I like the idea of airship AWACS platform, but I still believe that it should in addition to an AEW aircraft , not as a replacement.
An AEW that can operate from ships would be a very useful aircraft, not just for the navy but also to operate over a battlefield and provide target information.
The Russian Army bought Ka-31s... I believe they called them Ka-35s for use over the modern battlefield looking for low flying targets... an AEW aircraft like the Yak-44 would be better, but the Kamov was it at the time and they seem to think it is worth it.
A small Balloon would also be useful, especially if it could be tethered and powered by a ground vehicle, with antenna and sensors in the balloon it would be excellent.
In addition Russia would still benefit from having a carrier capable cargo aircraft (like the American
Grumman C-2 Greyhound) and its development costs could be shared between the AEW version and the cargo one.
I think an inflight refuelling light aircraft would be useful if they are going to have an AEW type on board... it would really be the only type on board that actually required cats for normal operations on a big carrier.
Either it could be a derivative of an existing transport aircraft (e.g.modified il-112 with more powerful engines) or the (larger than a il-112) restart of the Yak-44 project with new engines (i.e. turboprop or propfan version of the PD-Cool.
Well it would be interesting as to what sort of antenna it might be using and what sort of radar would be used... even an An-2 biplane type shape could be interesting... you could use a float plane version that could land on the water and drop a dipping sonar too... the AEW doesn't need to be fast or long range, but long endurance is important as well as being able to climb to decent altitudes...
What the **** are you writing about, guys ?
The Russians have been building the fucking corvette "Prvovorniy" since 2013, and you are writing about aircraft carriers ? No
Who needs giant coffins weighing tens of thousands of tons nowadays ?
Hang on... if large ships are useless and dead meat then big airfields would also be useless... in fact all air power must be useless... if it can't protect the navy then how could it protect the army.
Scrap the entire air force completely perhaps... but then without air power the army and navy will be much easier to deal with so save even more money and get rid of them too.
Without a surface fleet then subs will be too vulnerable too so get rid of them as well.
Funny because western experts often suggest to Russia that it doesn't need a powerful navy nor large ships... is it because theirs have become too expensive and also too vulnerable due to hypersonic missiles that Russia has shown in combat?
We have entered the era of hypersonic weapons, which will only progress even more, especially in the range and distribution of these weapons around the world.
You have witnessed that drones are also appearing at sea.
The best air defence system at sea it the US AEGIS system which includes and requires the use of aircraft on aircraft carriers for it to actually work.
A Russian equivalent with more potent missiles and better radar and better aircraft will be better able to face an enemy with hypersonic missiles than any other Navy could.
And this fucking conflict shows you all the vulnerability of aviation, but no, you just don't want to accept it.
What this conflict shows is pussies should not waste their time watching war because every time there is a loss they piss their pants and cry about it.
In war ships will be sunk and planes will be shot down and tanks will be blown up... if you think it is bad design or a design flaw or your design is not the best in the world because it can be destroyed then you are a fucking idiot that should have no say at all in anything to do with the military.
Do you think the US Navy burst into tears and surrendered to the Japs when the Japs sank a lot of their ships at Pearl Harbour in 1941?
Aircraft have been lost in the Ukraine... the shift of air defence forces within the Russian Army to the Aerospace Defence forces (ie Air Force) suggests to me that a lot of the shot down Russian aircraft were shot down by friendly fire, but don't quote me.
The Russian forces in Ukraine rely on their air force to supply information and to control the air space over them... not perfect and not complete but what fucking idiot would expect perfection in a war zone?
The Russian Navy require air power and air control if they want to operate beyond Russian controlled waters and an aircraft carriers provides that.
Spending money on an idiocy called an aircraft carrier makes sense if you're going to carry out airstrikes on Madagascar and Western Sahara.
It's over Garry, that doctrine of using giant coffins with a flight deck around the world is over.
When the UK and France and the US still have aircraft carriers, you think they are obsolete... good for you.
When drones and missiles can do what fighters and AWACS aircraft can do then you might have a case but they can't and wont for a good part of the next decade or two, which means carriers are necessary.
Leave the aircraft carriers to the US and China and let them measure who has the bigger dick among themselves.
The US and China have nothing to do with this.
Russia doesn't need aircraft carriers to fight the US or to fight China... Yasen SSGNs with Zircon and whatever replaces it makes rather more sense in defeating such threats if needed. In the 1980s the Soviets had a 15KT nuke torpedo for firing at ports from a distance to take them out... such a torpedo would be ideal for taking out entire US carrier groups and their escort subs all in one shot...
