Carrier gaps and the fleet that never arrived

By 1990, Soviet carriers lacked the fixed-wing airborne early-warning capability that the Yak-44 was meant to provide, while the Ka-31 offered a partial later answer. STOBAR carriers retained short-take-off constraints for strike missions even while offering rapid air-defence launches, and arrested recovery gave damaged aircraft a better chance of landing and being repaired. The intended 1990s expansion would have given nuclear-powered carriers a larger role in Soviet operations around the world. A later Ulyanovsk might have adopted a full catapult arrangement, but the Su-33 could not simply be launched that way because catapult loads would enter an airframe not designed to absorb them. That meant another round of aircraft design and industrial development rather than a simple deck modification. The Soviet system could produce innovative machinery, yet the Yak-38 illustrated the operational cost of introducing a concept before manufacturing and refinement had matured. The collapse interrupted both the carrier programme and the supporting aircraft evolution.