Aircraft Carrier Admiral Kuznetsov: News #2

kvs wrote:As the doggie barks, the Russian caravan moves on...

One rusty barge is not a caravan and it's not moving anywhere (except the bottom of the port)

The biggest gap VMF faces right now is the lack of a long persistence fixed wing AWACS in the navy, but even that could be made compatible with the Kuznetsov the way the Yak-44 was meant to be.

The factors that are important for AWACS platforms at sea are endurance, altitude, and antenna size... speed is unimportant as long as it can achieve more than 50 knots it can keep up with any ship.

An airship could be 100m long with a huge antenna array of small and large and enormous radar antenna elements... it could be unmanned and filled with hydrogen (in lift bags) and nitrogen (in other spaces to eliminate fire risk)... it could be made of modern strong fire proof materials like Kevlar and Nomex and carbon fibre.... it could be designs to operate at altitudes of 30km or higher... it would see everything from an enormous distance.

At 30km altitude blast waves are not effective so only fragments from a warhead would do damage, so even a direct hit from an AMRAAM will penetrate the structure and burst large numbers of hydrogen bags but with no oxygen there will be no fire and the loss of lift the airship with start to descend... all ballast could be dropped which would likely slow the descent to non lethal speeds... but with a radar 100m long you could fit self defence missiles and of course this thing is operating above a dozen of the latest Russian cruisers and destroyers and carriers so it will be very well defended... S-400s and S-500s from the ships below could intercept an AMRAAM and any aircraft that might have launched it... in fact the large missile of the S-350 missile family could take down anything getting anywhere near the airship.

Russia already have airship designs for use in mountains fitted with radar and radio repeating equipment to bounce radio and cell phone signals in mountain areas... they have sold some to China... they are designed to operate at 5km on a tether and can operate for 3 months at a time unmanned.

An all electric design with fuel cells and electric motors for station keeping... use solar panels, the fuel cells can create water ballast or hydrogen lifting gas as needed... even operating at 5km altitude it would see any low flying threats and stealth targets from enormous ranges... a 200m long model shaped like a wing with an enormous surface area on top for solar panels might be totally self sufficient in electrical power most of the time...

Which is why they are grateful for existence of Kuznetzov and Russian Navy's fragile ego which keeps it floating and eating away at funding

So why do they recommend they get rid of it?

(Kuznetzov defeating anything in open seas? It can't even stay afloat or recover an airplane)

How the fuck are you allowed to look after children, there was one problem with the arrester gear that led to the loss of two aircraft and you have written it off...

Y'all are starting to sound like that idiot who kept screaming about how Russia is completing 100k supercarriers in secret shipyards

Your comments might start making sense if we were, but nobody is.

Reality is that Kuznetzov is not being worked on, it's completely covered in snow and no workers are present

You are saying that it is covered in snow so it is not being worked on... Vann... how did you hack PDs account?

If it ever floats under it's own power again it will be solely as training pad for pilots as it has been reported

Reported by the Jamestown nazi collective.... supported by the Clinton foundation...

They already have two training facilities... the new ones they built because the Ukraine wouldn't let them use the Soviet site in the Crimea, and the site in the Crimea they can now use because it is now Russian territory.

It will never leave viewing distance from port again

As you said... remember these quotes for later...

One rusty barge is not a caravan and it's not moving anywhere (except the bottom of the port)

Yeah, Mistral was a helicopter barge too I seem to remember. The thing is that Russia has not got a lot of large vessels and so the ones she does have they need to be very careful with.

If they had the choice a complete upgrade of the Kirovs and Slavas and they could delay needing new Cruisers by a decade or so, but the reality of the situation is that these vessels are only getting minor upgrades so in the next 5 years they will be laying down brand new destroyer designs and not long after that a new cruiser design too.

