Project 23900 "Ivan Rogov" Amphibious assault ship

Your answers for EMALS power are all there, the centrifugal flywheels store 2-3x the required energy of a launch. they go from 9000 RPM down to 7000 RPM, then then are spun up by motors for the next launch. Its pretty efficient and quite clever IMHO. How much time in between launches? The math is easy. 4 min? you need 2MWh gen set for this. Not that big, 20 % loss? 2.4MWh 40% 2.8MWh.

Most of the time for the Russians the time between cat launches is probably going to average more than 30 minutes.... when they haven't got a fixed wing AWACS platform airborne they can operate Ka-31s to avoid sneak attacks. but most of the time they will have an AWACS platform flying around the place and probably an inflight refuelling aircraft based on the same aircraft design to top the AWACS aircraft up when needed, and also any fighters airborne at that time.

Otherwise the use of the cats will actually be pretty rare... bombing missions these days might include two FAB-500 bombs and external fuel tanks and some self defence AAMs... so maybe 3-4 tons at the very most for the MiGs... rather less for the Flankers because they can't even carry external fuel tanks so a couple of AAMs and some FAB-500s or perhaps GROM glide bombs maybe...

Russia did not see the need for strike aircraft in the past, that has changed with Syria. You can launch fighters with STOBAR but fuel and payloads suffer.

Why would you think that?  A few strikes against terrorist forces from 10km altitude with dumb bombs is not really comparable to US strike carriers.

With Su-57s a few Grom type glide bombs will be fine...

Why would the French carrier experience not influence Russia? Russia has the same fiscal constraints France does and De Gaulle can surge to 100 sorties/day which is a *hitload of firepower. De Gaulle is way more capable then the UK's trash barges.

Because they don't use their naval aircraft the same way the Russians do so their lessons are not as relevant.

France and the US and to an extent Britain also have a world wide network of friendly ports and countries that cooperate and don't ban them from their ports when Washington tells them to, so the Russians need to be more self sufficient.... there will be no cavalry to come to the rescue.

Russia simply does not have the near term capability to build a large supercarrier. For them to exit the decade with 4 small carriers with 8-12 fighters, would be the best possible outcome and a real quantum leap in capability for the RuN

Four small carriers would probably cost more than two big ones.

And with small ones they would need a minimum of two per surface action group so even with all four out of port and in service they would still only have two "carrier groups".

Not that I think they would be trying to do two things in different places at once...

You can launch fighters with STOBAR but fuel and payloads suffer.

The aircraft your AWACS is based on can also be aboard in a cargo/inflight refuelling type so fighters can take off with full (fighter) loads and reduced fuel and then top up after take off. Most fighter loads are nothing like max payloads anyway.

For STOVL it is instead the landing that take time and put heavy weight limitations, hence british experiments with rolling landing.

STOBAR is best most of the time even with VSTOL fighters because the short takeoff increases the fuel and payload capacity and the landing is quicker and a VSTOL should be able to reduce its landing speeds to very low levels making it much easier too.

I never said there was a prob with sortie generation, the only issues are perhaps payload, needing very high thrust planes, (BS IMHO)

The thing is that the Russians use their carriers to provide fighter cover for their surface ships so planes with high thrust are what they have....

There are about four takeoff spots on the Kuznetsov including a waist launch position that allows any plane they currently embark to take off at max weight...

There is even the possibility of using JATO bottles when you need super high payload missions.

Not really. On the Kuznetsov at each launch position there is a large door that opens up behind the launching aircraft to prevent its jet wash effecting other aircraft or crew on the deck... Rockets are volatile and messy and you would need too many of them and they are not reusable and actually quite expensive.

For Russian carriers if they make their new ones bigger they wont need cats for fighters anyway.

I agree conventional planes with STOBAR are better then VTOL planes. I doubt the 23900 will be long enough to be a useful STOBAR carrier. After all its 85M shorter then Kuz.

