Aircraft Carrier Admiral Kuznetsov: News #2

"In general, the modernization of the cruiser is that all systems are removed from it and the most modern ones are installed instead."

GarryB wrote:The British ships are not terrible, though if I was paying the bills I would have looked into making four ships where three were made into cruisers and only one was an aircraft carrier.

(I pointed out the British and the US have problems with their ships not to suggest they are bad or should all be scrapped too, but to point out that ships of this size are essentially floating small towns with water and sewerage and power and communication and transport and other needs that need to operate 24/7 all year round... they are complex things that not just anyone can manage to operate let alone build.)

They got their first carrier cheaper by buying two and the cost of cancelling the second carrier would have been almost as expensive as finishing both ships so that is what they did.

I also would have gone for Rafales instead of F-35s despite their price... they are at least combat proven and are fully operational... unlike the F-35.... and worse they seem more interested in hiding problems than with dealing with them and making the plane good.

They planned to have 12 new destroyers that they could use to escort these carriers but then they cut the budget and only got 6 and it turns out they have lots of problems too, meaning they have more carriers than they need and not enough other ships to operate with them.

A carrier is not cheap and if you try to make it cheap you end up with something less able to do a good job which means often you can't do the job properly or you have to use two and two smaller carriers often end up more expensive than one really big one that can do the job in the first place.

The Kuznetsov is no where near perfect... it was always a stopgap for the Ulyanovsk nuclear powered ship with cats and rather more aircraft.

This current upgrade of the Kuznetsov will have to include a lot more aviation fuel and lots of new guided aircraft ordinance because the old Kuz was designed as a carrier of fighter aircraft and helicopter AEW Ka-31s, but with new multirole aircraft the new Kuz needs all sorts of air to ground and air to air ordinance.

Having two types of fighters is good... right now it is Su-33s and MiG-29KRs which can perform different missions and compliment each other where the Su-33s are long range and can carry lots of air to air missiles, while the MiGs have a shorter range but good air to air weapons and are just as fast as the bigger aircraft while being smaller so more aircraft can be carried.

In the future perhaps the Su-33s might get replaced by Su-57Ks and the MiG-29KRs replaced by the new MiG light fighter designs.

Will be interesting to see what version of naval TOR they are going to carry and if they have modified the launchers to increase their capacity.

The British Royal Navy’s largest and most costly warship the aircraft carrier HMS Prince of Wales is currently being stripped for parts, after multiple performance issues culminating in incidents of flooding and major mechanical failures forced the new ship into a long period of repairs. Not only have items such as oil and fuel filters been stripped from the ship, but flight deck lifts used to carry aircraft up from hangars have also been removed entirely. Among other issues, the Prince of Wales’ propellers are currently being replaced in dry dock in Scotland, although its period out of sea may be extended considerably as parts are used to replace those which have broken on the carrier’s similarly troubled sister ship HMS Queen Elizabeth. The Prince of Wales had set out to the United States in August 2022 when technical issues forced it to return to port just 24 hours into its voyage, by which time it had only reached as far as the coast of the Isle of Wight. The cost of repairing the ship are estimated at over $30 million, with the Royal Navy’s goal of returning it to service in the Autumn of 2023 considered unlikely to be reached.

Preceding the ship’s failure in August 2022, in December 2020 HMS Prince of Wales suffered serious flooding which was expected to take at least six months to repair. The floods occurred while the warship was in dock in Portsmouth and resulted from faulty pipes, with footage of flooding below decks, including water pouring down concrete stairs and submerging electrical cabinets, and filling an engine compartment with at least three feet of water, having been released by local media. The Sun reported that “thousands of gallons of seawater poured into an engine room and submerged electrical cabinets for over 24 hours,” with necessary repairs expected to be highly costly. HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Queen Elizabeth have hardly been isolated in the issues they have faced, with ships across the British surface fleet proving similarly problematic. The country’s sole class of destroyer the Type 45 Class, which are heavily relied on to provide air defence to carrier groups, has proven among the most problematic with issues affecting almost all areas of performance and particularly their availability rates. Five of the six ships having been out of service in 2021 as a result for an availability rate of just 17 percent. British carrier air wings built around the F-35B fighter have also proven highly problematic, both due to the major performance and availability issues the aircraft continues to face, as well as due to delays to production and Britain’s inability to finance acquisitions on the scale previously considered necessary to furnish two aircraft carriers. An F-35B operating from HMS Queen Elizabeth fell into the sea in an accident near Cyprus in November 2021 - a major loss considering the class’ cost of over $130 million per airframe.