The weapon potential on their new destroyers and cruisers will be eye watering, but like any air defence system it is handicapped by the platforms being limited to about 30 knots, and the speed and range of helicopters they might be carrying. A Ka-31 will allow them to spot low flying threats and enemy aircraft and plug to low altitude gap around the ships, or gaps created by ships or islands that could be exploited by an enemy, but a proper AWACS platform makes rather more sense and is rather more effective along with a fighter air group that could be launched both in peace and war time to simply fly out a few hundred kilometres to intercept a target in international airspace and determine if it is friendly or hostile... without fighters you have to guess... and the costs of getting it wrong can be heavy... whether it is a civilian airliner with hundreds of civilians on board or a civilian airliner with extra fuel and a suicide pilot on board...

Situational awareness is critical, and is often the difference between winning and losing... we have seen it time and time again... Syrian air defence forces seeing parts of the picture took down 71 threats out of 103. A smart enemy looked at Saudi assets and determined what they could see and where and used that information to mount an attack so that the weapons.... drones and cruise missiles approached too low or too slow or from a direction not being monitored and successfully penetrated an air defence that was equipped with some of the best systems the west makes.

The enemy is going to try to bypass your defences and try to take advantages of your weaknesses... a big carrier is not a weakness... it adds depth and fire power and situational awareness that smaller carriers cannot provide.

On land most would agree that the F-35 would struggle against Su-35s... a small carrier would need the development of a Russian F-35 which will take a bare minimum of 15 years with VSTOL capability... plus the extra cost of an AWACS platform that can also operate from a small carrier.

A small carrier with VSTOL fighters does not mean you save money not needing EMALS... what it means is that all the fixed wing aircraft on board will need EMALS assistance to get airborne with full loads, whereas a big carrier might only use EMALS for AWACS takeoffs.

A bigger carrier can carry more but it does not have to, it might only carry 36 fighters instead of 60 odd fighters, and use the extra space the 24 other aircraft are not taking up for other things or just use the storage and spare parts and ammo and fuel for 60 fighters to maintain and operate 36 planes for longer times between needing to be resupplied.

TMA1 wrote:papadragon has made some great posts. only issue is he really, REALLY, does not like Russia's legacy AC haha.

He's also not a fan of "Trampoline Man" Rogozin or his effort in running Roskosmos.

Su-33 sucks when compared to modern fighters. Unless they upgrade them to su-35 standard they should throw them in garbage and use only mig-29K.

The Russian Navy never had the funding or the interest to have super planes... you are mistaking them for the west.

What naval person worth their salt wants to spend big money on aircraft... you spend money on ships and subs and missiles... the planes are there to deliver the missiles.

An Su-33 has good flight range and lots of weapons pylons and will be operating under the umbrella equivalent to hundreds of S-350 and S-400 and eventually S-500 as well as Pantsir and TOR batteries... it probably wont get to do much actual fighting in combat... more likely inspection and ID during peace time and possibly carriage and launch of 2.5 ton air launched Zircon variants.

It will get minor upgrades but nothing radical... they had an Su-33KUB upgrade that was a bit like an Su-34 upgrade but even more including active wings instead of just flaps and slats to change the wing shape, but it cost too much and was rejected.

The MiG-29KR was put into production for India so they tagged their own orders on the end of that so they didn't have to pay for tooling and setting up production.

If they build new CVNs in the 80-90K ton weight range I would think it would be guaranteed they will have Su-57s, with MiGs in support... MiG-29KR to start and LMFS later on.

It's not a surprise they send it for a major upgrade after seeing what it did in Syria. But even the upgrade was full of accidents.

That is the way things work though... you give something a real world test and then decide what needs to be upgraded and altered or just fixed.

There was a Chinese ship and an American ship that also caught fire during upgrades/routine maintenance, so while not desirable it is not unusual either.

Kuznetsov is the exemple of what a carrier shouldn't be. Chinese and indians have similar carriers and do better than the Russians.

How can you say they are better when they have never been to war... we really don't know how well they would perform...

And lets face it the real test in Syria is not about can the planes take off and land. One problem with arrester gear that could not be repaired in place caused the loss of two aircraft, and the 5 year olds here get really upset about that... the tantrums are amusing...

