Future Russian Aircraft Carriers and Deck Aviation. #2

arbataach wrote:

Isos wrote:

arbataach wrote:hello,
if I am just there is still no air carrier chapter in russian doctrine.(?)
so this project is perhaps a call for a cooperation ( with india ?) Russians dont develop alone an emal air carrier.
deck too short, speed too slow, plane to heavy...

You need to introduce yourself in the good thread before posting.

As far as we know russian navy isn't still planing a carrier.

All those projects are just made by the design bureaus by themselves to show what they can do. If the russian navy starts a projects they will first give specification and design bureau will create a design according to that.

This project looks like french charles de gaulles with  a modern design. It lacks weapons but also the catapults are on the landing zone which makes impossible catapulting and recovery at the same time. It is also a small carrier, they could have gone for 300m at least to give it some freedom. However it seems to be cheap and easy to build. If they can make one for them I guess they will have some export clients for it.

thanks for your response

so i am arbataach from France, my interest is the miltary arabic world and since the come back of russia in syria, égypt, libya, soudan my interest for russian military affairs is growing.

introduce yourself here pls
https://www.russiadefence.net/f6-member-introductions-and-rules

The picture is shitty quality to say so but it looks really strange.

A concept design that needs a lot of work to make it realistic most likely... it is a sales pitch.

This is the type of vessels I said years ago should be built.

The fundamental problem for the Russian Navy is the whole point of having an aircraft carrier is a bigger longer endurance AWACS platform to replace the Ka-31 or at least to use with the Ka-31, and perhaps a bigger better fighter with longer range and better flight endurance.

Small carriers offer the opposite of that.

I know... I know... small carriers are cheaper... but they are not cheap, so when they are too small to be useful they end up being more expensive than a bigger more effective ship would have been.

The British and the Russians both tried smaller VSTOL ships and they were a fucking disaster... expensive and ineffective... the Kievs had vastly better strike power than the British little carriers but that was only the heavy anti ship missiles they carried on their decks... the Yak-38s were worse than useless... slow and fragile they killed a few very good pilots... not as many as the Harrier did because of their excellent ejection system that threw the pilot out if the aircraft pitched or yawed beyond certain values during landing, but still way too many when the value of the aircraft was taken into account.... it was useless.

For some reason they thought the Yak could get supersonic if they put a big enough engine in it, but that just meant it had a tiny almost useless main wing and terrible payload and range performance.

The Yak-141 was not a whole lot better because again they wanted a supersonic plane... it was never operational and never properly worked but was only ever going to have four wing hard points and a 30mm cannon which was pathetic armament even at the time.

if I am just there is still no air carrier chapter in russian doctrine.(?)

They are operating both carrier training bases they have on their territory and the Kuznetsov is being upgraded to be put back into the water.

so this project is perhaps a call for a cooperation ( with india ?) Russians dont develop alone an emal air carrier.

They have mentioned a type of catapult system for the upgraded Kuznetsov, but they have been working on an EMALS type cat system for a while now.

Expertise and development in that area would be very valuable in a lot of other areas including electrical work, super magnets, plasmas etc etc.

deck too short, speed too slow, plane to heavy...

Correct on all three counts, though the lack of a ski jump suggest it is fitted with an EMALS system so heavy planes should be able to launch from it, but its small size suggests very little room for all the stuff they would need to carry including ordinance and fuel to keep those aircraft operating...

As far as we know russian navy isn't still planing a carrier.

There is no indication they are planning a mini carrier like this.

They seem to think the Kuznetsov is worth keeping for the time being and upgrades to cruisers suggest they remain interested in operational use of ships around the world...

This project looks like french charles de gaulles with a modern design. It lacks weapons but also the catapults are on the landing zone which makes impossible catapulting and recovery at the same time. It is also a small carrier, they could have gone for 300m at least to give it some freedom. However it seems to be cheap and easy to build. If they can make one for them I guess they will have some export clients for it.

I suspect they are going for the super mini carrier idea... cats making heavier aircraft able to get airborne, but obviously the problem is a smaller carrier still needs the same size distance for landing so the landing strip stays the same size and everything else gets smaller.

Those are specifics and could be legit concerns. When I say I like it , I mostly mean the concept. The size and scope mostly. A small carrier with a catapult. Which is something the British used to do.

The British and the Soviets have experience with mini carriers and currently both are looking at carriers between 50K and 80K in size.

