.com/navy/plan-aircraft-carrier-programme-news-views-44-6479.html#post247737

Blitzo

I said: The Sukhoi fighter was always going to have enough thrust, with WoD, to get up with a light air-air load.

I didnt say it couldnt take off at full MTOW from the ramp. There would be conditions where that would be more or less achievable, but, the fact remains that the important role for the carriers designed airwing was to generate high endurance air-air sorties…and it could do that without catapults.

The UlYanovsk was designed to the same doctrine as the preceeding Soviet designs…and this where you have it a little out with your idea that all carriers are offensive power projection platforms. Sergei Gorshkov had a VERY specific role for carriers in his anti-NATO planning. The carrier was there to provide escort for the real striking arm of the Soviet fleet…its submarines. Gorshkov learned the lesson of what allied airpower and light escort ASW hunter-killer surface groups did to the U-boat wolfpacks in WW2. He planned to split America from Europe just as Raeder did but decided he could support and screen the submarines in their hunting zones by putting fighters over them, off carriers, and targetting any significant ASW units that came close with heavy antiship missiles.

They would serve the dual role of bait to draw in major NATO units to the waiting SSN’s and SSGN’s below as well. With Legenda and Uspekh surveillance systems and powerful air search radar on the carriers themselves (ultimately see Mars-Passat) the carrier was effectively meant to sit astride the NATO reforger routes and dare anyone to shift them…or try to get past. So rather than offensive power projection these ships were set up for defensive power projection. This appears to be quite similar to the PLANs intentions with regard exploitation of its AShBM technology…a system that makes little sense without a surviveable cueing platform.

You’ll see then, from this, why MTOW limits and all the rest of your lovely stats are less relevent. Academically yes x aircraft will get off the deck with y load. Are there enough ordnance magazines/sufficient capacity weapons hoists to arm up a strike with heavy weapons and sustain a campaign of that type though?. Are enough fuelling pits there to generate a strike package without having heavily armed and fuelled fighters sat at idle on deck waiting for the remainder of the strike to be readied?. In marginal conditions, or if one fighter has an engine blowout and has to emergency recover, do you have enough cabs in the airgroup to put up a couple of buddy-stores to top off the first cabs in the strike package while the rest wait to get up?. Does this interfere with your CAP slots or DLI ‘Alert5’ pair if you do?.

When you design a ship to do one job…then ask it to do another entirely theres usually a handicap somewhere.

Blitzo,

Happy to agree to disagree with you chap. For me its the stuff that I dont see that convinces me they arent looking at exped capability. First and foremost UNREP…you can build auxilliaries pretty quick (at least the Chinese can) but getting the capability stood up takes a lot of practice – last I saw they had 3 or so multiproduct replenishment ships worthy of the name. RAS evolutions need lots of experience and can have dire consequences when they go a little iffy!. You look at the big amphibs…yep they have a few but only really enough to put one or two out at a time…they arent going to get far with a modestly supported battalion group plus attachments!. The LSTs are too useful for supporting island garrisons to be a big noise in exped warfare. Then we plug in the carrier…all wrong for high sortie rate strike ashore. None of the pieces fit the puzzle to me!.

Yama

Excuse me, but I don’t see how STOBAR is any more a ‘millstone around the neck’ than STOVL would have been, which is what you campaigned for. If anything, less so! Now, CATOBAR is of course most effective solution, but it is also the most expensive one. A carrier you can afford is better than better carrier which you can’t. I might note that even RN abandoned CATOBAR. Order a carrier from the French you say? Well, their own CATOBAR design is if anything, even bigger economical disaster than Vik was. Hardly encouraging example there.

Originally I stated that STOVL was good enough to last the IN through to about 2015 I think it was. Well….the IN is going to run on with STOVL until at least that isnt it?. My contention was that the Invincible had come out of a 10yr refit in spring of ’03 and would be a decent replacement for Viraat allowing for the continued deployment of STOVL for a very modest cost. As it happens even that modest spend would have been considered a luxury as Viraat has soldiered on.

Essentially then I didnt campaign for STOVL…I campaigned for CATOBAR with STOVL serving its purpose until such time as CATOBAR was ready. Reality bears out that my prediction was sound and that STOVL has been adequate to the tasks required of the IN in the decade or so since this was last explored fully.

The RN didnt abandon CATOBAR…the RN could never afford CATOBAR on the budget provided and keep the other things it wanted to have. It made the choice for STOVL as it allowed for as much of the RAFs budget to be applied to Carrier Strike as possible…leaving funding for the frigates, UAV’s and other things we want. Seeing as we dont expect to be going carrier on carrier in blue water with QE STOVL’s just fine for what we need. That happy compromise is not available for the IN as they need to deploy in the full USN model to accomplish their taskings.

The French carrier was hobbled by the political decision to go nuclear when they didnt have a powerplant to do it (salutory lesson for Indians re IAC-2!!!). Their conventional carrier design prior to that was just fine…as any Brazillian naval officer you care to meet. The DCN Romeo/Juliette conventional hulls were cited as needing about 2.5bn Euro to deliver from French yards with European build costs and all the systems. A CATOBAR Fincantieri design stretched 10% or so from the current STOBAR IAC-1 or a simplified 50k ton variant of the DCN Romeo would have ballparked around the US$3-3.5bn built in Europe. Built in India you knock 25% off the top straight off?.

Start 2005 with Invincible coming over for frigate money. The plans in place for SHAR as happened are fine. There is then about 4 years to get the design sorted out for CATOBAR IAC-1, long lead orders placed, sort out consultancy and modernisation of Indian yards…then another 4 years for build plus 2 for trials, remediation and service entry. That timeline is ample. The spend, even if you get the first hull built and fitted out in France or Italy, is no more than has gone on Gorshkov and IAC alone and, again, you have the one single design that allows you to build up an efficient, sustainable, carrier force at the end of IAC-1. What happens to Invincible after the SHARS go is irrelevent…seeing the gap the IN has in ASW I’d suggest any remaining life would’ve been, ironically, best spent back as an ASW CVH…but they’d have had money’s worth by then!.

No way.

In the eastern Asia, pushing hard to make your opponent loose his face in the worst kind of brinkmanship anyone could think of. Being both India and China nuclear powers, I cannot help myself thinking there is no chance to see IN fighting against PLAN, even less in South China Sea. I would find a little more likely in the future a confrontation against Saudi Arabia and GCC if Oil supplies from Iran to India would be subjected to some form of blockade by them.

Not too sure I’m following your line of reasoning in this unfortunately?. Indian aims are for precisely the full aspect sea control capability that has been outlined. Right now the follow-on vessel to IAC-1 is conjectured to be on the drawing boads at 60k ton plus and CATOBAR and I’ve seen nothing official denying this. We know as fact that they have looked closely at E-2 and that the US were happy to sell, plus, we know that a US offer to participate in EMALS has been made. The question is not whether this is on the IN roadmap, it is what they want, its when it is finally going to be delivered.

If there are concerns about diplomatic sleights stemming from development of the Indian carrier programme they are not being very loudly communicated or supported anywhere!. In reality there is no reason they should either. Chinese carrier development, so far, is looking south and east at the SCS and Pacific and reinforcing a doctrinally defensive, access denial, posture and not an expeditionary one. Simply put the Chinese do not appear to be equipping navally to be able to overtly force their way west of Malacca. For the forseeable future Indian and Chinese naval interests do not conflict so the route to the face-threatening brinkmanship you mention looks quite vague?.