Aircraft Carrier Admiral Kuznetsov: News #2

Russia could also go this path. Only build a second carrier with improvements, then a significantly larger, based on the well -known design.

The problem there is that normally building two the same is economic because the second one being the same as the first means the second one can be built faster because any problems were already solved making the first one so there should be no new surprises.

Obviously if Russia builds two more carriers they have plenty of experience in the use of the Kuznetsov but the shipyard that will build the new carriers didn't build the Kuznetsov so the shipyard making the two new carriers will be making two different unique ships so no benefit of the problems being the same

Making two bigger ships on the other hand makes much more sense and would not work out to be much more expensive.

The Kuznetsov is not a bad ship... its problems are being sorted out, but it is a little too small to safely operate Su-33s, which means a bigger ship makes much more sense... especially when operating naval Su-57s.

For China it made sense to build Kuznetsov type ships, but the shipyards which upgraded and modernised the design also built the new ships so experience is accumulated, which would not be the case for the Russian shipyards making new carriers.

The new helicopter carriers will be interesting because I suspect they will want to operate their new helicopter replacement for the Helix family, and the second ship is supposed to be a drone carrier, which would be a first in the world and would make a lot of sense to have a 40K ton ship dedicated to remote operated platforms... ground and sea and air and undersea perhaps... its ability to land armour would enable unmanned patrol ships to be carried too and also subs recovered and released and of course remote controlled vehicles could be landed by ship or amphibious vehicles land themselves and indeed the deck for helicopters and drones to operate from.... it is supposed to carry 1,000 naval infantry and their armour and helicopter support for 60 days so the space on board for armour and ammo and water and food and helicopters and landing vessels would be significant... but the drone model could be a landing support vessel with suicide drones and recon drones and an enlarged hospital, plus lots of helicopters which are always useful as well as hovercraft and trucks and other things useful in a war zone or a natural disaster zone.

This is not 100% accurate. Their second carrier, the Shandong, was built at Dalian which was where they did the refit of the Liaoning. But this carrier is being built in Shanghai. At a different shipyard.

There are lots of reasons for doing things different ways and logic can be applied to all of them to make sense.

Building a second carrier in a different yard might make sense because the original yard is busy making other things, or they might want more than one yard to be making carriers and have carrier making experience... it just means the first of a type of ship made in a particular yard will have extra problems that a yard serially producing something they have already made wont need to deal with for each ship made of a type they have already made.

Would it kill them to splash some concrete down there?

Wouldn't make much difference... they still need to spread the weight of the ship over the same sort of area to stop it from sinking and it would not be much different whether it was rock or concrete.

They appear to retain the old TOR system, the launch tubes at the corner of where the takeoff ramp and the landing strip are... those 6 big white circles are based on the original TOR with 8 missile tubes in a rotary launcher. Each of those represents a single land based TOR from the 1980s, so 6 vehicles with 8 missiles each on each corner of the ship.

It should be fairly straight forward to replace those with the newer smaller missiles in a fixed grid array of 16 missiles each to double the TOR missile load from 192 to 384 missiles without using any extra space.

Of course fixed grid vertical launch tubes would take rather less space than an 8 round rotary launcher so you could get a lot more in than that really.

That is why I call it TOR, and it is not even the current land based TOR with 16 missiles ready to fire, it only has 8 missiles in a rotary arrangement.

Upgrading to the current TOR missiles would allow double the missiles carried in the same space... the new reduced sized anti drone models are even smaller and so a mix of the two new types would allow a lot more ready to fire rounds and versatility against a range of target types too.