The 23900 is a helicopter landing carrier and putting fighters on it would be stupid. Building an extra one to make it a fighter carrier like a mini DeGaulle doesn't make sense either... this ship will be 10K tons lighter than the DeGaulle and it wouldn't make sense without an AWACS and inflight refuelling aircraft which would not be compatible with a skijump or a cat that small.

The 23900 is for carrying naval infantry and their armour and some helicopters to get them ashore... they are not aircraft carriers.

As for EMALs the math is clear, you do not need a huge electrical capacity to operate it.

Needs to be reliable though... I would think an AWACS platform that is also amphibious so if it can't take off with a cat it can be lowered into the water from a crane and take off from the water and recover on the water if needed...

In the 1980s there was a lot of talk about gas turbines in main battle tanks... because big diesel engines in the 1,500-2,500hp range are huge and heavy. Gas Turbines are much smaller and lighter, but as used in the T-80 and Abrams tanks when they are the primary power source for the tank they are horribly fuel intensive because tanks are enormously heavy and rarely drive at a constant cruise speed on a nice flat paved road. Normally they go from a stationary position to another stationary position 200m away at max acceleration... moving from cover to cover...

The next gen MBT the Russians are talking about will be a twin chassis vehicle with a 3,000 hp gas turbine engine but electric drive for both sections.

New ships will likely be the same with gas turbines that generate the electricity used to power the ship... perhaps with a few smaller backup diesel generators, but GTs are small compact and powerful... used to power a screw itself or a wheel they are not so fuel efficient, but connected to an electric motor generating power and optimum speed gets excellent fuel efficiency.

Obviously for a fixed wing Russian aircraft carrier they want a nuclear power plant.

For a helicopter carrier high speed is not critical... you need all your other support vessels in place before any landing begins anyway....

Syria was a capability test. Russia cannot build large carriers and that capabililty is about 10 years away.

They have just spent billions of dollars upgrading at least two ports in the far east to allow production of ships up to 350K tons, including military vessels and ships with nuclear propulsion... I really don't think the military invested in that so the energy sector could get their oil tankers and gas tankers subsidised...

By about 2022 Russia should be able to build large military ships... and I mean 50K ton plus ships.

The 23900's are about 1.1B/ship for the first 2, the next 2 will be cheaper.

The cost of a 5th gen stealthy STOVL fighter... which is what you would need from such a tiny vessel will be 10-20 times that figure with no guarantees it will be any use.

No chance at all of using the Su-57 from such a platform.

I think the 23900s will be excellent for what they are... naval infantry landing ships, and will provide the helicopter support any such landing would need.

They would never mount a landing without all their biggest ships including the Kuznetsov and any cruisers they have available so putting fighter planes on these helicopter carriers makes them worse helicopter carriers and totally ineffectual aircraft carriers.

Hopefully in a few years time they might build a couple more as hospital ships that can carry lots of helicopters and amphibious vehicles and trucks for disaster relief as well as supporting landings with a few more helicopters and troops along with hospital bed space for those that need it.

As mentioned by the designer, when it is not being used as a landing ship it can carry lots of vehicles, so for delivering ground forces say to Syria.... it could carry enormous numbers of vehicles too.

Later on perhaps an anti sub version with helicopters and perhaps drones... air, surface and underwater drones...  some sort of drone mothership that can sit in international waters and send drones secretly in to look at beaches and test currents and all the things useful to know for a landing operation...

I don't think a tiny fixed wing aircraft carrier makes sense however...

You cannot compare tank usage to ships. Tanks very rarely operate at full power for sustained periods.

Electric drive vehicles are the way of the future... electric buses, trucks, cars, motorbikes, bicycles, tanks, BTRs, BMPs, aircraft, helicopters, drones already, ships, subs, trains... they are all going to electric drive, and depending on their size the best solution is going to be a gas turbine or nuclear power... diesels are reliable and fuel efficient but they are also big and heavy... gas turbines are light and powerful and when run without load turning a generator they can be very fuel efficient... the tank example is just a real world example of a vehicle that uses a GT the wrong way, which leads to high fuel consumption... but even in that situation they are still compact and offer more power than diesels... the cost is much higher fuel consumption...