The Russian carrier is about providing aircraft to support their ships in what ever they happen to be doing.
on top of that Russia was never and geographically will never be a big naval force. It makes little sense to be one for Russia and the virtual projection of naval force is limited to geographical position and possibilities.
With the North Sea Route basing carriers in the Northern Fleet and the Pacific fleet gives them access to the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
If Russia wants to trade with the rest of the world it needs access to the main sea lines of communication.... the main trade routes, and from Russia no other branch of the Russian military can have any say except the navy, but if you want to project force around the world you need to take air power and drones, which requires a carrier...
I am convinced that aircraft carriers are more obsolete now than battleships were in WW2.
It was aircraft that made Battleships obsolete and on paper lots of people were saying nuclear weapons rendered large surface ships obsolete for the same reason... but that didn't work out to be true either.
Bigger ships can carry more useful things in more useful numbers... corvettes and frigates are good for coastal stuff but for much longer trips they are too small and limiting... you need a destroyer or cruiser sized ship to really project its air defence capacity and of course an aircraft carrier can extend that out thousands of kms in all directions with decent AEW/AWACS capacity and by the time the Russians have a new carrier likely Su-57 fighters as standard... along with a smaller 5th gen light fighter probably like this:
Well, a ship of several tens of thousands of tons is not a rabbit, so it cannot change its position at extreme speed.
Why would it need to?
A hypersonic missile is flying through air moving at several kms per second... putting something in the way would apply enormous force to that missile, the airflow over it would rip it apart.
Look at the single heat shield panel failing on the Space Shuttle during reentry... heat getting inside where it is not designed to take that sort of heat and the whole thing shatters.
Even a laser system that can burn a hole in the nose of an incoming missile from 5km... maybe two seconds to impact but if that nose comes apart at 4.5km the whole missile will disintegrate very rapidly as its insides are exposed to the airflow...
And that is ignoring the fact that decoys and jamming can cause the missile to miss.
Don't get me wrong they are formidable weapons but so were ICBMs before ABM systems were developed and then you got manouvering ICBMs and then you will get new ABM systems that deal with that etc etc...
New all electric destroyers and cruisers will lead to ships able to generate enormous levels of energy for use in specific things, which could include lasers and other systems that might be useful in defeating hypersonic threats... remember if you blind it then you don't have to shoot it down... it is going to miss your ship anyway.
An aircraft carrier is too expensive and a relic of the past.
Western carriers are prohibitively expensive, but Russian carriers might be affordable... especially if it is supported by an international trade boom that is created by the international commerce it supports for Russia and her new trade partners.
Investing billions of dollars in something that will surely be destroyed by the impact of a few dozen missiles
The only enemies likely to succeed in destroying a Russian carrier would be the west which means WWIII is already on so what difference would losing it or not losing it make?
A Russian carrier is not about invading countries, it is about protecting and supporting the ships it operates with which will likely actually cost rather more than the Carrier itself costs, and the presence of the carrier means it is vastly more likely for more of those ships to survive than if the carrier was not there.
In the Falklands war the British lost a lot of ships because their carrier had Harriers and weak AEW and so they had to pull the carriers back from where the war was taking place to keep them safe from Argentine attack.
If the conflict had happened 10 years before that with the Ark Royal with AEW and Phantoms and Buccaneers the conflict would have been much safer and easier... the ships would have much better protection with Phantoms able to carry BVR missiles... they had a modified version of the Sparrow... wasn't amazing but was better than the no BVR missile the Harrier carried.
Except for measuring who has the bigger dick between the Chinese and the US, aircraft carriers serve no purpose.
The fact that you don't understand the effect an air defence aircraft carrier has in naval situations is amusing and quite frankly a bit sad.
What did the USA do with a huge fleet of aircraft carriers in WW2 ?
They took on and destroyed the Japanese fleet and pushed them all the way back to Japan.
Did they land and conduct a land offensive on Tokyo, Osaka, etc ? No, they dropped two atomic bombs.
If the Japs had developed a decent fighter like an LA-9 or a Yak-3 those bombers might never have been able to get close enough to deliver said bombs...
Look, this is how the phone looked in 1955, that is, when the aircraft carrier Forrestal became operational.
And then that aircraft carrier was a very important factor.
And like the phone, aircraft carriers are still needed because nothing has been developed to replace them.
They have evolved over the years, but essentially an aircraft carrier gives you long range eyes and ears and reach that you can't get from surface ships.
