Future Russian Aircraft Carriers and Deck Aviation. #2

Making a ship that wide would create lots of problems... like getting through international canal systems like Suez and Panama, and of course just navigating near Russian military ports.

But if you did you would not make it by putting to conventional carriers side by side with a few attachment points... if you are going to have that sort of width then you might as well have a huge hangar and surface area that no one could fall off the middle of...

Equally if you have two complete decks with angled landing decks on both sides and fronts that aircraft could take off from than a unified single hangar deck would mean being able to transfer aircraft from one side to the other without having to takeoff and land on the other side to transfer them.

Active hull technology should allow improved performance in rough conditions, but it can only do so much... I would expect ski jump launch positions simply because the fighters they will operate from a much larger carrier should be able to get airborne without a lot of help most of the time.

@hoom

It is a serious stretch to call that a "semi-catamaran" hull. No overhead photos at all and the gap is very shallow. Looks more like some sort of
link from the lower decks to the upper deck.

Anything to lift ship hull out of the water to reduce drag is worth the effort... by making the ship wider... which is normally a very bad thing for a ship because width is drag and magnifies the amount of power needed to move it around, but width for a carrier is good... more deck space and more hangar space, both of which are valuable... a non operational carrier might have a couple of planes on the deck and a few more in the hangar, but an operational carrier will have its deck covered in aircraft and only a few in the hangar for repair because raising and lowering aircraft is very slow and inefficient... if they don't need repair having them on deck means it is quicker to get them airborne and in use.

A very wide front would certainly be interesting but work flow would be very complicated.

The angled deck design means you can have planes landing at the same time you are preparing aircraft for takeoff... but with two full decks side by side you can improve on that with two angled decks allowing two aircraft to land at the same time and aircraft on the left and right deck and also in the middle perhaps a ski ramp in the middle for normal fighters to all take off rapidly.

Being able to use both sides for takeoffs and landings at the same time would greatly increase the carriers ability to put aircraft into the air and also to recover them... though an inflight refuelling aircraft would reduce the pressure on landing aircraft so urgently of course.

I like the idea but I doubt the practicality particularly because that kind of single-bow, twin-stern setup has been tried a bunch of times in smaller boats and never worked out as intended.

Testing with scale models is important, but at the end of the day the only way to really know if a design will work properly or not is to actually test it in metal... which can be very expensive... but equally sometimes it pays off...

The US Navy has some real dogs... Zumwalt and LCS and the F-35 aircraft... but they also have some excellent ships as well... you don't know until you build it and test it... which is why testing is so important...

Regarding shipyards... they are getting to the point where they are going to be building bigger ships for the navy so upgrading shipyards for handling bigger ships makes sense... civilian and military shipyards...

As announced it had a flight-deck area only slightly smaller than a Nimitz but on only a 40-45kiloton displacement.

This is very important too... size is important and if you can get the aircraft capacity of a 100K ton ship in a ship less than 60K ton it makes the ship cheaper and easier to operate... it reduces the requirements of propulsion and has lots of circular weight and cost savings.

Note they don't need to sail around all the time full of aircraft most of the time, but being able to carry say 80 fighters means carrying 80 fighters and fuel and ordinance and spares and equipment for 80 aircraft... so when it is peace time you can carry 30 fighters and operate more than twice as long on the same stores... or carry stores and fuel for 30 aircraft and carry more of something else in the extra space left by not carrying the spares for the 50 aircraft you aren't carrying.

You could take on extra anti sub helos or extra drones...

It is Russia... they might modify their EMALS cats to launch cruise missiles directly from the deck...

The two island structure of the Shtorm also takes up unnecessary deck space.

The idea of the two island structure is to separate landing ops from ship sailing ops... ie a separate control tower for landing and takeoff, and a tower for ship operations and sailing.

Each tower is generally slim and allows aircraft to be parked between them... the air control tower benefits from being further back while the ship control tower benefits being further forward. By splitting them the AC tower can be further back and the SC tower benefits from being further forward. Having one tower means a long island or the AC less far back and the SC further back from ideal too.

Yes I do understand the rational - the ONE island it is just my personal preference. The benefit in air control would be minimal in a TWO island structure as you already have people on deck keeping a very close eye on landing proceedings which is most critical. These guys make the actual call if the landing is either good or bad.

From a design point of view the people running air operations don't just watch the planes taking off and landing... they also essentially manage the flow and processes taking place on the deck, but even ignoring that from a design point of view having two separate structures allows them to be positioned in more ideal places for their relevant functions while creating deck space between them for more places to park aircraft which is always useful.

The alternatives are move them closer together or have a really massive island, which I think you will agree are not very appealing alternatives... but not the end of the world either.

I just don't think aesthetics should ever be an important factor.