Once you separate the propulsion system from the propeller (ie screw or wheels) then manouverability becomes amazing because the wheels or screws can be put in pods that have 360 degrees of rotation... like a shopping trolley but all four wheels turn... parallel parking will stop being a problem.... vertical take off will stop being a problem... but more importantly from a design perspective you can put the engine or power generation components anywhere you like.

Instead of using dead useless weight that reduces performance but is necessary to keep balance, you can use your propulsion system as ballast and therefore have a much lighter vessel and widely spaced energy generation systems will be better protected from combat damage taking out all your power.

For very large ships you might want a few options in terms of power generation so even a nuclear powered ship might have diesel backup generators or gas turbine generators... if you wanted to be clever with fuel cell technology you could use nuclear and other power generation sources to get oxygen from sea water for breathing in a sub, and use the hydrogen to create electricity in fuel cells, or burn the hydrogen in the gas turbines as free fuel for a ship...

They might develop nuclear batteries that are just what batteries are now, but these batteries work for 20 years at their power rating.

A 2MW battery on its own wont be that much use but a large ship you could have them located all over the place... 30 or 40 of them... 60-80 MW would be useful and could run the nearby electronics on a reliable power supply even if main power is lost... they could power weapons or fire fighting equipment and pumps... when they run out of power in 20 years time replace them.... nuclear batteries should be fully rechargeable....

With ships you have cruise turbines that are sized to operate at full power during cruise where they are efficient. at partial load Turbines are not very efficient, only at peak load and high power are they efficent.

But the whole point of mixed power is to get the features of the different propulsion systems... diesels are cheap but need to be enormous to get good power levels, while GTs are small and compact with plenty of power but they do tend to burn more fuel depending on how they are used.

In a ship they are generally used for bursts of high speed so of course they are never going to be efficient... but in this case when you need the speed it is more efficient to use GT for a burst of speed at the cost of high fuel consumption while running fast, than to put in the amount of diesel horse power you would need to achieve your higher speeds.

In terms of cars it is like having a smaller engine but using a turbo supercharger to get the power to drive fast when you need it, so that when you don't you are driving around on a cheap small engine. The other way to get that performance is to just use a really big powerful engine which mean everywhere you drive you are burning lots of fuel...

Yes the next gen tanks should be Turbine/Elec, or Diesel Elect. Either one would be fine.

Not really... diesel electric might be good for trains or ships where weight and volume don't matter, but even buses, let alone tanks, the gas turbine offers more power in a given space... and they are lighter too...

If you are operating in CATOBAR as 23900 would need to, then you need to launch every 2-3 mins just to get the strike package off. Russia can have probably 4 23900s for the price of a 80K ton CVN.

23900 is only a 30K ton ship... it is 10 thousand tons lighter than the CDG... so we are talking perhaps 6 fighters and one or two AWACS aircraft at the very best... which would be totally useless.... the French basically custom built the CDG to their needs... do you think they are idiots... do you think if they could have made it 10K tons lighter they would have...

Smaller ships means less deck space... tiny ships means constantly moving stuff around because everything gets in the way of everything else... it would seriously be a dog.

But not a cheap dog.

Russia now has bases in the ME and can count on Venezuela, Cuba and probably Vietnam.

Can it? The Americans are , but sometimes their continuous mission to undermine human rights and democracy in countries that do not obey don't fail as badly as they have recently in Syria and Venezuela...

Notice they sent Kuz to Syria where they DO have a base and logistics nearby.

But that wont always be the case... smaller carriers in larger numbers will need a much bigger support fleet... which in itself will be vulnerable too.