But you are a grown up... you understand that getting planes to fly off the deck and then come back is the easy shit... the real hard shit that never enters into exercises or training is going to a real world place and finding real world badguys and having the C4IR to track down their locations in real time and create a mission to fly there and drop real weapons without hitting a Chinese embassy or a baby milk factory and to kill the target without destroying $50 worth of enemy junk using a 20 million dollar super precision guided missile... but using a 5000 dollar 500kg bomb to kill a group of terrorists and their bomb making factory.

After they lost those two planes they kept working, they planned the missions on board and went through the motions like it was happening from the carrier even though the flights were from a land base. All the procedures including the attack and the attack evaluations and planning any further follow up strikes were done from the carrier like it was a carrier based operation.

That is why it was a success and that is why it was worth while and I don't know whether China or India could do the same with their carriers but to be honest I really don't think they could.

Their arrester gear might work flawlessly, and I would think Indias MiG-29KRs should be able to drop dumb bombs with that level of accuracy, but would it be on the correct hill? There was no enemy air activity so China would be able to use Su-33 clones for the job but would they know what to attack and they likely would have to use more expensive laser guided weapons to hit the target as accurately as these upgraded Russian Su-33s did with iron bombs from altitude.

Writing off the Kuznetsov is like writing off all Indian and Chinese carriers because they are directly related... if one is shit then they all are.

Makes you wonder why they have persisted with the K, but that is obvious isn't it... they are not going to make a fixed wing full sized aircraft carrier till they have cruisers and destroyers that can operate with it. And making a mini carrier would be the dumbest move they could possibly make... though if they were going to do that the K would already be gone... no point keeping a big one if you are going to make small ones and you would make the small fixed wing carriers before you bothered making helicopter landing ships... a small fixed wing carrier doesn't need helicopter landing ships for normal operations but a helicopter landing ship needs fixed wing aircraft support... so the first two helicopter carriers would be VSTOL air defence carriers... and they would likely make 8 of them... four aircraft carriers with VSTOL fighters and four helicopter carriers.

But they are keeping the K and making the helicopter carriers with helicopter fighters with AESA radars in the form of the Ka-52K first.

Well they also need to use it properly. Most of the drawbacks in Syria were because of poor maintenance or bad decisions.

The only problem with the Kuznetsov in Syria was the arrester gear gearbox was faulty.

It they had been able to fix it on site they could have continued operating as normal.

The old were totally destroyed yet they changed only half of them.

Would be interesting to find out how you knew they were all destroyed, and certainly interesting to find out why you think they would replace only half of them if you think all were destroyed.

It's the military that turned this ship into a useless barge and the repair may just be to keep a carrier for formation untill a new one arrives.

For goodness sake... there is blame for everyone isn't there... can't possibly be that an air defence carrier is only useful when your navy is operating away from ground based defences and that for the last 30 years the Russian Navy has had no reason to piss away money operating a long way away from Russian waters for long enough periods to justify an aircraft carrier escort... but they should have spent top dollar on it and kept it in perfect nick... maybe take the money away from the Poseidon programme, or maybe Bulava... or Husky...

Cables even snap on US carriers. They were running the Kuz hard. In real combat. Something China or India haven't done in their dreams. If I recall , one of the jet losses in the Syria op was just because they ran it out of fuel because it wasn't calculated right

Cables do snap... quite regularly... that is why there are four or five lined up for each landing and they can be replaced very quickly and easily....

Having a cable snap is not a big deal... the plane normally follows through and comes around straight away and has another go on the 3 or 4 remaining wires.

Two wires snapping is very unlikely... they are normally used dozens of times before they fail.

To lose two aircraft including a Flanker that ran out of fuel suggests multiple attempts to land that failed, which likely means multiple failed cables.

Cables don't fail like that.

The cables are attached to arrester gears so when the hook of the plane catches them they don't immediately pull tight... they are not strong enough to stop a plane based on their strength alone. They are normally attached to a gearbox that starts out relatively firm but able to feed out several metres of cable but it gets tighter and tighter till it stops. A faulty gearbox means the cable will be tight and will snap immediately every time.