You don't save an enormous amount of money making a 30-40K ton carrier and the money you do save doesn't cover the cost of the ships you will be losing because the small carrier doesn't have a decent AWACS and therefore needs to sit back because it can't watch the air and the sea and the undersea all at once because there is not enough room for sub hunting helos in decent numbers as well as long range fighters and AWACS platforms, so sitting back some of your ships are vulnerable to getting sniped... the whole purpose of a carrier was to defend the ships...

It seems like they are focusing on automation too. To reduce the size of the crew. Which is something the Russians focus on in their submarines. Russian subs have more automation and smaller crews than even the most modern US subs

Very true, but having big good long range AWACS with excellent endurance is the focus.

You could have a 200m long airship that operates with this ship acting as AWACS and this little ship could have drones and helicopters and 12 Su-57s with EMALS cats to get them air borne but even then the small size of the ship means it will need to be constantly resupplied with fuel for the aircraft and weapons for the aircraft and it seems to have no actual weapons of its own which would be terribly limiting too...

It might work but you would probably need 2 or three to offer good coverage for any surface group... and for the price of two or three you could probably buy a 50K ton double hull carrier that is enormously wide in the hull and on deck... perhaps it rides foils at top speed like a huge cat sailing boat... give it 36 odd Su-57s and perhaps 36 MiG-35s and a 200m airship for AWACS and a dozen helicopters and perhaps 30 drones of all types... but also S-350 and S-400 and S-500 missiles and 8 Pantsir systems and perhaps 384 naval TOR missiles all ready to fire...

Escorts are supposed to carry weapons

Aircraft carriers are supposed to carry aircraft

Thank you MR America for telling us how things are in the American Navy, but in the Russian Navy the aircraft carrier is not the weapon system and the Navy the support team... I realise the US is air focussed and air power is everything... it is why their air defence systems are shit except on their ships.

In Russia the purpose of an aircraft carrier is to support the ships which carry out the mission.

Good, this means that someone has finally decided to stop trying to build another Kuznetsov
Every single carrier design proposed in Russia has been just another rehash of Kuznetsov with all it's numerous design flaws carefully preserved and enhanced

The plan was never to build another Kuznetsov... the plan was slightly bigger and with cats and was Ulyanovsk...

And it actually looks like something that could realistically be built in reasonable time without bankrupting them, if this is the way they want to do carriers then I can get behind it

It is not going to happen for the Russian fleet. A total nonstarter.

Only possible downside is that one catapult is located on lading zone but in case of emergency all pilot needs to do is to taxi the plane 30 meters to the side and they are good to go (plus other catapult is in the clear at all times)

It is tiny, and most of the aircraft are on the deck, there is not going to be internal space for anything... these planes and drones and helicopters will be operating with one tank of fuel and the weapons they have loaded on them when the ship launches... this is a joke.

It would be nice to have some more info. Right now we basically have a picture and a paragraph. Hopefully something will surface from the Russian language side.

If they are going to make a tiny carrier with cats then it would make sense to unify the design with the helicopter carriers they are currently making which are bigger than this.

I rather suspect this is a design they want to sell to a foreign country for whom a 40 or 50K ton carrier is out of the question.

With Emal Cats they can save lots of money by using conventional fighters instead of F-35 shit, but it would be such a limited vessel it would not go on long missions.... it might be the sort of thing to sell to Indonesia so they could use it as a remote landing spot for patroling their enormous number of islands without needing to build a large number of airfields around the place and maintain them.

Or for India to invade Sri Lanka perhaps...

Way cheaper a CATAPULT??? affraid Have you idea how much space, horsepower, project complexity and maintenance a catapult system imply

They invested in an EMALS system for the last decade or more... money invested in an electrical catapult system like this is useful in a variety of areas in new technology... it will be vastly more useful than getting a supersonic fighter plane to hover above the ground or sea.

A conventional one I mean because the EMALS are like the Phoenix described by Mozart: That there it exist everyone here say, where is it no one know.

Hypersonic missiles were expensive and complex and will require powerful fuels and maintenance too, but they are also worth the investment because scramjet technology will be useful in a lot of areas too... including artillery ammunition and even Surface to Air Missiles and Air to Air Missiles.

Seriously , what problem everyone seems to have with STOBAR and Sky jumps?