The Russian navy cannot match the USN, they don't have the GDP, but what they can do is have a few platforms to establish local logistics.

Russia doesn't need to match the USN ship for ship... with Onyx in service and Zircon on the way it is hard to say Russia is at a disadvantage.

If Russia does not develop a blue water navy its GDP will never grow in any significant way because it will have to rely on countries coming to it while surrounded on its european side by hostile enemy states that don't want it to grow and succeed.

Why would countries bother to trade with Russia and risk western isolations and sanctions? The other countries want to buy stuff and develop and grow, but they can see what the west has done to Venezuela and Syria and Libya and Iraq and Cuba and North Korea and Vietnam and even Egypt and Iran... not all of those countries were best buddies with Russia... in fact when the attitude from the west changed with Syria and Libya and Egypt and Iran those countries were trying to get friendly with the west and the EU and they all got burned and most have now turned to the alternative... Russia and China... they didn't really choose them but when the west turns on you they are all that is left if you want to have a say in your own country about what you want... and you don't want western companies to come in and take over everything....

With no cruisers or destroyers they will have no global reach, and with no aircraft carriers those cruisers and destroyers are going to be much more vulnerable to surprise attack and defeat by an opponent that will use air power.

Putting a tiny token force of weak fighters is just pissing money away... the Russians have just cancelled all the Flanker purchases and also the Su-57 programme and the new LFMS programme and they are going to build 48 MiG-29M2s, which is going to be their entire fighter protection force for the whole country... because they think their Nudel, S-500s, S-400s, S-350s, S-300s, etc etc etc are already good enough... the money spent on new aircraft can be saved and put into better missiles and more missiles...

I think AWACs can be a STOL platform ,does not need a CAT, maybe the transport planes do, but they can also use MI 26 for this.

They couldn't operate an Mi-26 on a Ford class super carrier, let alone a 30K ton lite carrier.

The Mi-26 would be a poor choice for AWACS simply because it is too big and heavy and would burn enormous amounts of fuel doing something a much smaller lighter aircraft could do much cheaper.

Notice using an An-124 as an AWACS does not make sense either... the bigger the plane the more it costs to buy and run and operate... if you need to transport 150 ton payloads then an An-124 is excellent, but to carry around a radar and extra fuel would be very very inefficient.

The key for an AWACS plane is that it spends most of its time cruising at an efficient flight speed, so traditionally airliners have been used as their base aircraft.

For the Soviets, they wanted a more rugged plane that could operate from poor runways with little infrastructure so they picked their Il-76 transport plane for the role.

AWACS planes don't have big powerful high thrust engines like fighters do, because that would mean they would burn fuel too fast and not be able to fly for very long periods.

For Russia the only reason it needs cats is for AWACS and inflight refuelling aircraft.

But they do need to be able to fit on the deck lifts otherwise they would have to remain on deck all the time which would get in the way of takeoffs and landings.

CGD can operate up to 40 Rafale so I don't see what a 30K ton ship cannot operate a 25 unit airwing with about 10-12 fighters.

Have they ever demonstrated that in a real combat situation?

If not then it is totally meaningless.

From what i have read about the ship the most aircraft they ever had on board and operational was in 2019 with 35 aircraft including 30 Rafales.

Standard load is two squadrons of Rafales (ie 24 planes) and less in peace time.

As a general rule of thumb the number of aircraft it can operate is based on the ships weight in thousands of tons so 35 Rafales for a 40K ton ship is actually pretty good.

I rather suspect the claim it could operate with up to 40 is because of that rule and nothing else... certainly not actual combat experience...

12 fighters is one squadron of fighters... which is pretty much useless in a 24/7 fight unless the enemy has no air power.

If you have cruise turbines that are sized right the ship can cruise efficiently. THat is the idea behind COGAG, At high load turbines are mor efficient.

