China_ This Carrier is Strange.

Millennium7* History & Technology

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00:00And in the end, she sailed. And I have to say, it looks magnificent.

00:07In the last couple of weeks, we finally had high resolution pictures and videos of the

00:29new Chinese TEP-003 because it just completed, at the time of filming, its first sea trials.

00:36Even though we recently discussed together China and the Chinese strategy,

00:41now it is time for an update specifically focused on this new aircraft carrier.

00:47And finding reliable information, it's not that easy.

00:51So the Fujian is a conventionally powered catobar carrier built by the Jiangnian

00:56shipyard in Shanghai. It was laid down probably in late 2015. It was launched in June 2022.

01:07And as we all have seen, it completed its first sea trial in May 2024.

01:14The Chinese are always very quick, but it is reasonable to expect at least a year of sea

01:19trials, another year of air operations trials, and some additional six months to one year

01:26to have a basic carrier wing operating from the carrier. A very basic one.

01:32Now, the sources agree that the displacement is about 72,000 tons at normal load,

01:38reaching around 81,000 at full load. Some sources give higher estimates,

01:44but this seems to be the consensus. The power plant was believed to be an

01:48integrated electric propulsion, but it is not. It has 8 boilers and 14 turbines,

01:55powering 4 shafts with 4 propellers. The installed power is 160 megawatts.

02:02For comparison, the American Kitty Hawk class had 210 megawatts of power installed,

02:09but the ship was slightly larger, but it displaced about the same at full load.

02:15Obviously, there is no spec sheet that you can download from the planned website,

02:19so all these numbers and information has been collected or inferred by fragments of information

02:26appeared in the press, online, or through interviews with Chinese officials.

02:31So, while researching, I realized that not only we don't know much, but we also don't know what we

02:39don't know. And inferring too much is a dangerous game, because... no, I'm getting ahead of me.

02:46Obviously, the major element we are interested into is the air component and its management.

02:52One of the major talking points is the adoption of electromagnetic catapults.

02:57This is often portrayed as skipping a generation because the US, before adopting the EMOS,

03:03used steam-activated catapults for more than half a century, I believe.

03:08But this is really not the case. Think of it, if you want to start building aircraft today,

03:14you don't start building wooden biplanes, you start with a general aviation monoplane made of

03:21aluminium and composites. So there was no point in trying an already obsolete technology.

03:27These catapults have gone through a long development on the ground and it seems that

03:32they went through successful tests on board, launching deadweights. We will see.

03:38Three of them are installed on the ship, which is one less than any US carrier designed in modern

03:46times. This obviously has implications. The sorties rate is physically limited by the number of

03:53catapults. So why this choice? I suspect that the Chinese hit two limits. One is the room available

04:01and the other is the power available. We don't know the detailed design of the Chinese catapults,

04:08but it is conceivable that they are a bit larger than the American equivalent. Moreover,

04:13it is not that you just plug the power cable into the socket and you're good to go. The system for

04:19storing energy is quite complex on the American ships and we can't expect the Chinese ones to be

04:25much smaller. If anything, the first iteration of a technology is usually the bulkiest.

04:32And anyway, the ship is smaller than a Nimitz or a Ford and the three catapults are all of

04:38the same size, so it sort of makes sense. Now, before the usual trolls make everyone

04:45notice in the comments, yes, I know that the emails are less impacting on the ship because

04:51they don't require steam pipes, valves and accumulators from the boilers, so thank you.

04:58Ok? Furthermore, the ship doesn't have an excess of engine power available,

05:02so it is conceivable that the electric power is also limited and maybe four catapults were

05:10just too much. If this is the case, the coming Type 004, which is going to be nuclear powered,

05:17may well have four catapults. We'll see. Another element influencing the air operation is the

05:23presence of just two aircraft elevators, both on the starboard side. The US carriers have three,

05:29which is better for moving the aircraft around and for redundancy. I've read some analysis that

05:34this is a heritage of the Soviet design at the root of the Liaoning and Shandong, but it seems

05:41unlikely to me the Chinese do not lack naval architects and the ship is big enough to house

05:47all three of them, so I don't have a real explanation and we will leave this for now.

05:52If you read around, there are all sorts of wild guesses related to the air wing composition.

05:58The truth is, we don't have a shred of efficient information. The most reasonable answer is

06:04probably that the carrier wing composition is going to be variable and it will be tailored

06:10for the specific mission. And the mission of this aircraft carrier is going to be...

06:15Well, let's not put the cart ahead of the horses. So the first interesting piece of news

06:22is that the Chinese are developing a carrier variant for their advanced trainer JL-10,

06:28which is the J variant. If there was any doubt that the Chinese are really serious,

06:35this should be enough to remove them. In the years from the commissioning of the Liaoning in 2012

06:41till today, the Chinese carriers have been focused on producing trained pilots and personnel.