In this particular case the ship in question is much much much too small for ski jumps to work... most of the deck will have aircraft sitting on it most of the time because there wont be enough space under the deck to store all those aircraft that are visible in the picture shown.

Operationally some of those aircraft will be stored below deck but some will always have to remain above deck because there simply wont be room for it all to go below deck. Having to swap aircraft so aircraft needing maintenance in the hangar would be a mind numbing game of Tetris to shift other aircraft around to allow it... one of the other problems of really small carriers.

Problem with slow planes someone say?

HAVE YOU ALL FORGOT THIS PLANE???

Problem for heavy planes... slow planes get airborne at lower speeds and are not the problem.

An An-2 could operate from the K without problems and land without cables, but a Yak-44 could not take off and would probably struggle to land too because of its weight.

If it could do it 30 years ago, with no particular arrangement, anything will do it now.
Above all an AEW plane that have not to carry any payload except the radar.

AEW will be carrying as much fuel as possible and wont be light. The Su-25 is a light combat air support aircraft... without armour and without a combat load it is a relatively light aircraft that was only ever used as a trainer aircraft for practising landing and takeoffs on carriers. The standard fighter was the Su-33 which did not have a two seat version. MiG-29KR is single and twin seat convertable... you could make all your MiGs twin seat planes if you wanted, so the Su-25 is now redundant.

Said so, STOBAR carriers with same displacement are actually in service, so why reinvent the wheel?

This plan for a ship is much smaller than the K and short take off is not an option so cats make flight possible instead.

As the ships get smaller the landing stretch can't be reduced so the takeoff run has to be made shorter instead and the only way to make that work is with cats.

The Ford class carrier has EMAL cats... they just don't work. We don't know why... The Russians and Chinese have been working on the problems for a while, I have no reason to think they can't make it work...

my dog need go to a walk NOW)

Hahahaha... I know that look...

Ideally both Krylov and Nevskoe could cooperate to have a carrier based on Krylov's 60 kT medium proposal with semicatamaran hull and electromechanical catapults. The propulsion would be proportionally much cheaper than Storm since, apart from the hull design advantages, it would not be fully nuclear but CONAG, and the proportion air wing / displacement is simply in another league compared to current designs. If Nevskoe has achieved advances in automation that could be applied too, VMF would have IMHO the by far best carrier concept at disposal.

The new reactors they are making for their new ships remain fuelled for 30 years, so in terms of operation and time out of service being refuelled or whatever, these new reactors should be very low operational costs, but likely not cheap to buy.

They might think the lower maintenance and extra power from a bigger reactor might be worth it... especially if it can be split into two separate systems to improve resistance to battle damage.

Ground launched V1 rockets used steam freaking catapults. It's old technology. I don't see why it has to cost an absolute fortune to build or run. Steam is also a natural with nuclear powered ships.

Super conducting magnets, power banks, and sophisticated electrical systems as well as plasma based systems will be more value in developing and investing in that steam based systems of yesteryear.

An EMALS system has already been in the works for quite some time and was planned for use on future carriers... why dump that because the Americans fucked up their programme. If that is the case then dump the Gorshkov Frigates because of the LCS disaster, and don't even think about laying down any Zumwalts... which might become a euphemism where Zumwalt means chocolate logs.

But yeah I agree about the ski jumps. They are underrated. But since Russia had one and the US didn't for the last 30 years , it's been drummed into everyone that ski jumps are useless

On a tiny carrier like this they are useless because a fighter like a MiG-29KR with light fuel and no external weapons probably couldn't get airborne on such a small ship even with ski jumps... it needs a catapult system to get airborne.

On a better sized ship like a 50-80K ton ship the skijump would mean you could rapidly launch your fighters with an air to air load and full fuel because they have a high power to weight ratio and you can sail into the wind at speed to help them... with a ski jump and if they have vectored thrust jet engines they should be able to get airborne easily... it will be the AWACS aircraft that need the cats or a big plane like an Su-33 or Su-57 with a strike load that needs cat launches, but the ski jump will still be useful.

Rather than starting a carrier from scratch, what Russia can do is buy carriers from China. By the 2030s China will be fielding at least 10 carriers. By then, China will have the capacity to build carriers for Russian navy.

Russia has plenty of time to decide what sort of carrier they want and what aircraft will operate from it. The number of carriers china will be operating is not important for Russia. Russia will likely complete the two helicopter carriers and probably follow them up with two more so it can base two in the northern fleet and two in the pacific fleet, but in terms of full sized fixed wing carriers they probably only need about 2 CVNs.

