why do you need carriers ?
useless dinosaurs
Actually there are plenty of dinosaurs still around that survive just fine.
Can you suggest an alternative to supplying air power for a surface group of ships?
I'd be building a sort of drone you launch from a sub that just hangs up there like a "low satellite"
as my AWACs ….
just left it hover up there …. to cross reference with your satellites
What sort of drone could operate for long periods and operate from a sub?
Have discussed a nuclear powered airship in the past... you might want to look back on some older posts particularly on the VSTOL threads...
VTOL …. seriously they are totally useless
Totally agree... the Hermes 20K ton carriers and the Kiev class carriers prove they are worse than useless...
anyway back to "super carriers" and "VTOL" ….
this twaddle is exactly what the USA wants Russia to waste its money on ….
I used to think that... but a carrier is not for WWIII, it is for peace time...
Look at the US shootdown and murder of hundreds of civilians in Iranian waters in the 1980s... the US Ship that was supposed to be state of the art mistook a civilian airliner as an F-14 that was attacking it and open fire with the only weapon it had to deal with what it thought was the threat.
If it had an aircraft carrier nearby (or indeed had not violated Iranian waters in the first place and had been somewhere else) then the situation could have been resolved in a much more civilised and less brutal and bloody way.
In peace time you can send a few fighters out to investigate blips on a radar screen perhaps hundreds of kms away from your surface group.
An airship AWACS makes a lot of sense but it lacks the flexibility of fixed wing fighter air power in terms of meeting and engaging an enemy threat... a detected attack by missiles or aircraft or a combination can be detected early by an AWACS platform but having fighters... especially conventional fighters unified in design with land based aircraft so they are not stupidly expensive and are capable against modern enemies, means you can go out and meet a threat further from your ships.
Datalinks and modern communication means even if your fighters can only shoot down a dozen incoming threats it can also use its sensors to detect more stealthy objects from closer distances... information which the ships can use to engage them making them able to engage targets at greater range too.
They enhance the sight and reach of any surface ship group... and they don't need to be enormous white elephants like the Americans make... clever design multi hull ships with wide hulls for large internal volume but reduced overall displacement... they have shown a model of ship with a displacement of 45K tons that has better internal volume and aircraft capacity than the 65K ton Kuznetsov...
All they need is to carry a decent AWACS platform and some fixed wing fighter aircraft... and likely in the future more and more UAVs of various types.
to create civilian "discontent" … and start a "colours revolution"
the USA wants control of the Russia arctic oil and gas …. end of story
They will be spending billions on new big ships so spending slightly more on maybe two new CVNs so those ships can operate safely beyond the reach of Russian land based aviation is only a minor cost.
We are not talking about 11 carrier groups with 11 x 100Kton carriers.
carriers …. VTOL ….. why do you think Yak helped Lockheed design the F-35
its clearly based on the Yak-41 … itself an utterly useless piece of crap ….
VTOL is a dead end street... a money pit, where the best you can hope for is a carrier that is too small to be useful for anything, and under performing fighters whose design is messed up so that it can hover even though in practise they never actually will because a rolling take off means more payload and more fuel, and a rolling landing means safer landing in the event of an engine failure or stall.
so they want Russia to piss money up against the wall on useless crap …. to create civil unrest …
But who cares what they think right?
What Russia needs it to be able to trade with the countries of the world that are not the west, which means being able to sail their navy anywhere in the world without worry about blockades or sanctions etc... so they need a powerful navy... not a big one... but a powerful one... that means big ships for long trips and a couple of carriers to protect those ships while they are doing what they are doing.
Having a carrier group right now sitting off the coast of Venezuela would be a useful thing for Russia and for Venezuela... not so good for the US and her henchmen wanting to plunder the country of its oil resources...
The carrier group doesn't need to be attacking any one.... just normal exercises with ally Venezuelan Navy... or Cuba or Nicaragua... or any other country the US is currently bullying into cutting ties with Russia via economic extortion.
Russia wont be using these carriers for WWIII, or for invading any one, but what country will trade with Russia if the US just goes in and removes Maduro from his legally election position because they trade too much with Russia and China?
If Russia can't help potential trading partners then the US will bully everyone to not trade with them and Russia will become isolated and have to trade with the west... fuck the west.
"Risks" posed to inexperienced pilots/crews by the weather. Baikal is covered in thick ice most of the year & can be sailed on only in summer w/o an icebreaker. Even with it, a CV must move fast to get req'd wind over the deck, but the open water will get filled with ice fast, slowing it down.
How about the obvious... how would you get the Kuznetsov there?
If you want to use carriers in the northern sea route... which they clearly do... how can having your only carrier in the black sea going to work and what value is there in training in the black sea for operations in the arctic?