Originally gas turbines were used for their power so you would have diesels as your primary and cruise propulsion and for a dash you used the gas turbines for extra speed at the cost of extra fuel consumption. I would expect it is possible to scale the GTs so that they run at an efficient speed for cruising and another set of gas turbines you can run when you need to go faster... not sure the Russian Navy has a wide variety of powerful GTs to choose from however... I would think most heavy ships will be nukes...

and I would never say use MI-26 for AWACs, but for carrier on board delivery if needed.

An aircraft carrier carries everything.... it is not just a question of how many planes you can fit on, or how many you can squease into the available hangar space.

Aircraft need maintenance... they also need fuel and ordinance.... a 30K ton ship intended to carry two regiments of Russian Naval Infantry and all their armour and helicopters to deliver them and other supplies to shore plus the fuel to operate landing craft and helicopters and of course food stores for up to 60 days for 1,000 soldiers... even just adding four fighter planes means the physical space for four fighter planes but also probably 4-6 spare engines and a mountain of spare parts for those planes to keep them going, and of course missiles and bombs and weapon pods and fuel tanks for those planes... not to mention a few thousand litres of fuel per aircraft per intended flight.

When I talk about needing a 90K ton carrier it is because when it is operated it will likely operate at a peace time level with perhaps two to three fighter squadrons on board.... that is 24-36 planes... and most of the time that will be plenty and it will allow it to be fully loaded up with supplies and stores... fuel and bombs and missiles and spare parts for 90 planes on board but just 36 planes actually there means that while on paper you are ready for a 3 month deployment with peace time levels of flight operations you could actually get away with a 7 or 8 month deployment at the same operational levels before you need to worry about replen... which makes you more independent and mobile.

Having a bigger ship and not needing it might cost more money, but having ships too small that were cheaper but not fit for purpose costs more and that payment is made in blood.

The Yak-44 specs showed a higher Max takeoff weight than the C2 (about 1.5 times bigger) and much more powerful engines, so it should be able to carry at least 7 tons of payload on a carrier (at a high speed).
(I know that it had D27 engines, but those could be replaced by a propfan derived from the PD12V helicopter engine (the propellers/fan themselves were anyway made in Russia by the company aerosila).

Would be interesting... they recently upgraded the props on the Bear which reduced vibration by something like 50% as well as increasing thrust and general performance... which suggests to me they have improved the accuracy in the production of the props and used supercomputers to model the airflow to optimise the shape and improve power delivery to thrust.

In terms of replen... a ship along side with a crane is faster than any help or transport plane alone, but teh Yak would be good for AWACS roles too so why not go for it?

A land based version as a full AWACS platform would probably sell rather well to countries that probably can't afford the much bigger A-50 and A-100, but recognise an aircraft with a 360 degree airborne radar that can monitor and manage air combat is a very very useful thing..

Note; even if I would prefer something with size and characteristics similar to the Ulyanovsk I am not against a smaller carrier (around 40/45000 tons displacement) with a similar size to the ex Gorshkov carrier (currently INS Vikramaditya) designed specifically for the role... however it should not be a LHD/full carrier hybrid....

Careful what you wish for... if they can create a multihull vessel that has an enormously wide but low drag hull that weighs 40-50K tons that can get the job done... ie potential up to 60-70 fighter aircraft plus 2-3 fixed wing AWACS and inflight refuelling fixed wing aircraft plus a dozen helicopters for anti sub and pilot SAR and AEW and other roles then fine... that would be great... but the planes need to be either Su-57 or the new MiG 5th gen fighter... no half arsed VSTOL bullshit.

What I mean is that if they are actually developing VSTOL aircrafts anyway (and another country, e.g. UAE or similar is paying for a large share of its development),then yes, in some occasions they could also think about deploying a couple of them on a LHD, however they should not base their strategy on it...

The new MiG 5th gen fighter wont be VSTOL... if the UAE wants to pay for a VSTOL version then they can go right ahead but the MiG model wont be VSTOL because they want to make a good fighter that is cheaper than Su-57.