Anyone wanting to actually check the influence of thrust in this type of take-off can use an online skyjump simulator and see for themselves what difference a couple tf per engine do.

Part of its influence is to angle the aircraft in a nose up attitude so the engines provide both forward thrust and lift at the same time.

A modern fighter with full thrust vectoring could probably mimic that, but the ski jump also adds an upward component to movement... a jump in fact that TVC engines can't really match.

As you can imagine for a big heavy low thrust to weight ratio aircraft like an AWACS platform having to climb an angle slows the aircraft down which is the opposite of what you want to do when trying to take off with forward speed.

In Russia purpose of the carrier is little more than to clog the pier, it did little other than that

Yeah thanks for that opinion Vann... the purpose of a carrier is to perform air defence roles beyond the range of Russian land based air power.... most people can appreciate that, except you it seems.

All previous Russian plans involved another version of Kuznetsov

The thing is that there are Russian plans and Russian plans.

Companies that make ships can come up with all sorts of querky plans and ideas and show them in drawing or even model form, but things like hearing that the Russian military is working on EMALS cats and also on a naval version of the Su-57 suggest otherwise don't they?

After their evaluation of the Kuznetsov in Syria they stated they wanted something bigger with more planes and more endurance and more storage... but I understand in your ears it means either all carriers are obsolete and Russia just needs lots of corvettes, or tiny ships with VSTOL fighters are the solution... even though they never have been before.

The reactor with long cycle for naval applications are using specially enriched fuel and a design that compensates for its progressive depletion, I am not sure they are much more expensive but of course they are a special design.

AFAIK it is something they have not used before so will probably need extra development work and testing.

Hey, if they only replaced half the boilers in the K why not replace the other half with a test reactor and give it a proper full scale test for the next 10 years.

They have a couple of Kirov class cruisers they could test them on too...

The thing is that they have these older ships that they want to continue using while they complete development on brand new designs, but you can reduce the risk by using the current old vessels as test vessels for the new technology you want to use in the new ships.

Zumwalt and Ford were disasters because they were testing all new technology all at once, and while I bag the shit out of them I do respect them for at least trying to get new technology into service... they could have easily just fudged things and used polished up old stuff that had nothing really new on it at all... low risk.

They have huge fleets of existing ships they could have taken an older carrier and put their new EMALS cat on it and tested it to their hearts content and get it right on a ship they can remodel and change as much as they like... once they have teased out the bugs and sorted out the issues because that should be the only thing on the ship that is new so there wont be 1,000 different problems you are working on at the same time with 50 different new systems each of which might be causing problems with other things at the same time.... it simplifies problem solving and debugging.

Obviously once it is working properly you then have to put it in a ship with all the other new stuff...

But for the Russians they will have huge radar and sonar arrays they are developing for their new cruisers that might benefit from being tested on a Kirov or Kuznetsov to see how it performs and work out any bugs or problems before it goes into a real ship.

There are lots of ways you could put reactors and radars and sonars in a ship... in their new designs they will have to make a choice as to where to put them and with no operational experience in test beds they will have to make an uninformed choice that could be wrong... making the first new ships take longer to debug and follow on ships requiring expensive redesigns before mass production can start.

Being familiar with the new power systems and sensors and weapon systems means more informed choices when designing the ships they are going to be fitted to.

Hopefully over the next few years production of corvettes and frigates will accelerate and start filling out the fleets, and destroyer designs start getting laid down and cruisers too.

but in general it vastly improves the TO performance of naval planes.

I would agree that a plane that was going to get airborne, this makes it easier and safer, but a plane going too slow and not going to make it this wont help at all.

There might be a few marginal aircraft that may or may not have made it on a flat deck, where a ski jump helps make them get airborne....

But the fundamental thing is that ski ramps are used on ships with no cats, or the cats are angled off the flat landing strip part of the front and not angled up the sk jump ramp.

An An-2 is probably too slow to benefit from a ski jump ramp... but honestly sailing the ship into the wind you would probably have to tie the An-2 down to stop it getting airborne...

TVC operates behind the CoG so its contribution is to turn the plane (rotation) pointing the nozzles up, which as discussed before results in overall negative lift, unless there is some source of lift ahead of the CoG that compensates for a TVC generated lift in the tail (nozzles pointing down), creating overall positive lift. In general I doubt the effect of the ramp, which is to ensure fast rotation, can be substituted by TVC.

