BBs vs CVs vs ASMs (Get a fucking clue, keep it out of PST)

[Rogue 9]

Something in the mod forum, I take it? Because its telling me it doesn't exist.

[fgalkin]

Something in the mod forum, I take it? Because its telling me it doesn't exist.

Yes.

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

[Rogue 9]

Well then its obviously not my business. No further questions, your Russianness.

Right. At this point, I regret ever bringing up the carriers versus battleships analogy to illustrate torpedoes vs. fighters. While I don't appreciate Alyeska's deletions, this did need to be split. Sorry about the hijack, I suppose, since it was my analogy that started this whole damned landslide.

[Dalton]

Splitting posts, fine. Deleting and editing posts, not good. I think you went a little too far here Alyeska.

[Vympel]

Really, so they sealed it at last.

Yup, it was signed sealed and with the blood and the secret handshake and everything a few months ago. Finally!

And I thought the Moskit is seaskimming (not quite as low as something slow like a Harpoon.) The Shipwreck seems to have a bunch of profiles, like high-flying at 60000ft or one high missile leading three low altitude missiles, but I never heard of the Shipwreck having seaskimming ability.

Sea-skimming is referred to in JED: "Carrier Killers, Pt 1" in its bit about the Granit.

Be fair. It might successfully defend against a SS-N-9 Siren.

Yeah, but the P-120 Malkhalit speed is Mach 0.9 (some source say Mach 1.4).

And the Soviets don't have to worry about supersonics (but when the Kirov was designed, it was the Cold War, and countries such as France were trying to build their own supersonics), but they had to worry about 50 Harpoons in simultaneous, all-angle attack from Hornet and (in the Cold War) Intruder squadrons.

Yeah- but I'd rather take 50 Harpoons than 24 Granits

[phongn]

Yeah, but the P-120 Malkhalit speed is Mach 0.9 (some source say Mach 1.4).

IIRC, Phalanx even has trouble with smaller missiles causing fragmentation damage and such. Not as much as an issue as if you tried to engage a Granit or Moskit, but still, that's why its getting replaced by RAM and ESSM.

Yeah- but I'd rather take 50 Harpoons than 24 Granits

I was reading about some interesting tricks that some ASMs can do -- what a some gun-based CIWS systems do is track the inbound missile and the outbound stream of shells and applies a loop to make the tracks merge. What the missile can do is detect that loop timing and maneuver to screw up the track

[Sea Skimmer]

I don't intend to get the Iowa within gun range of a credible modern surface force. In case you failed to notice, I was saying precisely this back on the previous page when I noted why battleships were retired from the Navy. The only thing I'm disputing is that a destroyer can beat a battleship for volume of fire, not that modern CGs and DDGs can't beat the shit out of the BB at range. But just for the sake of argument, if we're talking about just the Spruance by itself, how did it locate the battleship? Remember, no satellites and no aircraft support beyond the destroyer's chopper.

A helicopter is more then sufficient for the job, and unlike an Iowa a Spruance is fully equipped to operate a pair of them for as long as is necessary. Iowa can only provide a pad for one to land on and refuel at, without any maintenance it would be unsafe to fly after a single mission and unable to fly after a few more.

250 miles out is well far enough for an object on the surface to be below the radar horizon of a surface installation/ship. The missile can't hit something it can't find, and the destroyer without support has no means of finding it.

Bullshit as noted above.

Granted, the unsupported battleship can't find the Spruance either, so unless they blunder into each other we're looking at a non-encounter. And the outcome of one ship against an entire battle group is preordained no matter what the ship is, so I'm not sure where you're going with that.

No, what where looking at is the Spruance locates the Iowa after a period of air searches, empires her VLS system of TASM's which blow the Iowa into a blazing wreck twenty minutes later. Iowa then can only serve as a drain on enemy resources as they seek to take off her crew.

[Sea Skimmer]

Umm no the anti-missile defenses will just be upgraded to meet the threat of supersonic missiles.

Lets just say for arguments sake that the missile defence onboard the carrier and its escort vessels is 100% accurate (obviously its not), all that the Russians would do is send in a whole swarm of anti-ship missiles. If 20 anti-ship missiles smashed into a carrier group all at once, then you can bet that there will be ships sunk. And this is if we assume that the defence missiles are 100% accurate.

