henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) (04/17/89)
From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) In article <5633@cbnews.ATT.COM> you write: >... As mentioned earlier their CVs aren't really carriers and >even the Soviet navy calls them ASW cruisers... As I recall, this designation is political rather than technical: they can't take capital ships (e.g. aircraft carriers) through the Dardanelles without negotiating first, but "ASW cruisers" are no problem. This happens in the West too; the British carriers were "through-deck cruisers" for a while because the RN was officially out of the carrier business. And for that matter, the USMC's small carriers are not officially carriers, because the only Real Carriers in US service are the USN's big ones. (The fact that the USN operated carriers that size not too long ago, and called them carriers, is of course irrelevant. :-)) >Nobody really knows for sure about the new Sov CVs but it is reported that >they'll carry approx 60 planes a lot less than US CVs but then their >composition will make a lot of differnce. As I think I've mentioned before, beware that there are different ways of counting carrier capacity and the raw numbers aren't necessarily comparable. (For example, USN numbers are inflated compared to most of the rest of the world because the USN is willing to park aircraft on deck permanently, whereas the RN and others insist that the ship's official capacity is what will fit in the hangar space.) Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu