Chinese Shipyard Looks to Build Giant Floating Islands
1,000,000 ton battlestations

By Jeffrey Lin and P.W. Singer Posted April 20, 2015

Floating Island
This CGI shows one of JDG's floating islands, which is likely the largest 120m X 900M configuration. The floating island can support both civilian and military missions, including supply, landing aircraft and basing of amphibious vehicles.
China, not just satisfied with turning South China Sea reefs into airports, is looking to expand its naval basing activities by building giant floating islands.


Important Guests
The April 2015 press conference of the Jidong Development Group included interesting guests, like this PLA officer. Considering that the first floating island will be based as a deep sea support project in the South China Sea, the PLA could have dual use interests in JDG's technology.
The Jidong Development Group (JDG), a construction company, and Hainan Hai Industrial Company (Hai is Mandarin for ocean) are proposing to build a floating sea base for multipurpose usage, such as tourism, shipping, power generation and offshore fossil fuel extraction. The floating sea base would be based in the South China Sea, for logistical support activities.


Shell Australia Prelude
Shell Australia's Prelude, was built in South Korea and displaces 600,000 tons at full load. It extracts natural gas from undersea fields, and liquifies them to offload for transport by LNG carriers.
Currently, the largest offshore floating platforms are natural gas and oil production facilities, of which Australia Shell's Prelude is the world's largest. Built by Samsung Heavy Industries and Technip, the Prelude is 488 meters long, 74 meters wide and has a full displacement of 600,000 tons. The Prelude has a catamaran ship's double hull and is currently anchored off northwest Australia's eponymous gas field.


Airport and Port
The floating island can be outfitted to accommodate both port terminal facilities, fuel bunkerage and airstrips, raising all sorts of interesting new logistical capabilities. For instance, this air-sea port would be able to be shifted towards disaster zones, with airplanes loading humanitarian relief for quick delivery inland.

JDG's floating island designs are modular, being assembled from multiple semi-submersible hull sections. They would come in three sizes. The smaller island is 300 meters long and 90 meters wide, the medium sized island is 120 meters wide and 600 meters lond, while the larger island is 900 meters long and 120 meters wide. Assuming a hull draft of around 16 meters, full displacement of the islands could likely be around 400,000 and 1.5 million tons, respectively.

The design though would allow the islands to scale much larger, by attaching more semi-submersible hull modules, just like Lego bricks. Despite the large size of the individual modules, the floating islands could be easily assembled in deep offshore waters by linking together modules transported by semi-submersible heavy lift ships from landbased shipyards.


That's no island!
This JDG floating island island is even larger than the currently planned 900m long floating island. With a length of 2 kilometers (the cargo ship alongside it would be around 400 meters long), its large size is made possible by the modular construction of JDG's shipbuilding technology. The islands can also travel at speeds of up to 18 kilometers an hour.

Such giant bases could house battalions of marines and a wing of fighter/attack aircraft, and unlike fixed island bases, they can be redeployed away from enemy missiles.
The technical description of the JDG floating island is a "deep sea support base." That is, unlike an actual island, they will be mobile. JDG General Manager Wang Yandong said that the islands can move at speeds of up to 18 kilometers an hour. The floating islands could serve as an offshore wind farm, oil production and as a rapidly deployable offshore port. While JDG has mentioned the island's potential as sea mobile resorts to move between northern Bohai Bay in the summer and tropical Hainan during winter, the presence of a PLA officer at the JDG press conference raises interesting questions about future military interests in the JDG's floating islands.


Project Habbukak
During World War II, Britain attempted to build a 2 million ton aircraft carrier big enough to support larger anti-submarine warfare airplanes (to combat German U boats). Project Habbukak was built from pyrite (a frozen, lighter than water mixture of sawdust and water).
Floating island plans in war have ranged from the Royal Navy's Project Habbukak, a massive ice and concrete aircraft carrier built in prototype in World War II, to US Navy's Joint Mobile Offshore Base plan in the early 2000s, of which studies called for being able to accommodate a 1.5 mile long airstrip. The goal of such programs is that a mobile floating island could carry many times more aircraft and soldiers than a carrier or amphibious assault group. An additional military advantage to China's modular floating island design is that its large size and compartmentalized construction would make it very difficult to sink (an opponent would have to strike a large number of the modules to compromise the island's seaworthiness).


Joint Mobile Offshore Base
The JMOB was an American proposal in the mid 2000s to use 300m by 150m steel/concrete floating modules to build large ocean going bases. The JMOB was intended to replace bases in places such as Saudi Arabia and Japan, though most JMOB configurations would be much smaller than this maxed out version.

For China, a floating island airbase, besides obvious deployments to disputed islands, could be a new kind of tool for global military projection, notably addressing one of China's strategic weaknesses compared to the US, its dearth of foreign military bases. In the near future, China could stage anti-piracy missions and humanitarian relief from well stocked floating islands. More forceful uses of floating islands could be temporary or permanent deployments off the waters of potential battlefields.

Thanks to: Hongjian, Jeff Head and Henri K.

China Is Building Giant Floating Islands in the South China Sea

A new report reveals China’s plans for 1,000,000 ton battle stations in the South China Sea.
By Jack Detsch
April 24, 2015

China’s pursuit of construction projects to assert its claims to disputed territory in the South China Sea is intensifying. As Victor Robert Lee reported in The Diplomat last week, land reclamation and buildups have expanded from the Spratly Islands, where China is pursuing military installations, including radar towers, gun emplacements, port facilities, and airstrips, to the Paracel Islands, just 400 kilometers off of the Vietnamese coast. According to satellite imagery, Beijing is looking into major expansions of runway and airport facilities there.

Now, per a report from Jeffrey Lin and P.W. Singer in Popular Science released Monday, China will have a new tool to pursue their ambitions further into the oil-rich sea: 1,000,000 ton floating islands, mobile battle stations that can be converted for civilian and military use, allowing for resupplying forces in the region, aircraft landing, hangar storage, and providing a naval base for amphibious vehicles. The largest model of the vessel, proposed by Tangshan-based Jidang Development Group, would measure out at 900 meters in length by 120 meters in width, and around 300 meters by 90 meters for the smallest design. JDG’s models are built from semi-submersible hull components that can be attached to one another, making the battle stations potentially scalable to much greater sizes.

While this all sounds somewhat futuristic, the use of floating islands is not a historically unprecedented idea. The British Royal Navy hoped to construct a 2 million ton “aircraft carrier” during World War II, in hopes of sinking German U-Boats and other Nazi vessels that wracked havoc on trade and maritime supply routes. More recently, the U.S. Navy tried to roll out the Joint Mobile Offshore Base in 2000, a design which included plans for a 1.5 mile airstrip. Elsewhere, a few commercial designs have been able to get off the ground: Shell Australia’s Prelude, weighing in at around 600,000 tons, can extract and liquefy natural gas from underwater wells, and offload those supplies to ships for transport to energy customers all over the world.

But with China showing a remarkable ability to rapidly convert coral reefs into military outposts, the islands could be a particularly useful supplement to its anti-access, area-denial systems (A2/AD). The battle stations could also do more to offset Washington’s tremendous basing advantages in the Asia-Pacific theater.

China could also uses these structures to accommodate civilians and vacationers. The mobile units are big enough to house mobile resorts, apartments, and other lodging. On the logistical side of things, the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLA(N)) could utilize the massive bases for a range of air-sea capabilities, including docking, energy storage, and air strips, which China could use for rapid response to humanitarian crises in the region.

The islands may not be the linchpin of Beijing’s strategy in the South China Sea. But with the situation heating up in the region, they could certainly be helpful.