Future Russian Aircraft Carriers and Deck Aviation. #2

Isos wrote:

What are smoking. Russia has upgraded its soviet era SSN and is building Yasen in decent number while the design bureau are working on Husky class. In 5 years the gap will be even bigger since they will get state of art Yasen M.


No they aren't. Lot of ships doesn't mean good navy.

Japan easily tracks their subs just like russian or US sub are tracking them unnoticed to fill their database with recordings.

Their area of deployement is mostly their port or chinese coast. Lack of training. And if they go outside their usual area of deployement they will be at disadvantage of terrain because US, Japan and Russia have mapped the sea much better than them over the years.

Well,well,well: such a thing would open a lot of possibilities of collaboration between Russia and China, one got expertise, the other productive capacity.

Well,well,well: such a thing would open a lot of possibilities of collaboration between Russia and China, one got expertise, the other productive capacity.

No it opens nothing.

Why would they give all the job to China. They have their own shipyards and workers.

They already made the mistakes to give them sukhois and air defence systems. Now they are copying everything and try yo sell them on export.

GarryB wrote:Not so much an issue for a Russian carrier because they wont be carrying strike aircraft and the fighters and AWACS are there to protect the fleet, not invade some country.

Certainly not a problem for VMF. It is amazing to what level the USN has taken their bizarre focus on land attack to the point of conditioning every aspect of the carriers operations, carrier size and design, weapons, size and characteristics of the air wing etc. For VMF a far smaller air wing with fighters of better A2A capacities and good AShM would be the right thing, at a fraction of the cost and with much smaller vulnerability than the USN approach. This US doctrinal distortion is the reason for the rejection of carriers by so many people.

LMFS wrote:

GarryB wrote:Not so much an issue for a Russian carrier because they wont be carrying strike aircraft and the fighters and AWACS are there to protect the fleet, not invade some country.

Certainly not a problem for VMF. It is amazing to what level the USN has taken their bizarre focus on land attack to the point of conditioning every aspect of the carriers operations, carrier size and design, weapons, size and characteristics of the air wing etc. For VMF a far smaller air wing with fighters of better A2A capacities and good AShM would be the right thing, at a fraction of the cost and with much smaller vulnerability than the USN approach. This US doctrinal distortion is the reason for the rejection of carriers by so many people.

They have a huge number advantage that they didn't need to spend more on defence. Untill yesterday only Russia with kh-22 had a chance against them.

All the rest could be anhilated by their f-18 and harpoons.

Now lot of countries are developing long range missiles and are buying multi role fighters that can do anti shiping and anti air missions.

Old mig-29A/B or the few mirage that were sold to 3rd world countries couldn't do anything against them. Neither missile boats could get close to their navy.

Backman wrote:

mnztr wrote:

miketheterrible wrote:

Yes, it's definately not bad. But having family in military in Canada, where they are paid more and have better benefits, in the end, majority barely has a dollar to spend on at the end.

I know a few who used the years they were in the army to buy a house. Which to that I salute them for their money management skills.  So there is that.

If they were smart, most would invest that money in the stock market, like in dividends in national banks that never fail.

Some have, walked out rather wealthy.  But anyone can do that with even small amount of money.

Canada promotes very quickly and has the highest percentage of officers in any military. I once inquired about joning the pilot program and you start at around 60K a year and are making 90 within a year if you have a university education. Problem with being a pilot in Canada is all bases are in places you would not want to live...except maybe Comox BC.

Im from Vancouver but had an oilfield career in Edmonton. Edmonton isn't as bad as it looks. I loved it there.

90k is great except taxes. You'd be paying 20- 25% income tax all in. Russia's income tax is a flat 13%. 9% for business owners.

You get a lot of tax free perqs when based overseas only fighter bases are in Cold Lake and Bagotville. Both a long drive to civilization. 75 K net is super when you are in a rural area, and get food and accomodation while on base. All the bases are rural unlike the USA.

LMFS wrote:

In general I don't see any combat capability of the unmanned ships that manned don't have, and in fact they appear to be a cheap approach to military capacities, since there will be no one to repair potential failures or combat damage. They will be more compact for sure, but steel is not the most expensive component of ships. All navies will adopt unmanned vehicles

Unmanned ships are perfect for flotilla use, a small 500T ship with 1 or 2 USKS and a remote 30 mm gun turret with a radar that can send data to the command ship for processing. You can put those way out there with little fear of attack. Cheap and they do not need many of the super expensive computers as the data can be processed on the command ship. All they send is raw data and video. For sea handling the ship can be semi submersible and completely airtight with snorkel intakes for the engine. Maybe even smaller is possible 200T or so.

GarryB wrote:
Launching strike aircraft makes no sense if you are not launching fighter escorts and jammer aircraft to help them penetrate enemy air defences...

Not so much an issue for a Russian carrier because they wont be carrying strike aircraft and the fighters and AWACS are there to protect the fleet, not invade some country.

I don't understand how you protect the fleet by not carrying strike aircraft. After all you will need to attack carriers, cruisers, destroyers, subs and frigates no? The SU-57 is a superb multirole fighter with a growing array of air to surface weapons, and the only time the Kuz has been used in battle is for strike. If they have LPDs you can bet the carrier will go along if they are landing troops and the carrier will launch strikes. I say arm the carrier with Mig-29K first and augment then replace with SU-57.

Isos wrote:

Does this mean that China has reached the same level as Russia in capabilities? Probobly not, but they have catched up quite a bit. Will this trend continue for 5 to 10 years i would say they have surpassed them.

What are smoking. Russia has upgraded its soviet era SSN and is building Yasen in decent number while the design bureau are working on Husky class. In 5 years the gap will be even bigger since they will get state of art Yasen M.

Their area of deployement is mostly their port or chinese coast. Lack of training. And if they go outside their usual area of deployement they will be at disadvantage of terrain because US, Japan and Russia have mapped the sea much better than them over the years.

And China will stop develop new submarine classes you mean? The type 095 and 096 is in the pipeline and should be an even better improvement.

The difference is also that when Chinas military leaders are happy with the result the Chines leaders can throw money on the construction and pump the subs out in a fast pase. That what we seen in all other naval classes, the type-052D destroyer, the type 054A frigate, the type 071 transport dock, the Type 041 Yuan SSK and so on.

Isos wrote:They have a huge number advantage that they didn't need to spend more on defence. Untill yesterday only Russia with kh-22 had a chance against them.

All the rest could be anhilated by their f-18 and harpoons.

Now lot of countries are developing long range missiles and are buying multi role fighters that can do anti shiping and anti air missions.

Old mig-29A/B or the few mirage that were sold to 3rd world countries couldn't do anything against them. Neither missile boats could get close to their navy.

It was absurd then and it is absurd now to focus on land attack missions, before they killed the F-14 at least they had a proper air superiority plane, now they must be praying for Russia to be fool enough to not take advantage with Su-57K

LMFS wrote:

It was absurd then and it is absurd now to focus on land attack missions, before they killed the F-14 at least they had a proper air superiority plane, now they must be praying for Russia to be fool enough to not take advantage with Su-57K

The F-14 was aready quite useless for air superiority. IMHO its a plane that has a much higher reputation then its ability. It has poor manuverability, it has a good (for the time) radar and decent LR missiles. As the range of AShMs grew it kinda became irrelevant. USA has decided the Carriers will not be useful against Russia so just equip them with trucks to dump on weak countries.

mnztr wrote:The F-14 was aready quite useless for air superiority. IMHO its a plane that has a much higher reputation then its ability. It has poor manuverability, it has a good (for the time) radar and decent LR missiles. As the range of AShMs grew it kinda became irrelevant. USA has decided the Carriers will not be useful against Russia so just equip them with trucks to dump on weak countries.

Not really, the F-14 was excellent in terms of payload and range, so it was a great bomb truck too, with the advantage that it had the type of airframe needed for exactly the same roles NGAD is being proposed, barring the stealth element, whose effectiveness is far from easy to judge. Destroying the tooling for the F-14 was an abject fuckup or worse open treason.



