SD.Net World Redux Comment Thread II

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

Also... Shepistan says 2400 BOMARC missiles are deployed. Just WTF? "Pakistan", right, Shep?

You might have a point if this game was taking place in ths 1960s. By 2008, the technology used in BOMARC is pretty cheap (although my missiles have been upgraded several times).

Hell, I should have supplemented my BOMARC sites with NIKE HERCULES in hardened shelters. Next time....next time....

How does that make you a third world shithole?

[Raj Ahten]

(Man, this sucks. A whole lot of us guys are probably gonna get pwned cause we're totally ignorant of these gizmos.)

That would seem to be the case. I would be fucked because my hobby isn't knowing the specs of all the worlds combat systems . So best to stay out of wars I don't know as much about then!

Though my military would know what type of munitons etc to buy if I'm doing surveilence flights and so on right?

[PeZook]

I'm afraid of getting into a war for the same exact reason. All of a sudden, it will turn out that I didn't flesh out every single little detail of my armed forces, which will then be countered by some insanely superoptimized weapon system I had no idea even existed

[DarthShady]

I'm afraid of getting into a war for the same exact reason. All of a sudden, it will turn out that I didn't flesh out every single little detail of my armed forces, which will then be countered by some insanely superoptimized weapon system I had no idea even existed

I think there are plenty of people who do know their shit and are honest enough as to not allow that somebody is made a fool of, and besides we have Marina if any problems should come up.

[Shroom Man 777]

By the way, with this war and all that scary stuff, I don't think the Shadow Navy can visit Shroomania. The whores will have to wait.

Sorry.

[PeZook]

By the way, with this war and all that scary stuff, I don't think the Shadow Navy can visit Shroomania. The whores will have to wait.

Sorry.

I don't think they'll mind, what with them actually wanting to invade Sjenska. Visiting Shroomania would just slow down and give the medical corpsmen a lot of additional syphillis cases

[MKSheppard]

Capt Alto Saotome was the WSO of Surprise Attack, monitoring the highly automated systems that tuned the ALQ-100 to effectively jam the radars of the F-106Hs, turning their displays into hash, and resulting in the FMRAAMs of the Shepistanis losing lock.

10~ kW of jamming against systems capable of 7-8 kW average power, and 14 kW Peak will annoy the radar; it won't shut it down completely; range will be degraded along with performance.

Elsewhere, the few F-12Ds available were making strikes. ...The aft weapons bays were fitted 12 GBU-39s. They dropped the bombs at long standoff ranges, punching through the hardened bunkers of Bomarc missiles. They then returned to airbases in Wilkonia.

Awesome! You've managed to destroy, what, a dozen or so BOMARC shelters, and I have 2,400 of them!

Closer to the deck, the F-16DJs of 17th Fighter Wing was having a field day against the air defense radars near the Shepistani border. HARMs were being launched like fireworks.

Ah, good old HARM. Too bad the warhead on HARM, even with enhanced tungsted cube spheres for maximum fragmentation is still so weak that it can't completely knock out even portable radars; much less hardened radars. Worst case, you have to send someone out to repair the antennas or replace them; and the site is back in operation in an hour or two.

The biggest weakness of BOMARC was the datalinks controlling it. Jam them, and they were useless for long range shots.

How sad that BOMARC is so big it carries it's own active pulsed radar, even in the early IM-99A versions of the late 50s.

Additionally, they were so large that they themselves could be shot down, and were.

The F-99F is ramjet powered, and cruises at Mach 3~ at 80,000~ feet; that poses an enormous problem for air to air missiles; in regards of snap-up shots.I know that the AIM-7F Sparrow can theoretically engage targets flying at Mach 3 at 90,000 feet; but that would be at the limits of it's energy envelope.

A total of 770 Tomahawks were in the submarines, the targets of each varied, but a number were targetted at radar installations. They nearly universally carried submunitions, and most of the tomahawks were targetted at multiple radar sites to ensure destruction of the radars.

