PA NG - next gen French Aircraft carrier program

TomcatViP said:
Hardly if you haven't any stealth component among your fighters.
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But for that the Neuron based drone is in development...
TomcatViP said:
Regarding the extra length catapult, I wonder if that doesn't result from a trade study regarding a/c maintenance and service life. Longer means a slower acceleration and less strain on the airframe.
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Lots of reasons for an increased EMALS. Maybe they just need a higher launch speed at a given weight.
 
Kurapika444 said:
Ah thanks. It kind of makes it look like a big yacht haha
Any idea as to why other carriers aren't using the same trick? Could that indicate that the K22 reactors are somehow a bit underpowered?
It would be a shame if they didn't learn any lessons from the K15.
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I'm guessing that the reactors are underpowered a bit.

The USN can design whatever monster reactors they want for a 330-350m carrier.


Kurapika444 said:
Yeah the Ford and Fujian do have a notch but it seemed less dramatic than the PANG one.
The Queen Elizabeth has a square-ish deck with no notch though. Is that beacause the flight deck isn't angled and so it is less bothersome for the landing planes if you park planes there?
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Yes, it's because the QE flight deck isn't angled.



Archibald said:
Besides that, I often found SCAF to be severely overweight for any carrier - until I just realized EMALS could handle the weight much better than plain old steam catapults. 35 mt instead of a Rafale-M 25 mt ?
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Yes, EMALS is a beast of a catapult. especially if you can get two the same length as the Ford-class.


kqcke for you said:
Edit: that means we may see FCAS with an MTOW twice of that from rafale with around 50.000kg
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You could, but I strongly doubt it.

I wouldn't expect any carrier aircraft to exceed 40 tonnes MTOW and ~25 tonnes landing weight. Both weights limited by the carrier equipment (MTOW limited by catapults, landing weight limited by arresting gear).

So FCAS would be about the same size as the USN FA-XX.
 
kqcke for you said:
Lots of reasons for an increased EMALS. Maybe they just need a higher launch speed at a given weight
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Please let’s stop jumping to conclusions. There is no evidence that EMALS’ length is being changed and in fact it is most unlikely.

Everyone quotes 90m (300ft) length but that is just a nice round number that isn’t accurate. EMALS is actually composed of 29x 12ft segments (according to congressional testimony in 2009), ie. 348ft or 106m long. That doesn’t include the braking length, just the power stroke (acceleration length).

So when journalists quote 90m or 100 m or 105m they are all talking approximate numbers, not actual lengths on an engineering drawing.
 
H_K said:
Please let’s stop jumping to conclusions. There is no evidence that EMALS’ length is being changed and in fact it is most unlikely.

Everyone quotes 90m (300ft) length but that is just a nice round number that isn’t accurate. EMALS is actually composed of 29x 12ft segments (according to congressional testimony in 2009), ie. 348ft or 106m long. That doesn’t include the braking length, just the power stroke (acceleration length).

So when journalists quote 90m or 100 m or 105m they are all talking approximate numbers, not actual lengths on an engineering drawing.
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Yep it's all approximate so far and we won't know for sure until next year it seems.
Wouldn't it be more expensive if France ordered custom EMALS instead of using the same Gerald Ford ones? Unless they can't be exactly the same for obscure reasons? (aircraft needs, deck dimensions, power system idk...)
 
Kurapika444 said:
Yep it's all approximate so far and we won't know for sure until next year it seems.
Wouldn't it be more expensive if France ordered custom EMALS instead of using the same Gerald Ford ones? Unless they can't be exactly the same for obscure reasons? (aircraft needs, deck dimensions, power system idk...)
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If EMALS is built from a number of 12ft/4m long sections, it'd be relatively simple to just not include a few of those sections at the cost of less acceleration out of the resulting catapult.
 
Scott Kenny said:
Unlikely, IIRC the US setup is as long as reasonably achievable. While I wouldn't be surprised by the French at least asking how much speed they could get out of a ~300ft long EMALS made up of 25 sections.
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I mean as far as i know:
"The complete EMALS system will use a 300-ft long LIM to accelerate a 100,000-lb (45,000-kg) aircraft to more than 130 knots (67m/sec) and lighter aircraft to 200 knots (100m/sec)."

But who knows how large FCAS will be in the end. Hopefully the demonstrator will give ous atleast some kind of picture about the situation
 
FighterJock said:
I like the sound of the F-111B sized FCAS Scott Kenny,
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It's a big aircraft, basically the largest plane that you can launch and recover using C-13 steam cats and whatever the designation of the arresting gear is. It means you have a lot of internal volume available for weapons and fuel.
 
Forest Green said:
In fairness 2xK22 reactors is 600,000hp, which is ~3x the total installed power on a QE Class (204,000hp). So even underpowered nuclear reactors and still pretty powerful.
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I believe that's 220 MW thermal power per reactor, so about 145 MW shaft power. Still comes out more than QEC, which is about 120 MW total generating capacity.
 
Scott Kenny said:
It's a big aircraft, basically the largest plane that you can launch and recover using C-13 steam cats and whatever the designation of the arresting gear is. It means you have a lot of internal volume available for weapons and fuel.
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Yeah something F-111Bs has the best chances but i would argue that there is a chance for a larger plane if needed
 
Without getting into politics, I really hope that the current troubles in France won't lead to the carrier being delayed/cancelled/downscaled. The PA2 did get cancelled under similar circumstances 15 years ago...
 
Nope, PA2 was a "luxury" on top of CdG. That one is the successor so it will get through.
 
Yeah they need it to replace the CdG but I'm scared of the potential cost cutting measures. They might go for 2 EMALS instead of 3 for example (although 3 was never official).
 
Kurapika444 said:
Yeah they need it to replace the CdG but I'm scared of the potential cost cutting measures. They might go for 2 EMALS instead of 3 for example (although 3 was never official).
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I'm not convinced that the third cat is really that significant. It's unlikely that more than two would be used at one time anyway.
 
TomS said:
I'm not convinced that the third cat is really that significant. It's unlikely that more than two would be used at one time anyway.
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Gives you a LOT more redundancy, especially in case of combat damage.
 
Hi,
As I understand it from some article that I once read, the old Mk13 steam catapults were supposed to have a reliability of something like 95% each. As such, with two catapults total, your chances of having both catapults down would be 5% of 5%, or 0.25% overall. With three catapults, the chances of having all three down at one time would be 5% of 5% of 5% or 0.0125% overall.

I know that I once read that the planned reliability of the EMALS catapults is supposed to eventually be 99.5% each, but I don't know if they have reached that capability yet. For two catapults though, for both them to be down would be 0.5% of 0.5% or 0.0025% overall (if I did the math correctly) which supposedly is why some modern carrier designs only have three catapults.

Regards

Pat
 
This topic needs to be made "news only" in order to avoid pointless speculations.
 

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