Not to talk about many modern variants that were proposed and that would have allowed to preserve air superiority for the USN instead of losing it miserably.




The carriers, again, are not useful against the territories of powerful enemies, but for keeping open ways of sea communication to places of interest for the country and to deploy / protect forces far from the homeland.

The sad reality for US nowadays and for the foreseeable future is that a potential Russian naval group comprising a modern carrier with 3 sqd Su-57K and their escort could contain almost any number of forces the USN could realistically throw at it. So they have spent big time in numbers but surrendered the qualitative element, giving Russia the opportunity in the coming years to offset the huge quantitative advantage of the USN for relatively little money.

It has combat range of about 200km more then then F-18 but much lower payload. (6.6T vs 8T) it is also a significantly larger plane. Also a very expensive platform to operate. At the end it was not really even used as an air to air platform. It is ancient tech, no one is building swing wing planes anymore.

mnztr wrote:It has combat range of about 200km more then then F-18 but much lower payload. (6.6T vs 8T) it is also a significantly larger plane.  Also a very expensive platform to operate. At the end it was not really even used as an air to air platform. It is ancient tech, no one is building swing wing planes anymore.

Maybe you want to read about the advanced variants.

Swing wings have very nice advantages and are actually smart for a naval fighter. There have been also modern proposals with such geometry

And China will stop develop new submarine classes you mean? The type 095 and 096 is in the pipeline and should be an even better improvement.

The difference is also that when Chinas military leaders are happy with the result the Chines leaders can throw money on the construction and pump the subs out in a fast pase. That what we seen in all other naval classes, the type-052D destroyer, the type 054A frigate, the type 071 transport dock, the Type 041 Yuan SSK and so on.

It's not because they are build today that they will be good.

Yasen or Virginia are the achivement of 70 yeard of R&D and tests and what not.

China is barely starting. Building a SSN isn't the same as taking an Iphone and making a copy. They will need quite a long time before catching up.

In terms of numbers they already have more ships than US. Yet they rule on nothing. They can't even rule on south china sea. Building more ships won't help. They suck.

Their economy could sustain their needs. But now they are becoming a rich country. Population wants more money, producing in China is just as expensive as in the west, western firms will go away and they will be hit by an economic crisis. A growth of less than 10% is already a crisis for them. They won't be able to sustain such big army. Statistics also say their population will drop to 700-800 million in 2100.

Their future isn't as bright as it seems. All these ships will rust at port soon.

It has combat range of about 200km more then then F-18 but much lower payload. (6.6T vs 8T) it is also a significantly larger plane. Also a very expensive platform to operate. At the end it was not really even used as an air to air platform. It is ancient tech, no one is building swing wing planes anymore.

But the advantage against USSR is that its speed and Phoenix missiles gave them a chance to hunt Tupolevs which was the main enemy for their carriers. F-18 has no chance to intercept a tu-22M launching its kh-32 from 1000km away.

By now f-14 would have had a radar like Irbis E to spot them 500km away and a phoenix with 400-500km range.

LMFS wrote:

mnztr wrote:It has combat range of about 200km more then then F-18 but much lower payload. (6.6T vs 8T) it is also a significantly larger plane.  Also a very expensive platform to operate. At the end it was not really even used as an air to air platform. It is ancient tech, no one is building swing wing planes anymore.

Maybe you want to read about the advanced variants.

Swing wings have very nice advantages and are actually smart for a naval fighter. There have been also modern proposals with such geometry

Hmm I had no idea swing wings still had some sort of relavance. The Panavia Tornado was IMHO probably the most successful swing wing design IMHO. I thought modern aerodesign made them obsolete?

mnztr wrote:Hmm I had no idea swing wings still had some sort of relavance. The Panavia Tornado was IMHO probably the most successful swing wing design IMHO. I thought modern aerodesign made them obsolete?