06:48This is a slow process. Since this is the first Catobar carrier, there is also the necessity of

06:55extending the training of the current pilots and start establishing a new generation of personnel

07:01trained in Catobar operations. If I had to guess, the JL-10 will be the first aircraft

07:08really operating from the carrier. Of course, this won't stop the integration of other aircraft,

07:12but it will take probably a year of intensive training to have the pilots and the personnel

07:18ready to deploy a more or less complete carrier wing and fly safely to and from the carrier.

07:25The main combat component, at least at the beginning, will be based on the J-15. The J-15

07:32isn't a great platform. It is the reverse engineering of the Russian Su-33, an aircraft that

07:38the Russians themselves have been considering obsolete for many years now. However, that was

07:44what was available to the Chinese and it has contributed to creating the first and second

07:50generation of Chinese naval aviators. But the aircraft, as it is today, it is configured for

07:56Stobar operations, so to operate from the Fujian, it must be modified to launch from a catapult.

08:03And since they were already back to the drawing board, this is the point when the Chinese

08:08decided to fix the problem. Since the J-15 is basically a flanker, which is a platform that is

08:15almost infinitely adaptable, and since the Chinese have a massive experience in upgrading flankers,

08:22well, they basically decided to go all in. The J-15B is currently being tested because,

08:28other than the structural improvement required to be catapult launched, it has been provided

08:34with an entirely new avionics suite, modernized radar, and it has been integrated with the PL-10

08:39and the PL-15 air-to-air weapons. And since it is a multirole aircraft, most of the Chinese air

08:45launch weapons are being integrated as well. The aircraft would benefit from some more thrust,

08:51but it seems that the engines have not been upgraded, but basically most of the rest it was.

08:57And they also designed a dual seater training version, which in turn is the base for a dual

09:04seater electronic warfare variant, the J-15D. It has been developed, but it has never been seen

09:11operating from the Liaoning or the Shandong. Albeit it seems that this is going to happen,

09:17because mockups have been seen on board of the Liaoning. While we do not have any picture of

09:22a catapult prototype, it is only reasonable to expect that the Fujian will carry a few of these

09:29aircraft. So, if the J-15 is overall an old aircraft, then the J-35 is exactly the opposite.

09:38The J-35 is a medium weight fighter with stealth features. It features a general configuration

09:44similar to the F-35, but it is a totally indigenous design. The engine is the Chinese WS-13,

09:52it features two weapon bays and six wing hardpoints, with an estimated maximum payload

09:57of 8 tons. The radar is a modern AESA radar, and it has infrared sensors integrated into the

10:03aircraft. It is currently in development, and it is unclear if it features the key

10:095th generation hallmark, which is passive and collaborative targeting.

10:14Mockups have been seen on the Fujian, but also on the Stobart carriers, so the Chinese are likely

10:20going to operate it from all the fleet carriers. The aircraft is currently in development, and at

10:26least two prototypes are flying. The J-35 is a derivative of the Shenyang FC-31, a private venture

10:34that was heavily modified for carrier use. The first flight was in 2021, so it is still

10:40relatively early in the development to be able to say too much about it.

10:45Some say that it looks like an F-35, because China stole a large amount of classified data

10:51from Lockheed Martin. While the data leak is indeed true, if you think that this is going

10:57to simplify the life of the Chinese engineers, I think you are deluded. Whatever they found,

11:02those are not recipes to cook a dish. It's orders of magnitude more complex.

11:09Those data are useful to assess the performance of a potential opponent,

11:14they are useful as a benchmark, but if you think that you can copy something like an F-35,

11:21you have no idea of what you are talking about. I know that I will be taking a lot of flak for

11:26this, but when it comes to anything with a high technological content, China definitely takes

11:33inspiration, but just scoping is simply impossible. But there is a better reason why China is not just

11:42scoping, and I will explain it right after covering what I believe is the most important

11:48element in the upcoming carrier wing. The KJ-600 is a carrier capable AWACS.

11:56The general configuration reminds of the American E-2, being a turboprop with two engines,

12:03with six crew members and a large round radar on top. The radar is different from the standard

12:09configuration of the Chinese AWACS. In fact, for example, the large and ground-based KJ-2000

12:16has fixed AESA arrays arranged in a triangular configuration, each covering a 120° sector.

12:24In the case of the KJ-600, though, a similar arrangement would have implied

12:30quite small arrays, so the preference has been for a single one-sided rotating array,

12:36and we know that it is like this because the dielectric covers just one half of the rotodome.