A group of ships sailing an ocean have very limited vision, they would be easy to sneak up on and attack and without airborne radar showing the commander what is where and where the enemy is and what threats are there then you are fighting blind... without surface ships most subs become targets rather than hunters because enemy forces which have plenty of carriers will just hunt them down.
Ships are shitty anyway, no matter which. If they have 48 AD missiles just launch 49 anti ship missiles. But for most a salvo of 8 missiles is already an assured kill.
A single ship even a single Russian Corvette would probably survive 8 anti ship missiles if they are shitty western subsonic missiles, but without an aircraft carrier you can launch aircraft after aircraft to launch missile after missile at a group of ships till your missiles start to sneak through and start to sink ships... you need the ability to strike back and having a carrier with AWACS and fighters that can go and investigate the area all these missiles seem to be coming from and then direct weapons to start shooting down these enemy aircraft and ships that are launching this attack from is what it is all about.
Some little country might think its entire navy of 4 or 5 ships could take on and defeat a small Russian ship, but when the radio call comes that a flight of four Su-57Ks are inbound watch them scatter.
A threat of US sanctions and port blockades in Venezuela will disappear when the Kuznetsov and the Namikhov arrive for exercises and training with the Venezuelan navy...
A US ship acting like dicks in the Persian gulf shooting its gun and chasing Iranian navy boats into Iranian waters detects an aircraft on its super radar and the captain pisses himself and shoots down a civilian airbus airliner.
I remember before the incident the AEGIS class cruisers were amazing.... they could identify targets by counting the turbine blades in their engines... they were amazing... after they confused an Airbus as being an F-14 they shut up about that amazing capability, but if he wasn't acting like a dick he could have called a nearby carrier to send a fighter out to investigate the radar target and everything would have been fine.
Of course if it had been an F-14 on attack they could have dealt with that too...
Ships however are still important yo control your seas. Planes can't patrol for days an area. Ships can.
But in a war, the air force and the subs are what you need.
Carriers have their usefulness. Specially for controlling sea routes. A small carrier can do the job. No need for the 100kt.
You are all over the place dude, ships are important because Russias enemies don't have hypersonic anti ship missiles yet and by the time they do the Russian air defence network has probably already evolved to deal with that.... the extra ring of defence created by having fighters and AWACS aircraft makes any group of ships much safer than without it.
Planes from carriers can patrol areas for months at a time... continuously... because they carry more than one on each carrier.
Most countries use MPAs to monitor water around their country... so aircraft are actually rather good for that... manned or unmanned.
Large aircraft carriers are a liability in superpower vs superpower conflict.
They are very useful in foreign intervention against small defensless nations.
Whether Russia will build aircraft carriers will depend on its future foreign policy.
You are confusing Russian and Soviet aircraft carriers with US carriers.
US carriers are like the US military... aircraft are most important and do most things, so the US Army relies on the US AF to clear the skies of the enemy and attack the enemy ground forces to make their job easier. The US Navy thinks the aircraft can perform air defence and strike missions and the ships are just there to protect the carriers that do the job.
For Russia and the Soviet Union, the ships do the job and the Carrier is there to protect the ships and subs.
Their naval fleet was for sinking western carrier groups so they didn't need 40K ton helicopter landing ships, their Orlan and Atlant cruisers could probably protect themselves and the ships they operated with better than any Yak-38M could defend any of that.
The reason they wanted MiG-29s and Su-33s and that they didn't get Su-35 and MiG-35 multirole upgrades was because they wanted air defence fighters, not multirole fighter bombers.
The Su-33 with lots of weapons and lots of fuel can launch first and fly 1,000km out to where the threat is coming from and then loiter there for a few hours thinning the enemy air force that is threatening the Russian group of ships... the MiG-29s launch next and don't travel as far or as fast and carry fewer weapons and hit the enemy incoming strike package again and keep launching till the attack force is defeated or it reaches the ships and the ships start shooting down threats.
Why send Su-33s into enemy airspace when a Zircon or Granit missile could fly in and hit point targets at mach 10 or mach 2 respectively?
Their land attack missiles are powerful and effective, why risk aircraft doing something a missile can do better?
In the near future the MiG-29Ks will get MiG-35 level upgrades and the Su-33 will hopefully be replaced by the Su-57K...
An airship based AWACS could have a radar in a very low frequency that is 50m wide that could detect threats in space and 300m underwater...
What better platform for an enormous fleet of drones than an aircraft carrier... they can take off conventionally without rocket boosters, you could carry thousands of them and also carry decent modern fighters too.
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