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China Builds New Type 002 Mega Carrier as the Age of Sea Power Wanes

posted by martyb on Wednesday May 15 2019, @03:52AM   Printer-friendly
from the The-bigger-they-are dept.

Chocolate writes:

Who's is bigger? Russia or the good old US of A? Do we need to get out the measuring tape? Maybe we do, after China completes what looks to be the latest generation naval defense: the Type 002 aircraft carrier that is currently under construction in a floodable dry dock. Tinfoil hatters among us will be glad to hear that updates of the progress for the construction of this mighty vessel come from satellite imagery. Now that battleships are pretty much obsolete with maybe carriers to follow this latest addition to China's growing fleet may just be an expensive showboat.

Entry for the carrier on Wikipedia.

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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday May 15 2019, @01:13PM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday May 15 2019, @01:13PM (#843809) Journal

    You do need to know where it is, yes. Carriers are relatively large objects, when in operation they and their activities are visible for many miles. It's hard to imagine any significant national military unable to find the carrier that's bothering them.

    And yet, you still have to find them in order to shoot them. Every significant national military that got into a fight with the US had considerable trouble finding those things.

    There aren't many effective countermeasures against hypersonic missiles. Particularly true for ships, which have space and weight limits.

    You don't need many, you just need one.

    Not, of course, to say that countermeasures won't eventually develop.

    Hence, my use of the word "future".

    Sure, they exist, they do have a chance of success, but you're talking about trying to shoot down a missile that's coming in way faster than the bullets from your point defense guns go out.

    I suspect the approach will be to use lasers which go out five or so orders of magnitude faster than the hypersonic missiles come in and which could eventually target missiles hundreds of miles out.

    The real problem is that such concentration of force as in an aircraft carrier has increasingly limited economies of scale. The increasing ability of small objects like hypersonic missiles to do few or even one-hit kills on an aircraft carrier (say by flying through an internal fuel storage tank) means that you are increasingly restricted in the use of that aircraft carrier, particularly, when the planned defenses can't be properly rigged up along with the risks of using ships that take years to replace.