I am not sure, but I guess it depends on the application and what other options there are. Naval fighters normally have foldable wings and overload tolerances between 7 and 8 g, the Tomcat had 7.5 g so the same as the F/A-18E/F, despite the bearing of the wing being certainly a part under high stress. The wing in minimum sweep is great for low stall speed (carrier TO and landing) and good L/D at cruising speeds, at maximum it gives small footprint at the carrier and very low drag / high speed, so it has some appealing indeed.

Is the russian navy hampered in detecting subsonic sea skimming AShMs(especially stealthy ones like the kongsberg NSM, LRASM and storm shadow) over the horizon by lacking naval AWACS like the E2?

I'm more worried about russian naval groups detecting massed missiles salvos too late. Would it be possible to just build a light carrier that carries unmanned AWACS drones with long loitering capability?

kvs wrote:

limb wrote:Is the russian navy hampered in detecting subsonic sea skimming AShMs(especially stealthy ones like the kongsberg NSM, LRASM and storm shadow) over the horizon by lacking naval AWACS like the E2?

I'm more worried about russian naval groups detecting massed missiles salvos too late. Would it be possible to just build a light carrier that carries unmanned AWACS drones with long loitering capability?

That does not add up.   They would be aware long ago of any such detection gap.   And this is not 1994 where they have no money for
anything and are being sold down the river by a stooge in the Kremlin.  

AWACS will be the first things to be dropped in any serious conflict.   So that leaves alternative means.   Frankly, the nondetectability of sea surface
skimming missiles is something that follows from simplistic approaches dating back to the 1950s with monochrome radar systems.   No-line of sight,
hence no return signal.   But that is not all there is to it.

https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a381980.pdf

High frequency over horizon ship-based radars are possible and the real challenge is signal processing to extract the information needed.
Modern computing and high gain radar elements enable practical deployment of such detection systems.   Hypersonic missiles are actually
a way to deal with such detection.   NATzO subsonic AShMs are not a big threat to Russia's navy.

Correct me if I'm wrong I thought that its a matter of physical laws that OTH radar is inherently less accurate than direct LOS radar as one found on an AWACS which can detect missiles by flying high, something about the athmosphere scattering radar waves. Why did the russians use their helicopters' for early warning and guidance of missiles then? I assume they don't do it now since OTH radars have advanced sufficiently

Russia cannot destroy E2s since they operate close to the carrier group and they have no long ranged carrier born fighters that can come into range.

Well,well,well: such a thing would open a lot of possibilities of collaboration between Russia and China, one got expertise, the other productive capacity.

Russia has spend time and money investing in all the technologies that go into building modern military ships and subs... no reason to hand production to China.

This US doctrinal distortion is the reason for the rejection of carriers by so many people.

Yes, an imperial tool to keep the lower orders in line... Russia does not need that.

They have a huge number advantage that they didn't need to spend more on defence. Untill yesterday only Russia with kh-22 had a chance against them.

No they didn't... that number advantage had to cover the whole planet, and the various different heavy anti ship weapon the Soviets deployed very few had counters that would work against them on the US side.

All the rest could be anhilated by their f-18 and harpoons.

In Syria the Syrian air defences were not coordinated and were rather weak... in comparison a Soviet naval surface group has a very potent air defence network and against low flying subsonic missile attack they likely would have been able to shoot down all Harpoons fired at them...

Old mig-29A/B or the few mirage that were sold to 3rd world countries couldn't do anything against them. Neither missile boats could get close to their navy.

The US Navy never sailed close to anything that could touch them. Leading to rather skewed results.

Unmanned ships are perfect for flotilla use, a small 500T ship with 1 or 2 USKS and a remote 30 mm gun turret with a radar that can send data to the command ship for processing. You can put those way out there with little fear of attack.

Why little fear of attack?

They would be easily torpedoed and sunk.

Cheap and they do not need many of the super expensive computers as the data can be processed on the command ship.

Two way data communication would give away the location of both platforms.... Zircon for both.

All they send is raw data and video. For sea handling the ship can be semi submersible and completely airtight with snorkel intakes for the engine. Maybe even smaller is possible 200T or so.

Torpedo would still sink it.

I don't understand how you protect the fleet by not carrying strike aircraft.

