PLA Navy and Naval Air Force

That's just incense

Except the image seems to capture the incoming trails of two boats who seem to have arrived in a hurry... probably to deal with the problem...

walle83 wrote:Nice diagram over the tonnage in PLAN surface combatants between 1950 and 2025. Very nice development.

i dont know for the quality of their ships but the construction numbers are impressive.

I would say the build quality is likely to be very good.

The first of series for each ship type might have a few design bugs but once the get them into the water and test them such problems usually become obvious and a redesign of the next revision and a later upgrade of the original ships should sort that out...

This is good news for China and not too soon either... the general public in the west probably know more about American culture than Chinese culture... and ths big split with the west for Russia will be great for China because China can sit on two seats if it wants to... continue to trade with the west and sell to the west but also trade and have relations including cheap energy from Russia and the rest of the world in a balanced way that suits China.

The question is... will the west... or should I say... will the US want to continue to contain and isolate China the way it did with Russia considering how that is going to turn out for them.

Cutting them off from the cheap energy and resources of Russia is going to be costly for the west and that cost might make them less aggressive and self destructive in their relations with China.

It is going to be very interesting... but either way Chinese weapon production is putting it into a good position to be able to trade with the rest of the world and be able to deal with potential western interference...

The Chinese produce items at varying degrees of quality typically. It depends on who you hire, how much you pay them, and what the deal was.

See the kinds of commercial ships they are building and the kinds of clients they serve.

With regards to nuclear submarines the Chinese have the production facilities, they tripled the floor space of their submarine production facilities over the last years, their problem is they do not have any decent submarine designs they can produce I think.

With regards to the South China sea, I doubt they didn't litter the sea floor with sonars. And while they do not have any decent nuclear submarines, they have a fair amount of conventional ones, which might even be better than the Kilo. They had access to the Kilo at one point, before that access to Western French submarine technology, and now they have their own technology base to rely upon.

That is what you get from Western sources. But I do not think it is quite as bad. The Type 093 entered service in 2006 at a time neither their naval nor nuclear industry had quite the same level and experience as they have today. The submarine they had before that, the Type 091, which they built at the height of the Cultural Revolution period was a major failure with a leaky nuclear reactor. The Type 093 did not have nearly the same issues with its reactor but it had several issues of its own. They did several upgrades to it and the simple fact is we do not even know the exact performance parameters of the latest variants. The latest variants can fire cruise missiles unlike the earlier 093 models. Some Chinese sources claim the nuclear reactor in later 093 variants is a newer design not the one in the original models.

But the Type 093 is clearly an interim design that the Chinese are using as a test platform to build technologies for their next generation submarine and as a platform to train crews more than anything. The government basically bought it initially as a way to keep the industry operating and give them enough work to keep their skills up to task.

Today China is one of the world leaders in nuclear technology. Arguably only behind Russia. Any new submarine they build will be much better than the Type 093 which was built at a time their surface navy was still buying Sovremenny destroyers from Russia. But yes I do not doubt they could use technical assistance from Russia with regards to overall system design and perhaps some subsystems.

The fact is the West has very limited information on the Chinese nuclear submarine program. And if you go to the Wiki page on the Type 093, the EN page claims 6 in service with no information with regards to dates to the last two. Go to the ZH page, and it claims 10 in service. The Chinese have a huge underground submarine base in a cave built inside a mountain. And only a couple of submarines have shown up on the surface or up pier side. So the simple fact is we don't even know how many submarines they actually do have.

https://www.businessinsider.com/rare-satellite-photo-of-chinese-sub-at-mysterious-undersea-base-2020-8

I don't think they need state of the art level subs to compete with the US and any Eurosuckers the US manages to fool into joining them... and I include India and Australia in that along with the UK of course.

A sea bed sonar array will tell you where an SSN is currently and a ballistic rocket delivering a decent modern torpedo to the nearby area of the detect sub and you defeat an SSN without having any submarines at all... the torpedo could be air delivered by helicopter of fixed wing aircraft or delivered by ballistic rocket from shore or ship or sub.

Obviously an SSN is more than just potting other SSNs... it is about having a presence... it is also about monitoring enemy activity and shipping and it is about controlling patches of sea... but then it is also about sinking enemy ships and subs and for China that is going to require subs and ships to work together with aircraft to deal with enemy ships and subs including aircraft carriers.

The last exercise Russia and China had together... remember our European friend gloating about the new larger Chinese ships and how the Russian sailors probably envied their Chinese counterparts... well the article mentioned that the Chinese were interested in Russian anti sub technology and tactics.

China has technology Russia might want access to to better survive and grow in isolation from the west... and Russia has technology and knowhow that China will want for its own survival too so... I am sure they will share and work together... China getting bigger and stronger does not hurt Russia if Russia is getting bigger and stronger at the same time and vice versa... it only becomes a problem if one or the other is getting bigger and stronger at the expense of the other.

Like anything else you get what you pay for... some of the AKs made in China in the 1980s and 1990s were awful... they were made to be super cheap and they were terrible... but that is why the AKs were made simple but never super cheap in most other places.

I had a Chinese AKM knockoff and accuracy was acceptable... a 3-4 MOA with ordinary ammo... which means chest sized groups at 300m which is perfectly acceptable... not that I shot anyone or even wanted to. It was mainly used on plastic bottles and paper targets and rocks... for fun... but we are not allowed to have fun with firearms in NZ any more.

When I first saw that I initially thought that might be the entire British Navy.... but there are 8 destroyers and the British only have 6.