Regarding TVC I would see its role on a flat deck as being where the aircraft clears the deck and starts to drop the TVC would angle the engine nozzles up to rotate the aircraft around its cg to angle the nose of the aircraft upwards to get extra angle of attack lift. Once that has been achieved I am not sure as to whether the nozzles would remain angled slightly up... because with the aircraft now at a higher AOA the upward pointing engine nozzles would now be angled horizontally and be accelerating the aircraft into the oncoming airflow, or whether the nozzles would then return to neutral and therefore be angled down generating both forward speed and a force upwards to try to help gain height.

The aircraft with the increased AOA should already be starting to recover height so the horizontal engine angle increasing speed might be more efficient... I would think that would be something interesting to experiment with...

Climbing the ramp would normally not reduce speed unless TWR is very low (less than 1/4), but of course it will work against the acceleration needed for taking off. The space save to rotate the plane compensates for this due to the lift gain.

Climbing the ramp would reduce acceleration because you are essentially using momentum and engine power to push a 20 plus ton aircraft up a small hill... for a high power aircraft like a MiG-29 I would think the upward jump and angle of attack change make up for a slight reduction in acceleration for a fraction of a second.

Ok...I waited a little too much so the discussion piled up...

Yup, that can happen.

Although I contested the use of a catapult in such a frame I appreciated the large flight deck and the minimal dimension of the command bridge.of the new design.

I have printed out the image above and an image of the K, and while I agree the new design has a much smaller island it really does not have a huge deck... the deck itself could have been made rather wider to give more space on deck for moving things around and more simultaneous takeoffs...

This design appears to have two launch positions... and there is no space on the deck for anything else at all...

This is a small carrier.

Invincible and Hermes allowed UK to retake the Falklands

These mini carriers make what should have been a walk in the park into a serious ordeal where ships were lost and bombers had to make 12,000km flights at huge risk.

If the Argentines had a fighter with BVR air to air missiles the Brits would have been in serious trouble.

Problem probably lies in the difference between ambitions and real possibilities of a nation.

Tiny carriers are better than nothing... but not a huge amount better, and they are nothing like as cheap as some claim... especially when you include the cost of ships lost because of their inadequate protection.

For Russia I think a decent sized carrier with a real fighter (Su-57) and full capacity AWACS support (ie not a helicopter based system) is worth the slight increase in costs.

The ship based AWACS could be sold to existing customers who can't afford a full sized A-100 model, but still want improved performance and coordination for their fighters. A Yak-44 type aircraft managing a small area would massively improve communication and cooperation in a combat situation like the one in India, where communication between different aircraft types seems to be rather poor.

then our bills while Charles the Gaulle and even more Queen Elizabeth and Prince of Wales end up ruining their respective Navies' inner balance (I am meaning it in sense of weight and counterweight, not of money here).

The british are screwing themselves... they made a carrier design not big enough for the job because they wanted to save money and by having to buy two of the damn things they can't now afford the support ships to protect one carrier let alone two. They should have built one carrier that was good enough to do the job and spent the money they spend on the second carrier on support ships to operate with their first carrier.

When the Falklands situation erupted they didn't send carriers there overnight... they had to form up a task force which included converting civilian ships to carry troops and equipment... even if they only had one carrier they could have guaranteed it would have been ready to go, and if it was a decent full sized carrier with Phantoms and Buccs and a proper AWACS platform instead of a helicopter based AEW system they could have attacked the island themselves with Buccs instead of needing Vulcans, and the Phantoms would have been much more effective patrolling the air space and using BVR skyflash missiles and sidewinders (they could still have pinched the new Sidewinders from HATO stocks like they did) and they could have operated the carrier closer to the other ships and offered much better protection from enemy attack... they might not have lost any ships at all and probably would have shot down a lot more Argentine planes... not to mention the Buccs would have been much more use supporting the troops on the ground.

Probably the real watershed is exactly there: when the balance flip between the Carriers being just an asset in service of the Fleet and it reverse into right the contrary you know you have done something REALLY wrong.

The purpose of the carriers in the Russian fleet is to provide air protection for the ships and any landing forces... they need a group of fighters and some AWACS platforms and that is all.