That is the problem... you think the Russian Navy will get CVNs and then change tactics and doctrine and immediately become the US Navy.

After all you will need to attack carriers, cruisers, destroyers, subs and frigates no?

Russian surface groups already attack carriers and cruisers and destroyers and subs and frigates... ship and sub launched missiles can continue to perform those roles.

The SU-57 is a superb multirole fighter with a growing array of air to surface weapons,

Russian ships will have hypersonic missiles reaching hundreds or thousands of kilometres already... why use a mach 1.7 aircraft when you can use a mach 10 missile that wont need support or assistance.

and the only time the Kuz has been used in battle is for strike.

They were testing new capabilities but the primary role of the carrier was generating combat experience. Against some targets an aircraft might be used but against most targets a cruise missile would have been launched to hit the target instead... how many carrier launched aircraft can hit targets 5,000km away.

If they have LPDs you can bet the carrier will go along if they are landing troops and the carrier will launch strikes.

The helicopter carriers they are making at the moment have transport helicopters and also Ka-52 attack helicopters directly related to the land based Ka-52 recon helicopters... I would say there is a very good probability that the recon attack helicopters will find targets and call in strikes from naval gun support rather than fixed wing aircraft.

And China will stop develop new submarine classes you mean?

What access do they have to the latest technology going in to Russian or American subs that will allow them to do better in 5 years time?

Half the technology used in Russian subs have no foreign analogs.

The F-14 was aready quite useless for air superiority.

The F-14 was their only aircraft with any chance of stopping a Backfire attack from succeeding.

It has poor manuverability,

Its job was to shoot down heavy aircraft like Backfires and Bears and also any anti ship missile already launched... its ability to manoeuvre is meaningless... much like the MIG-31s lack of manoeuvrability and for the same reasons.

As the range of AShMs grew it kinda became irrelevant.

The Kh-22M and Kh-32 were specifically designed to bypass the missiles the Tomcat carried...

It has combat range of about 200km more then then F-18 but much lower payload. (6.6T vs 8T) it is also a significantly larger plane.

It is also faster... in terms of interception flight speed and missile range are the critical factors and the F-14 beats the F-18 on both counts.

Also a very expensive platform to operate.

So they said, but both the Super Hornet and the F-35 have made it seem rather cheap in comparison.... the land based F-35 costs 70K US dollars an hour to operate... the Tomcat cost a fraction of that despite being bigger and faster and longer ranged...

At the end it was not really even used as an air to air platform. It is ancient tech, no one is building swing wing planes anymore.

Funny you say that because at the end of its life it was the only US aircraft that could operate over Afghanistan from carriers so it was actually performing air to ground duties using LANTIRN III pods because the Hornets didn't have the range or endurance...

By now f-14 would have had a radar like Irbis E to spot them 500km away and a phoenix with 400-500km range.

They didn't even upgrade the F-14 to carry AMRAAM because they were afraid it would risk scuttling more expensive replacements like the Super Hornet and the F-35....

Hmm I had no idea swing wings still had some sort of relavance. The Panavia Tornado was IMHO probably the most successful swing wing design IMHO. I thought modern aerodesign made them obsolete?

Backfire and Blackjack...

The F-15E requires all sorts of trickery to fly fast and low and can give an eyeball shattering ride... the Su-34 uses canards to try to smooth out the ride but it is still potentially rather rough but at least you can stand up and go to the toilet and cook something in the microwave.

The Su-24 on the other hand is much better at low and fast, yet in Syria it has been bombing from safe altitudes of 10km so even better rides there...

Is the russian navy hampered in detecting subsonic sea skimming AShMs(especially stealthy ones like the kongsberg NSM, LRASM and storm shadow) over the horizon by lacking naval AWACS like the E2?

Not enormously. Their CIWS are optimise to deal with targets detected at close range... in land based systems TOR can shoot down targets not spotted till the very last few seconds, and the gun mounts are the same. Improved optics and radar and elevation drives means they are getting much more precise and accurate in dealing with targets.