The drydock there can handle Adm. K & even a bigger ship. Experienced personnel can be sent there from other yards & out of retirement.
It is not 100% Russian owned and has no experience with large military ships... the biggest military ships it has made are frigates. It mainly works on tankers...
Sevastopol & Novorossiisk area ports r large enough; Adm K was anchored in the former before the BSF was divided up with Kiev.
It is not a question of large enough... there is no point basing your only carrier 14,000km away from where you intend to operate it...
No need to unnecessarily expose aircraft to the Arctic conditions with it's severe weather, esp. since flight ops there better conducted from land bases.
Maybe they should send them up a canal to the Aral sea and beach them and that way they will be protected from sea water as well so they wont need to paint them so often...
It'll spend most of the time in the Med. Sea, if they home port it in Syria.
WTF would it be doing in the med? WTF would it do in Syria?
If more sailors/pilots need training, they could also be sent there, instead of waiting their turn on Adm. K or other training CV.
CVs can also rotate between Med. & Black Seas, with both in the BSF & none home ported in the Med.
They only have one carrier.... it is the Admiral K.... WTF would they put any carrier in the Med for?
During the cold war there were three sides in the Med... NATO, WARSAW PACT, and neutral... WP is gone and it is mostly hostile now... not some where that needs a Russian carrier at all.
It can be done in a few months. Aircraft r flown in after leaving port. For safety, after some disasters, explosives r usually not loaded in port, but at sea via UN/VERTREP from the ammo ships. I've seen it being done myself.
BUT WHY. You still haven't explained why they need a platform specifically designed to provide air cover for the Russian Navy in the Black sea or the Med?
A carrier is not going to be sailing around all the time doing regular patrols... the carrier is a support vessel to support a surface action group that is doing something... more than half the carriers life will be in overhaul/upgrade, or just sitting in port doing nothing.
It costs a lot of money to have them out doing things... there is a reason why only about 3 US carrier groups are operational at any one time and they have 11...
Not necessarily; 1 TAKR/CV forward deployed in the Med. is going to be worth 2-3 CVs in the North & Pac. Fleets, as it'll be spending more time at sea resulting in more sustainability/persistence & higher state of readiness. The Med. Sea has even better weather in winter months than the Black Sea, allowing more & safer training.
Get it through your head... Russian aircraft carriers are not for fighting NATO or for fighting the US because that means WWIII where aircraft carriers = Zero and are still expensive to buy and operate.
What possible use is a Russian carrier in the Med?
Surface ships in trouble spots deter intervention/aggression & perform diplomatic function;
And in the med... why would they require air support?
Which NATO country is stupid enough to try to sink a Russian ship?
TAKRs/CVs r needed for air cover, as u pointed out. Having them there sends a clear message, so there's no doubt that Russia will be defending her interests in far away areas- no submarine or land based bombers/missiles can do so as persistently & sustainable.
Air cover wont be needed in the Med... no NATO country will attack Russian surface ships because their own territory will be within range of direct missile counter attack... Air power would be redundant.
At the bottom of the pacific or atlantic however things might be different.
If Russia can't deploy TAKRs/CV/Ns to Atlantic/Med./Red Seas regularly &/ when needed, China certainly will to fill that vacuum; as Alexander I said, "Russia has only 2 allies: her army & navy".
If China wants to send carriers to the Med then good luck to them.
For Russia it makes more sense for her to expand her operations away from the west and towards Africa and Asia and Central and South America... no where near the black sea or the med.
This is more or less what I make out of the F-35B's layout myself too. But there is a twist here:
an STOVL UCAV version of a STOL manned plane may substitute the space normally taken by the cockpit and place a lift fan there, allowing to bring the engine back to its normal and more optimal position, free space for the crucial dorsal fuel tanks and at the same time allow to put some weapon bays in a reasonable position close to the CoG. I hope I can send a drawing one of these days, but from the rough numbers I have done this looks fine in terms of weight distribution, reducing substantially the amount of thrust the fan should be responsible of generating, reducing its diameter / aero effects and power drain from engine's turbine. Many of the problems I see with other STOVL layouts are solved this way. The use of such STOVL drones would be normally restricted to LHDs in relatively low risk missions so the need for guidance should not be a big issue for some years until autonomous flight gains maturity.
There is no reason the front fan engine couldn't be put in front of the pilot and behind the nose mounted radar... it just makes it harder to power the fan from the main engine... or if you go with separate lift engines like the Yak-41 then you end up with hot engine exhaust ingestion stalls again...
my "carriers" SSGNs …. hordes of them ….
and with weird drones you can launch from them ….
A future aircraft carrier could carry a wide range of all sorts of drones and special vehicles... a surface ship can carry bigger aircraft and not have to worry so much about surfacing or submerging...
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