12:42The aircraft sports a forest of antennas, and various analysts have reason to believe that the

12:47level of integration the Chinese are going for is not inferior to what is possible with advanced

12:53data links like the American model. Moreover, from the same airframe it is possible to derive

12:58other aircraft, like anti-submarine and maritime patrol aircraft, transport aircraft, electronic

13:04warfare and surveillance and so on. I would expect to see some of these variants in a not so

13:11far future. So, at the end of the day, what is going to be the carrier wing composition? Well,

13:17as I said, it may well be variable and it will be time dependent. At different points in time,

13:23in the future, it will have different compositions. If I had to hypothesize, considering what we have

13:29seen on the other Chinese carriers, there will probably be the following. I would say 40 to 45

13:36combat aircraft as a mix of J-15B and J-35, 4 to 6 J-15D for electronic warfare, 4 J-600,

13:45because with 4 you can maintain a 24 hours operation, 7 to 10 helicopters, because the

13:52Chinese tend to have quite a lot of helicopters, some of them are AWACS and they won't be needed

13:56on the Fujian, but still the Chinese like having helicopters on the carrier. It is also likely that

14:03in the near future the carrier will feature a naval variant of the J-11 drone, but so far we

14:10have only artist's impression or scale models. So, the first element to notice in all of this is that

14:17the effort the Chinese are pouring into creating a high-end carrier force is, simply put, enormous.

14:24At least four different aircraft types are in development, and they are doing it at a pace that

14:30is inconceivable in the West. Just consider the time that the Royal Navy took to put in service

14:37the two carriers, or the timeline for the new French Pang. We know for a fact that the Type 004

14:44project has started already in Dalian, and the fact that the Fujian hull number is 18 while the

14:51Type 004 is 20 is suggesting that we are going to see another Type 003 likely built in Shanghai.

14:58I know what many will be screaming at this point, that I am a Chinese shill because the US Navy has

15:05a century of experience in running an expeditionary carrier force while China has barely any experience.

15:12According to these people there is no chance that China is going to become a real opponent to the US

15:17in the foreseeable future. Well, the first consideration I have is why they must be

15:23opponents? Is the art of diplomacy and compromise dead in the 21st century? I really don't understand

15:30this level of rivalry between two countries that, at the end of the day, not like they are now, but

15:36potentially they don't need each other. It's beyond my comprehension. I actually may have an answer,

15:42but this will take us way too far. However, beyond this consideration that is mostly political,

15:48it is a fact that the Chinese do not have the culture and the experience of the US Navy or

15:54other European navies. But this is changing. With every training exercise, with every cruise, with

16:01every mission, the gap becomes smaller and smaller and smaller. The Chinese have shown remarkable

16:08abilities to grow and evolve and wherever I look I only see improvements. So, trust me, I have no

16:14particular sympathy for the Chinese establishment, but I can't say what I don't think it is true

16:20just to cater to a public who only wants confirmation of its own bias. But, leaving all this aside, there

16:26is a second and more subtle element to consider. As I said at the beginning, we have very little

16:33officially confirmed information. So, obviously, we extrapolate and try to infer the solution to

16:40our questions and in so doing we face the risk of projecting ourselves onto the Chinese thinking.

16:47Typically, we think that if it is not like us, well, it's worse. At least when it comes to

16:54weapon systems. Well, maybe it's not true. Maybe the Chinese have in mind different missions or

17:02postures than those that we would have if we were in their shoes. So, just saying that the

17:09Fujian is the beginning of a force like the United States Carrier Force with the same missions

17:17and the same doctrine. Well, it is not necessarily true. And actually that is my thinking. I am not

17:24sure what is going to happen. I have a couple of ideas in mind that I covered already in different

17:30videos, but I am sure that we will be surprised somehow. In fact, one peculiarity of the Chinese

17:37is their typical approach to the challenge. While the Russians tend to look for asymmetric solutions,

17:43the Chinese have both a symmetric and an asymmetric approach. For example, they introduced

17:49hypersonic and anti-ship ballistic weapons, which are an asymmetric threat, but they are also trying

17:55to catch up in the most symmetric competition, that is carrier-based operations. And by the way,

18:01this is the reason why coping makes little sense if you just dig a little bit under the surface,

18:08because if you want to reply asymmetrically, by definition you don't have anything to copy,

18:13you need to come up with something new. But if you want to reply symmetrically, then coping is

18:20useful up to a point, because you may want something better than your opponent. And for

18:25those who are now foaming at the mouth saying that everybody knows that the Chinese are only good at

18:31coping, I'm not saying that they never did, I'm saying that now they are beyond that stage.

18:40So I think that I've talked enough people for today. If you want to go a bit deeper on this

18:44subject, there is a very long and detailed discussion on how the Chinese carrier force

18:51could be used in a real confrontation, and this is in the video that is going to appear beside me.

18:58I'm sure you will love it. So thank you very much for watching,

19:01thank you to Patreon and members for their support, and see you next time!

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