Sea skimming missiles are always a problem but Ka-31s can be operated from any Russian ship able to carry Helix class helicopters... which is most of them... so dealing with a low flying missile attack should be fine.

The introduction of the new S-350 missiles should make it even better defended against mass attacks.

I'm more worried about russian naval groups detecting massed missiles salvos too late. Would it be possible to just build a light carrier that carries unmanned AWACS drones with long loitering capability?

Ka-31 is already in service and operational...

Correct me if I'm wrong I thought that its a matter of physical laws that OTH radar is inherently less accurate than direct LOS radar as one found on an AWACS which can detect missiles by flying high, Why did the russians use their helicopters' for early warning and guidance of missiles then? I assume they don't do it now since OTH radars have advanced sufficiently

Old missiles with narrow field of view radars pretty much had to start looking for the target with the target right in front of it, so an accurate picture of where everything was was critical to hitting a target.

Modern active radar homing surface to air missiles and modern anti ship missiles have excellent radar sets in comparison so target information does not have to be as precise or as accurate.


Since the 1980s satellite target information together with large missiles that could communicate with each other and share targets amongst themselves meant initial target data didn't need to be super precise.

For some of the early missiles the helicopter basically controlled the missile on its way towards the target area as a sort of surrogate autopilot till the missile was close enough to the target to use its own radar for homing.

Not needed for some time now.

Russia cannot destroy E2s since they operate close to the carrier group and they have no long ranged carrier born fighters that can come into range.

Who told you that?

Most of their anti ship missiles had backup anti radiation functions... against a fighter sized target it would be useless but against a large slow aircraft it would probably be rather effective at turning off the lights.

Aircraft carriers approaching Russian territory would be met by MiG-25s with R-40TDs and later MiG-31s with R-33s... Hawkeyes didn't only operate directly above the carrier... that would give away its position anyway... they could wander hundreds of kms away from the group they are protecting depending on where they thought the threats would come from.

Next gen Russian long range AAMs might be more of a cluster weapon to engage multiple targets at extended ranges...

limb wrote:Is the russian navy hampered in detecting subsonic sea skimming AShMs(especially stealthy ones like the kongsberg NSM, LRASM and storm shadow) over the horizon by lacking naval AWACS like the E2?

I'm more worried about russian naval groups detecting massed missiles salvos too late. Would it be possible to just build a light carrier that carries unmanned AWACS drones with long loitering capability?

Soviet groups had a huge array of onboard radars, placed as high as possible, because of the need to overcome the radar horizon. The US missiles are not fast enough to be a big threat IMHO unless launched in huge salvos, but still that is a delicate issue as far as I know. The topic of the OTH SW radar we discussed before, but I don't see it implemented, not that I am aware at least. It would be very nice and it would change things a bit in naval warfare, but systems like Podsolnukh are not specially small. The only onboard OTH systems I am aware on Russian vessels are passive radiolocators.

https://www.aorti.ru/en/competencies/radar-system/Podsolnukh-E/

Of course one of the main declared roles of AWACS is to provide naval groups early warning about low flying targets that would go otherwise below the radar horizon of the fleet, this is a major vulnerability of any surface force and one big reason for the need of carriers (not necessarily light ones) and air power in general, so that you can detect and down those missiles and their carriers before they become a problem. Additionally you have the issue of the radar silence that a fleet with AWACS can use but a fleet without them cannot, at any time, so they give themselves away at great distances.

kvs wrote:That does not add up. They would be aware long ago of any such detection gap. And this is not 1994 where they have no money for
anything and are being sold down the river by a stooge in the Kremlin.

AWACS will be the first things to be dropped in any serious conflict. So that leaves alternative means. Frankly, the nondetectability of sea surface
skimming missiles is something that follows from simplistic approaches dating back to the 1950s with monochrome radar systems. No-line of sight,
hence no return signal. But that is not all there is to it.

https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a381980.pdf

High frequency over horizon ship-based radars are possible and the real challenge is signal processing to extract the information needed.
Modern computing and high gain radar elements enable practical deployment of such detection systems. Hypersonic missiles are actually
a way to deal with such detection. NATzO subsonic AShMs are not a big threat to Russia's navy.