Strike missions can be performed as they are today with cruise missiles launched from ships and subs... a million a shot sounds expensive, but a flight of 10 aircraft at 100 million dollars each entering enemy air space and risking getting shot down is not cheaper.

Well to change a carrier from boilers to NPP is quite wild and you don't want to turn your only carrier in a test lab, but in general I am sure they sue every opportunity to test anything before deploying it. Actual experience and specially combat experience are revered in Russian military and any opportunity is used to get them almost without exception.

Swapping the old nuke reactor in a Kirov class cruiser for a new one then... maybe even swapping out the entire complex propulsion arrangement of the Kirov for 2 or more new reactors might be interesting too...

Too slow is relative here. What I mean is that a plane that would crash at a given speed and AoA will actually take off perfectly at an appropriate, higher angle, because lift generated will be much bigger.

I agree, but extra lift also means extra drag so if it was close to its stall speed then flicking the nose up might be like applying an air brake and forcing the stall.... very close to the water.

The An-2 is actually stall proof... if you are flying along and your engine cuts out you just pull back hard on the stick apparently... this raises the nose and as you get slower and slower the aircraft just naturally descends till your wheels hit the ground... or water.

The MiG-8 was essentially stall proof too but for different reasons... essentially the nose mounted canards stalled first and the result of the nose canards stalling was that the nose dropped which increased speed and cost altitude but recovered from the stall. Commonly on a conventional aircraft it is the tail that stalls, resulting in the nose pitching up and further slowing of the aircraft leading to the main wing stalling and the aircraft falling out of the sky uncontrolled.

I still don't know if it is fundamentally impossible to combine the ramp and the catapult, but I have not seen them combined in any real vessel...

A ski ramp is not compatible with heavy slow aircraft... they just can't take a high g push up on launch... their wings would break... otherwise all US carriers would have ski jumps... but they don't... even the carriers that operate Harriers.

Yeah, such a plane in AWACS configuration would have no problem taking of without catapults.

The weight of all the AWACS equipment and the fuel needed for long endurance... it would probably need an engine power increase... but as a cargo transport it would be interesting... too slow for inflight refuelling too.

the logical thing would be actually to deflect them down to create lift, but only if a comparable lift device at the front can prevent the nose from pitching down as a result.

Deflecting down wont create lift it would reduce forward acceleration and a rotational force on the aircraft that will need to be countered creating more drag to further slow you down at a time when you should be trying to accelerate as much as you can...

It does not work like an air break, because it increases lift...

But it increases drag, unlike an air brake it also increases lift... lift and drag are related.

as far as you do not increase drag more than you increase lift you are ok.

Drag slowing down forward motion by definition will reduced lift from all surfaces, so you might get more lift from your tail surface of canard forward surface, the increase in drag slowing the aircraft down will reduce lift from all surfaces generating lift...

I have not seen g values for the ramp take off, but it is essentially impossible that it is harder than the impact on landing, naval aircraft are tough...

Then why don't all aircraft carriers and indeed all conventional runways everywhere have ski jump ramps?

I guess it depends on how much automation you use on the plane. If you have many operators and their working consoles then it will be a heavy plane, with lots of space and weigh that cannot be used for fuel or radar equipment, but judging by the trends it seems such surveillance planes will try to increase persistence at the expenses of crew. A very high cruising speed is also not so relevant.

I would think a few crew consoles and crewmen in the aircraft would not be heavier than more fuel. More computing power means less interpretation and less human interference would be needed... In fact more crew means more human sized open areas where they can move between positions... essentially empty spaces. With electronics and a big radar and fuel the aircraft could be much heavier, but also much longer ranged.

I think you are confusing increasing drag with slowing the plane down, at that take off moment engines are working at max power and you are accelerating. You can reduce your acceleration as much as you want, if your excess power remain positive as said above, the plane will not fall.

Also you cannot talk about drag creation forgetting that you are at the same time increasing lift, in fact the definition of a plane is that L/D is bigger than one, therefore as far as the wings are working, you get more lift than you get drag and so increasing your AoA is going to reduce your stall speed accordingly, you need to keep the plane inside the flight envelope of course. This reduction of the stall speed translates directly in the distance needed for take-off and landing and therefore it is one of the main issues to be addressed in naval planes.

All so obvious and plain common sense, yet no US aircraft carriers use ski jumps... odd really...

But their marine carriers don't have cats and ski jumps were proven to be useful to Harrier type aircraft, which is what they operate on their carriers...