Really, do explain how this is so given that the design criteria for the AEGIS system was for a single vessel to defeat 32 supersonic missiles, and that this criteria was met.

There is no chance that 20 hypersonic anti-ship missiles can all be taken out before one hits your ship.

Too bad no one has an anti ship missile faster then about mach 2.5, half way to hypersonic. We have plenty of things which can shoot those down too.

Do you get my point? As good as the ship defence systems are, they simply are not good enough when large numbers of enemy missiles are invovled.

20 is not a large number by the standards to which the USN built its defences.

Why do you think the Soviets never built carrier battle groups?

Because they couldn't afford them and lacked the technical knowledge to build catapult equipped fleet carriers until the last years of the Union, when they made great efforts to get carriers in the water.

The Reason was that they prefered to build subs that had anti-ship missles anboard and they knew how powerful those weapons were.

It wasn't the perfered choice, it was the only choice. The Soviets had a long string of failed carrier projects. From the moment they sought an oceangoing navy they sought carriers. But you can't spring a fleet out of nothing and they ran out of time.

[Sea Skimmer]

A small plane might have been able to sink a battleship with WW2 technology but a BB w/ modern defenses is a whole different story.

A BB with modern defenses is no different then any other vessel with modern defenses, its armor becomes irrelevant to its defence and with that its justification for existing. If you want heavy guns, well heavy guns have value, but not on 45,000-ton warships requiring a minimal crew of a thousand. The armor though just doesn't matter. The Fritz X from 1943, a 3,300-pound bomb could pierce any thickness of deck armor on any battleship, modern penitrating bombs are no less impressive and missiles will at the least star huge fires, which will easily bypass armor. Not that that really matters anyway, burn the superstructure of a battleship and its useless. WW2 bombs and shells had only limited fire starting potential on a battleship. But the fuel load of a missile is perfect for he task, as Sheffield and Stark learned.

[Rogue 9]

If you want heavy guns, well heavy guns have value, but not on 45,000-ton warships requiring a minimal crew of a thousand. The armor though just doesn't matter.

So if you want heavy guns, bring back the WWI battlecruiser concept? BB guns with thin armor?

[Kazuaki Shimazaki]

Really, do explain how this is so given that the design criteria for the AEGIS system was for a single vessel to defeat 32 supersonic missiles, and that this criteria was met.

Question: How did they show they met this criteria? What was the subcriteria (supersonic high flyers or seaskimmers? What was the time spread between the weapons - 32 missiles one at a time is different from 32 missiles TOT and everything else in between)

[Sea Skimmer]

Question: How did they show they met this criteria?

Shooting down drones. They never did a full 32 inbound test so far as I can tell but they did do test with the number of threat missiles and the number of missile directors on the firing ship proportionally scaled back.

What was the subcriteria (supersonic high flyers or seaskimmers? What was the time spread between the weapons - 32 missiles one at a time is different from 32 missiles TOT and everything else in between)

It was 32 medium and high targets, all supersonic and all all at the same time. There have been plenty of tests against sea skimmers as well though, the USN has run through hundreds of mach 2 target drones over the years.

[White Haven]

Hmm...regarding the AEGIS system, how well does it coordinate with others of its own kind. If you have two AEGISes (AEGI? in a fleet, and there are, say, 64 missiles inbound, do they properly designate targets, or do 32, or 40, or 50 or some such get mobbed, and the rest are let through? How does that work. Also...you hear a lot about AEGIS cruisers, is there a similar design in the works as a DD refit? I'd see that as bein a real useful way to beef up CVBG air defense without commissioning new hulls.

[Batman]

Also...you hear a lot about AEGIS cruisers, is there a similar design in the works as a DD refit? I'd see that as bein a real useful way to beef up CVBG air defense without commissioning new hulls.

Given that such a refit would propably only be marginally cheaper or faster than building new ships, I rather doubt it.
Plus there's some 60 of the damn things already, with another class of 20something planned-how many do you think you need???

[Howedar]

Hmm...regarding the AEGIS system, how well does it coordinate with others of its own kind. If you have two AEGISes (AEGI? in a fleet, and there are, say, 64 missiles inbound, do they properly designate targets, or do 32, or 40, or 50 or some such get mobbed, and the rest are let through? How does that work.

AEGIS can also control missiles off of other ships IIRC.

Also...you hear a lot about AEGIS cruisers, is there a similar design in the works as a DD refit? I'd see that as bein a real useful way to beef up CVBG air defense without commissioning new hulls.

It's called DDG-51 and the first ship of the class was commissioned in 1991.

[White Haven]

I know it can do that in THEORY, I'm just wondering how well that theory works in a real attack situation. As for how many you need...more. You can /never/ have enough

This is why I am not in charge of the Naval budget.

[Kazuaki Shimazaki]

It's called DDG-51 and the first ship of the class was commissioned in 1991.

That's not a DD refit. The Burke is a new design with a reduced L/W ratio, sacrificing fuel economy for some stability. The Tico is based of the Spruance hull. The Spruances now carry the Mk41 launchers, but to get the Spruance to handle Aegis, you need a whole new, very expensive superstructure to house those Aegis phased arrays.

[Sea Skimmer]

Hmm...regarding the AEGIS system, how well does it coordinate with others of its own kind. If you have two AEGISes (AEGI? in a fleet, and there are, say, 64 missiles inbound, do they properly designate targets, or do 32, or 40, or 50 or some such get mobbed, and the rest are let through?

If the ships have cooperative engagement capability then there sensors and fire control systems are linked together, data from other assets also gets fed into the picture and land based Patriot missiles can also be coordinated. In that case the system would basically act as one and you will get very target designation. However not all ships in the fleet have CEC, though most will by 2007. If the ships don't have CEC then your probably going to see a lot of double targeting, but against a densely packed missiles attack it's not going to matter that much and missiles can be retargeted in flight. The latest SM-2 missiles are moving to an active radar seeker, that will make retargeting harder, but then it will also allow far more missiles to be launched because the ships not limited by its missile directors. In any case, a typical US CVBG has several hundred SM-2 missiles and at least four AEGIS warships; the shear volume of missile fire produced by these ships will easily knock down any likely missile attack. The arrival of ESSM, which has the range of an early SM-1 but requires 1/4th the space of any Standard series missile will make things even better from the defence standpoint.

How does that work.

In automatic mode AEGIS shoots at whatever appears to be the greatest threat first, that could produce allot of double targeting with multiple shooters. But its also possibul to designate specific tracks to be engaged, and a simply radio message (you take the right side and work in I'll start on the left) would be all that's needed. Failing that, its possibul for standard missiles launched by one ship with or without AEGIS to be controlled by the AEGIS system on another cruiser. In that way all fire can be coordinated without CEC. Though it does limit the total rate of fire and you'd only want to use it against a very large attack that is detected at long range, say a muti regiment attack by Soviet Backfires. That's a threat though, that never really existed. NAT Intel didn't know it, but only two of the many Backfire regiments actually trained for anti shipping work, and they where deployed, one each, to the Northern and Pacific fleets. Their where more regiments of badger bombers that did have anti shipping training and weapons, but those lumbering beasts would have been very vulnerable to interception on a long range attack on a US CVBG.

Also...you hear a lot about AEGIS cruisers, is there a similar design in the works as a DD refit? I'd see that as bein a real useful way to beef up CVBG air defense without commissioning new hulls.

The US already has been building destroyers with the AEGIS combat system since 1985, starting with DDG-51, the Arleigh Burke class. They have one less missile director, 3 vs. 4 compared to a Ticonderoga and there VLS missile launchers have smaller capacities but the combat and radar systems are just as capable. About 45 have been commissioned and orders and authorization run through hull number 112, that would give the USN a total of 62 ships of the class. After that its planned that the USN will begin buying DD(X) class destroyers. But it is possibul that even more Burkes will be bought.

[Sea Skimmer]

So if you want heavy guns, bring back the WWI battlecruiser concept? BB guns with thin armor?

No, that would be utterly pointless since we already have the Iowa's. New battlecruisers would cost billions to build, with similar crew requirements to an Iowa and without even the dubious protection of those ships heavy armor. What might make sense though is a WW1 monitor, one or two heavy guns possibly in a turret mounted on a cheep shallow draft hull. The problem is though, that the turrets on an Iowa class battleship are extremely heavy, even with the armor removed and we'd need to build quite large monitors to carry one. We'd also have to build a great many of the monitors since they'd be slow and yet need to deploy worldwide, the WW1 monitors simply needed to sail from Dover or Dunkirk to the Belgian coast and back. That all means a very expensive program, it was looked into in the 1960's and even back then when simply building a hull with engines as still cheep it was too expensive to be worth while.