Thanks for the link, that is very interesting. Are you aware of such systems being operational?

AWACS do not need to fly directly into the harms way, they can look very far from high above the sea (typically 500 km with direct LOS and further in passive mode) and they have the ships SAMs plus a force of fighters to cover them, that is why we talk about the need of proper air superiority planes doing OCA and DCA. There are no carrier borne MiG-31 that can play the speed card and get through a defensive barrier by force. According to projections, in the future there will be more and no less AWACS and in general aircraft fulfilling that mission in naval roles, because UAVs will be used for that role too and because multirole fighters will be also very capable in ISR. Also the advantage vs. stealth planes that Russia has with radars like Konteyner or even Nebo are not currently available at sea, so a powerful airborne radar operating at lower frequencies than X band in regular fighters would be very useful to detect the enemy defensive escort or inbound attacks.

GarryB wrote:Russian ships will have hypersonic missiles reaching hundreds or thousands of kilometres already... why use a mach 1.7 aircraft when you can use a mach 10 missile that wont need support or assistance.

Still AShM and hypersonic missiles are in development for the Su-57. Tsirkon can reach 1000 km, but the logical reaction of the USN would be to move just beyond that distance and cover any eventual range gap for their aviation with IFR. That is something aviation can do but missiles cannot and again a main reason for the need of air power. USN's ability would be degraded if forced to operate that far from their targets, but not lost, and would still be capable of keeping the Russian surface group under threat without they being in range of Russian missiles. That is a huge advantage specially regarding deterrence. Added to the development of decent air launched AShM it would be quite dangerous in fact. The development of counter hypersonic defences is also something that will happen eventually and it would neutralize the current Russian advantage, so their naval air power needs to be built up in the window of opportunity provided by Tsirkon.

LMFS wrote:

walle83 wrote:And Russia needs all new subs it can build, not less. Alot of older Sovet era types need to be replaced.

Russia is now maybe struggling to build and modernize subs fast enough to avoid their numbers from falling due to the ageing of old Soviet units. Middle of this decade the situation may improve, as new classes get produced reliably and the numbers start to actually increase, plus old hulls get modernized. So from 2030 onwards it is perfectly possible that Russia does not need to produce subs full steam. But in any case, the productive capacities at Sevmash are probably not going to be challenged if they start building a carrier too. Also not the VMF budget, since in past years the actual problem was to spend the money that had been assigned, due to the lack of productive capacities in the industry. Thee is a lot of people making assumptions about what VMF cannot do, but few if any have provided any shred of proof until now.

Regarding the number of subs, a table with the load at Sevmash. They are building quite fast and for the end of this state armaments program they should have left the worst behind, they will not need to replace old units but just keep the numbers:

https://www.russiadefence.net/t5541p425-russian-naval-construction-plans-and-statistics-update#308954

kvs wrote:There are all sorts of links to research papers dealing with near surface tracking with high frequency radars for civilian shipping.

Yes, surface wave OTH radars are quite common. The issue is their application on a ship, I have not seen that and the way all militaries rely on sea skimming missiles makes me think this is no yet quite there, but maybe will be soon or there are already some forms of it operating, I am not sure.

Classical geometric optics does not apply

Still people insist in PO methods to ascertain the RCS of complex devices like an aircraft, when there are many methods, each of them with their strengths and weaknesses. Trying to calculate the RCS of an object without diffraction is simply for very coarse estimations, but people supposedly knowledgeable are talking (I am not kidding you) about -70 dBsm for the B-21 and -50 for the F-35, without the slightest embarrassment.

There is a boundary layer about 600 m deep over it that collapses to 300 m at night and can be patchy

Podsolnukh measures air targets up to 20 km in altitude IIRC, so they can use the surface wave and also LOS detection without problem.

Even being able detect 50 km over the horizon is worth something.

Exactly, every km beyond the normal radar horizon is critical. As discussed previously, with certain combination of missile speed / ship radar type and height / atmospheric conditions, the vessel under attack has no time even to launch interceptors.