Putting VSTOL fighters on helicopter carriers makes no sense... it is like putting a 125mm high velocity tank gun on a BMP so it can fight tanks as well and they will save money on tanks... except they wont of course. There are no tank/BMP hybrids in service because a tank and a BMP have different roles and do different things...

Ironically if you had a 1,000 ton land vehicle you could probably put gun and missile air defence turrets on it and various anti armour weapons and cabins to carry troops etc etc and make it multirole... but it would be an enormous bomb magnet and missile magnet.... it would probably take quite a few hits to take it out however but could not have the level of armour a T-90 can have on its front... otherwise it would be a 10K ton land vehicle...

Even sillier would be to build a full size carrier, bigger than the french one, but only able to carry STOVL aircraft (like the british navy)....

No chance of that... Sukhoi have lots of power in Russia and a big carrier will get naval Su-57s...

Even with two CVNs and the Kuznetsov at most you would have about 250 carrier based fighters... 90 + 90 + perhaps 40 for the Kuznetsov leaving about 30 odd for the two land based carrier training centres...

If they did what MiG did and just make them all naval capable with a wing outer panel change then it would be a good excuse to make a few more of them...

Yes, so effectively making the new Russian helicopter landing ships and some medium support tankers as manouverable as the Mistrals which also have sophisticated propulsion... this is good news because taking some docking tugs to a landing to make sure your landing ships can manouver properly just looks bad.

This will be interesting and a useful technology going forward for other platforms as well...

Not really... they have Azi pods on their icebreakers... there was no need to buy Mistrals and even buying them did not give them access to the technology... it just would have given them four more ships with Azipods (they would have bought four).

They bought Mistrals because they wanted serious landing ships with good helicopter and armoured transport capacity and the Mistrals were the best match and would have been put quickly into service.

Obviously they now need to take the long route and make them themselves... they will still get some and they will likely buy four and possibly more... perhaps six... I wonder if India will want to buy some... or perhaps Brazil... who knows...

The skills to build modern ships in a modular way they already paid for when they paid the South Koreans to develop their new enlarged shipyards in the far east... the SKs were the best ship makers in the world for quite some time... though China has surpassed them in numbers but that is about funding and needing to replace a lot of obsolete or nonexistant ships and subs.

With the Mistral the Russian shipyards just showed they could make them as well as the French could... which is no great surprise to anyone.

Off topic posts moved to this thread:

https://www.russiadefence.net/t8410p350-future-russian-aircraft-carriers-and-deck-aviation-2

As expected, soon we will hear some news about a new short take off or vertical take off plane. I doubt the SU-57 will be operated from these ships despite its advertised short take off and landing.

These ships are helicopter carriers... the closest thing to a fighter plane these ships will be carrying will be Ka-52K helicopters.

They are 40K tons because they are carrying a large compliment of Russian Naval Infantry forces and their armour as well as a compliment of helicopters to support their operations and small landing vessels so the landing ships themselves can remain off shore during the operation.

There has never been plans for any fixed wing aircraft to operate from these two ships... they are Mistral replacements and they weren't supposed to carry VSTOL fighters either... otherwise the Ka-52Ks with AESA cm wave radars would not have been developed.

The next two ships of the class will also be helicopter landing ships and two ships will be based in the northern fleet and two will be based in the Pacific fleet and will operate in the Atlantic and pacific and arctic oceans most of the time. They are rated for 1 month at sea operationally so will have large amounts of onboard stores to allow such operations.

Talk of VSTOL aircraft is mostly wishful thinking, but if they do manage to develop a VSTOL 5th gen fighter that is any good they are more likely to operate it from the Kuznetsov class carriers and bigger because even a vertical take off jet benefits greatly in takeoff weights with rolling takeoffs and ski jumps... and these ships are helicopter carriers and wont have ski jumps like the Mistral didn't.