Per Wikipedia, it says that the refit is supposed to extend the life of the boat for 25 years. That article a couple pages back said it would extend the life for 5 years.dunno
Refit

A carrier will have a useful life of half a century or more, and different refits and upgrades will be for different periods... it might be that they are doing a temporary refit but a refit to last 5 years makes no sense after 5 years it will likely only have been back in the water for 3 or 4 years. In that short space of time it is likely not long enough to look at the situation with new destroyers and new cruisers and potential new carriers and the decide whether to fully upgrade it with all new weapons and systems and equipment including cats and perhaps even improved propulsion design... maybe even a small nuclear propulsion system to boost the boilers, or whatever, or they might just use it as a training carrier and accelerate their first CVN.

Building destroyers and cruisers will mean production of large AESA radar arrays and other large systems that wont fit on smaller lighter ships, and of course putting weapons into very large scale service which makes them more useful too.

The ship was sitting at port since 1991 and used only to keep a carrier aviation training so it's more a barge than a carrier.

Which makes French presidents brains beef stew... well they don't use them as brains now do they...

Please entertain the Chinese threads on their barges that have never done anything either, or the Indian thread... their barges have been absolutely critical...

Su-33 are already getting replaced by mig-29K. They don't even produce su-33 which is totally outdated. It's ground counterpart is su-27P which was replaced by the su-27SM/SM2/SM3 then su-30SM then su-35 then su-57.

Its range and speed are fine and its level of manouver are fine too. With R-77-1s it should be as capable as a fighter as any other carrier aircraft currently in use.

They already have 5 new sukhoi class of fighter in the flanker family. So yeah its totally outdated.

Yet it could murder Libyans by the thousands just like the Rafales did...

You have pictures of the boilers when they were changed. They looked like destroyed and not just old and used. And they changed only half of them.

Looked destroyed like 103 targets in Syria destroyed?

It was sent to a real operation and failed. What they learned was either scrap it or improve it. The choice was quickly made.

It was sent on a real operation in Syria and it did its job. There was a problem with the arrester gear so it could not recover fighter aircraft till that was repaired, but it achieved its mission and did its job.

Again I'm not saying the ship is shitty but russians use it like an old prostitue. Indians and Chinese often sail their carriers, probably even more than russians since 1991, and have no problems with them.

Which missions have these Chinese and Indian boats accomplished... for that matter I would say French Rafales murdering some Libyan civilians and starting a civil war that reduced a functioning successful country into chaos that destroyed that country and whose people are still paying the ultimate price for Frances interference are not as good as the Su-33s and MiG-29s that were launched from the Kuznetsov and land based airfields that killed terrorists and criminals and helped keep Syria as a viable functioning state... I say keep the junk and the trash planes...

The ratio incident/time of use shows their carriers are billion times better than the kuznetsov.

The ratio of cables snapping when the arrester gear is not working is 100%... it is not a cable issue it is an arrester gear issue... the fact that you don't understand this after I have said this plenty of times seems to me to you be stirring the pot... or just being a bit thick, and I don't think it is the latter.

It just shiped 7 fighters and 2 choppers to Hmeimim and waited off the coast.

They were testing new upgrades and new features and also new tactics and new communications and strategies.

They hardly needed any more fighters to test if they can locate a target and organise a flight to go and attack the target and then determine if follow up attacks are needed using cheap simple dumb iron bombs from 10km altitude with aircraft that don't need escorts.

China and India use theirs more often. Using it for training or some easy bombing in the desert against a very very very weak enemy is not different.

You keep saying they use them more often but where and when?

What terrorist targets have they defeated with air power, how many missions... what is their mission rate... why would that matter if they can't find targets to attack in the first place?

Syria was more a test than a real deployment BTW.

It would not have been a test if it was not a real deployment...

Wow, such a Russian fail. Not a shred of effort to evaluate the actual functionality of the Su-33.

Obviously it is not capable if it doesn't cost more than 200 million a plane...