Now we could go with a smaller array of guns, but we don't have the ability to build anything bigger then 8-inch without spending a lot of extra money, and the limited firepower of such guns makes the whole endeavor pointless. Espically since a gun of that caliber could be mounted on multi role surface combatants, which is a far more economical proposition. As it is the DD(X) destroyer will carry a pair of 155mm guns, which can fire ultra long range and very heavy (260 pound, the weigh of a normal 8-inch shell) projectiles. Given the distinct lack of real operational demands for naval gunfire in the last couple decades I expect those guns will prove sufficient. High caliber shellfire is required to support landings and methods of fighting that simply aren't going to happen anymore. Huge advances in troop mobility and precision weapons have seen to that.

[BlkbrryTheGreat]

High caliber shellfire is required to support landings and methods of fighting that simply aren't going to happen anymore. Huge advances in troop mobility and precision weapons have seen to that.

If the Chineese ever decide to try a amphibous operation on Tiawan, meaning that they have a air/sea supremacy on the US- or we stay out of it, I could see them wanting the fire power of an Iowa or something similar.. something that has "staying power" and the ability to deliver large amounts of firepower.

As for amphibous operations by the US- the reason we don't do them anymore is because nowadays, when we go to war, we usually have a friend in the area who will let us move our forces there. It is premature, to say the least, that this will always be the case and that we will not need the combination of firepower, staying power, and armor that a BB can provide.

As for a deck fire cause by rocket/jet fuel of a missle... couldn't you just rip up the wooden deck and replace it with steel "grate" (like the type found over storm drains) if/when you modernize it? (And put in modern jet fuel fire fighting equipment while your at it?)

[Batman]

High caliber shellfire is required to support landings and methods of fighting that simply aren't going to happen anymore. Huge advances in troop mobility and precision weapons have seen to that.

If the Chineese ever decide to try a amphibous operation on Tiawan, meaning that they have a air/sea supremacy on the US- or we stay out of it, I could see them wanting the fire power of an Iowa or something similar..

That money would be much better spend on building a fleet that enables them to try a credible amphibious operation in the first place.

something that has "staying power" and the ability to deliver large amounts of firepower.

A staying power it doesn't have against modern weapons, and large amounts of firepower it will never get in range to use, unless the Taiwanes military is so laugably inefficient that the ship is a redundant waste of money anyway...

As for amphibous operations by the US- the reason we don't do them anymore is because nowadays, when we go to war, we usually have a friend in the area who will let us move our forces there. It is premature, to say the least, that this will always be the case and that we will not need the combination of firepower, staying power, and armor that a BB can provide.

Against modern weapons the BBs armor is little more than dead weight, and keeping around a ship that epensive to run merely because it is theoratically possible you might eventually need it is utter folly, especially as (as SeaSkimmer described) much more versatile designs are likely going to suffice.

[Kazuaki Shimazaki]

That's a threat though, that never really existed. NAT Intel didn't know it, but only two of the many Backfire regiments actually trained for anti shipping work, and they where deployed, one each, to the Northern and Pacific fleets.

What were all those others in Soviet Naval Aviation doing? I can understand Long Range Aviation bombers being held back with nukes, but what were the other naval Backfire regiments doing?

[Sea Skimmer]

If the Chineese ever decide to try a amphibous operation on Tiawan, meaning that they have a air/sea supremacy on the US

If the Chinese have built up to the point that they can challenge US sea control then the last thing we should be spending money on is expensive manpower intensive battleships. Espically since the weapons, which could challenge a carrier, battlegroup would effortlessly sink such a ship, even if heavily modernized to a cost of billions of dollars.

- or we stay out of it, I could see them wanting the fire power of an Iowa or something similar..

Yes, becuase steaming up to a Chinese invasion fleet and opening fire with 16 inch guns is such a great plan. Never mind that hundreds of land based anti ship missiles and multipul rocket launchers on trucks could be bought for far less and cause far more damage to soft skinned invasion craft.

something that has "staying power" and the ability to deliver large amounts of firepower.