GarryB wrote:The British ships are not terrible, though if I was paying the bills I would have looked into making four ships where three were made into cruisers and only one was an aircraft carrier.

(I pointed out the British and the US have problems with their ships not to suggest they are bad or should all be scrapped too, but to point out that ships of this size are essentially floating small towns with water and sewerage and power and communication and transport and other needs that need to operate 24/7 all year round... they are complex things that not just anyone can manage to operate let alone build.)

They got their first carrier cheaper by buying two and the cost of cancelling the second carrier would have been almost as expensive as finishing both ships so that is what they did.

I also would have gone for Rafales instead of F-35s despite their price... they are at least combat proven and are fully operational... unlike the F-35.... and worse they seem more interested in hiding problems than with dealing with them and making the plane good.

They planned to have 12 new destroyers that they could use to escort these carriers but then they cut the budget and only got 6 and it turns out they have lots of problems too, meaning they have more carriers than they need and not enough other ships to operate with them.

A carrier is not cheap and if you try to make it cheap you end up with something less able to do a good job which means often you can't do the job properly or you have to use two and two smaller carriers often end up more expensive than one really big one that can do the job in the first place.

The Kuznetsov is no where near perfect... it was always a stopgap for the Ulyanovsk nuclear powered ship with cats and rather more aircraft.

This current upgrade of the Kuznetsov will have to include a lot more aviation fuel and lots of new guided aircraft ordinance because the old Kuz was designed as a carrier of fighter aircraft and helicopter AEW Ka-31s, but with new multirole aircraft the new Kuz needs all sorts of air to ground and air to air ordinance.

Having two types of fighters is good... right now it is Su-33s and MiG-29KRs which can perform different missions and compliment each other where the Su-33s are long range and can carry lots of air to air missiles, while the MiGs have a shorter range but good air to air weapons and are just as fast as the bigger aircraft while being smaller so more aircraft can be carried.

In the future perhaps the Su-33s might get replaced by Su-57Ks and the MiG-29KRs replaced by the new MiG light fighter designs.

Will be interesting to see what version of naval TOR they are going to carry and if they have modified the launchers to increase their capacity.

GarryB wrote:

Yes its a good choice to increase the weapons for the airwing, in fact i hope they cut out the SSN-19 altogheter to make more room for aditional planes and or airwing weapons.
No usuks is needed on a carrier.
Or drones of course.

Welcome back... has been a while...

The thing with the SS-N-19s is that they were located in a place that isolated them from everything with heavy bulkheads to reduce the risk of fires spreading to or from the missiles to the rest of the ship, which means taking the section out and replacing it with something else would actually be rather problematic.

I thought for a bit that it could be used as a bunker for ordinance for aircraft with its own lift to bring it up on deck to load onto an aircraft, but it is well forward and not an ideal place for that.

I actually think the UKSK launcher would be the best solution because the bulkhead and isolation would be useful and they could probably fit two or three UKSK-M launchers in there.

Keep in mind that the UKSK-M is a universal carrier that can carry anti ship and land attack missiles of course, but it can also carry anti sub missiles too and could probably be used in an anti torpedo role too.

In terms of submarine use you could load it up with long range anti sub missiles so you can send out helicopters to hunt for subs and if they find something a missile can be fired from the carrier 80-100km away that splashes down into the water near the sub with a modern fast torpedo that chases down and kills the sub.

Very fast engagement because the missile flys at mach two in the air so it gets to the sub fast and with no warning, and then it is in the water within a kilometre of the sub which gives the sub very little time to react and do anything.

This means you helicopters can operate lighter without the need for carrying torpedoes and therefore operate longer further away from the ship.

Of course the other ships operating with the carrier could also launch an anti sub weapon too.

The UKSK-M can carry large SAMs which the carrier could use to defend itself too.