A battleship does not have staying power against modern weapons. It does however have a huge signature on all forms of sensors and missile and torpedo seekers. It does also have heavy firepower, out to about 23 miles. That means that to counter an invasion of Taiwan it must enter the Taiwan straights, where it would be extremely vulnerable to all forms of attack, particularly underwater from mines or torpedoes. Funny thing about those, an Iowa can be crippled by a single one and her thousands of tons of armor and torpedo defence system can't do shit about it.

As for amphibous operations by the US- the reason we don't do them anymore is because nowadays, when we go to war, we usually have a friend in the area who will let us move our forces there.

No, we don't see WW2 style massed invasion against heavy defenses anymore because technology has changed and made such attacks both unnecessary and near suicidal for both sides. That is not going to change. Weapons have not made much of a habit of getting less lethal.

It is premature, to say the least, that this will always be the case and that we will not need the combination of firepower, staying power, and armor that a BB can provide.

No its not. The armor has been useless since WW2 when weapons already existed that could make mincemeat of any battleship. The firepower has always been limited in scope, and the fact that the US's most recent amphibious invasion was against a nation with no coast is a further demonstration of how crippling that lack of range is. Staying power is just a joke. Single hits form a considerable array of weapons could cripple or destroy an Iowa and simply knokcing the vessel out of action doesn't take much. The staying power of battleships is only evident against heavy shellfire. Heavy shellfire is not a threat. The threats got more lethal, far more lethal then any battleship could handle. It took a single bomb to destroy the Roma, a bomb which could defeat any thickness of deck armor on any battleship and which today could be delivered from hundreds of miles away via missile. Get that into your head. It's not a matter of dozens of shells. Its a matter of a single hit. And when it happens all the armor, one of only two justifications for a battleship, is useless. Shear size is nice, But that's not unique to battleships and brings a huge pricetage with it.

As for a deck fire cause by rocket/jet fuel of a missle... couldn't you just rip up the wooden deck and replace it with steel "grate" (like the type found over storm drains) if/when you modernize it? (And put in modern jet fuel fire fighting equipment while your at it?)

There are a thousand other things on a warship, which burn besides the decking material. Paint for example happens to coat just about everything. And even if it doesn't burn outright, the buildup of heat (which is a huge problem with missile fuel fires) will cause the paint in adjoining compartments to vaporize. After a point those paint fumes become flammable. The result is you can have compartments spontaneously explode like fuel air bombs. Sometimes it's real bad and the heat from the explosions causes the exact same thing to happen in even more adjoining compartments almost instantly. There is a process called stripping ship in which you remove as many flammable items as possibul and either leave them on the pier or throw them over the side. but there a limits to how much you can remove, espically while maintaining modern habability standards. In any case, the fact that a modern warship, even a battleship needs its electronics to be useful means that the ship, will both be full of wiring and will be effectively crippled by damage to that wiring.

Some upgrades to a ships firefighting capability are possibul, but there a limits to how much you can do without totally rebuilding the entire thing, particularly because you need to be able to effectively seal all the compartments in a ship to contain those impossible to extinguish fires and all the fumes from both the fires (missile fuel fires are toxic as shit) and all the burning plastic and other such things you'll find around the ship. Old ships like Iowa though don't have very many compartments above the armor deck, and you'd be adding a great amount of steel to change that.

Anyway, the unique features of a battleship are large caliber guns and armor to resist large caliber shellfire. If you can't justify the utility of those features in completing mission requirements then you're stuck with nothing really. Pushing a platform because of what it can do, rather then asking what do you need to do such and such task is the wrong way to go in military budgeting. Invariably the BB proponent wants battleships and thus looks for a mission for them, then argues on that basis. That's a flawed method of reasoning in the first place.

[Shortie]

If the Chineese ever decide to try a amphibous operation on Tiawan, meaning that they have a air/sea supremacy on the US- or we stay out of it, I could see them wanting the fire power of an Iowa or something similar.. something that has "staying power" and the ability to deliver large amounts of firepower.

There are similar things with both more staying power and the ability to deliver greater effective firepower. That'd be Aegis ships, supercarriers, and nuclear hunter-killer submarines. Technology has evolved, and these have taken over the role of capital ships in the modern era. Heavy armour and big guns are means to an end, they used to be a good idea, but aren't now.