Awesome. Little or no unitary warheads for anti-bunker work? Then I just open up the roof on one of my hardened radar shelters, and pop back out the antenna. Unfortunately for my radar technicans, you bastards blew up their cars, which were parked outside the HQs. And cars in Shepistan are major investments. They hate you now mang. Still, I can't slide all of my antennas back under ground, some have to stay up in order to provide continous guidance and air defense updates to the IADS.

Once again, you guys keep thinking that my Radar sites and SAM sites look like this:



Instead of hardened shelters with flip open doors.

With datalinking, the F-14s APG-71v1 radars were capable of reaching out nearly 500 miles, having a peak power of approximately 32 kW, and an average power of 5kW, and their LPI design made them exceptionally resistant to jamming, and for that matter, detection.

I see you're going by the Wikipedia's entry which says that two F-14Ds can datalink their APG-71s to reach to 400~ miles, to get around the antenna limitations that limit it to 200~ miles; but I've checked Jane's on the APG-71, and Norman Friedman's NI Guide to World Naval Weapons Systems, and both of them don't ever mention that capability.

Secondly, Jane's for the APG-71 says:
7 kW Average
10 kW peak

Where the christ are you getting peak power of 32 KW? I can understand an increase to 12 kW peak (20% improvement) over the APG-71, with your APG-71(v)1; given that you've continued development of it and the Tomcat, long after we ended Tomcat development; but three times the power?

The bombers were picked up nearly 800 miles from the combined TXN/ODN battlegroup.

The APS-145 that equips the E-2 Hawkeye, with a peak power rating of 1 megawatt, has a maximum instrumented range of 350 nautical miles. Assuming that we have an E-2C orbiting about 200 nm from the carrier for stand-off detection, you'd pick up my bombers at around 500~ nautical miles.

Secondly, my bombers are being escorted in their naval strike packages by RB-56s which are providing electronic jamming support, to the tune of 45 RB-56s escorting the carrier strike package, and 45 escorting the land strike package. If we assume each RB-56 has two jammers roughly equivalent to the ALQ-99, then that means each raid is going to be emitting between 540 kW and 900 kW of jamming power from the RB-56s (depending on which model of ALQ-99 I pick). Then you got to add in the jamming from the B-56s and PB-56s themselves, probably equial to another 100 kW of power or so.

There's a good reason I had the OD Commander remark:

"Wonder if those Shepistanis plan on having kids in the future." in my attack post...

Secondly, all that electronic jamming from the bomber raid package is going to fuck with your F-14E's fire control radars. You'll have to close to closer ranges to burn through all that jamming, even with AESAs to help.

Thirdly, each RB-56 carries 1,400 pounds of Chaff to dump to create chaff corridors. That's 63,000 pounds of chaff that each raid group (carrier/land) will have. I know you poo poo chaff, but when you dump so much chaff into the air that it presents a nearly solid wall of returns, it will shield the aircraft behind the chaff barriage, and also slow down your fire control systems, as they have to categorize the chaff as spurious returns and then delete them.

Fourthly, you forget that the DFB-56s carry ASG-30s in their noses (the equivalent of your own APG-71v1s roughly, but optimized for sheer power; although they do not have the datalinking of the F-106Hs), and carry 10 FMRAAMs internally, and 12 more externally on wing pylons for a total of 22.

It's a lot harder to attack a bomber raid if the raid can shoot back 900+ FMRAAMs at you...

Again, with the capabilities of the AESA radar, the bomber force had no warning until the AMRAAMs were already in the final stages of their attack run. Over six hundred bombers fell apart in mid air.

Yes; because the RWRs of the RB-56s, et al won't detect the sheer amount of power that the F-14Es are having to radiate to burn through between half a megawatt and nearly a megawatt of barriage jamming, not to mention having to pick their way through 63,000 pounds of chaff.

When I was designing my air force; one of the primary objectives I assigned to it was to allow for my bombers to successfully penetrate enemy air defenses; and thus, that required a disproportionate amount of support craft to "back up" the raids.

So I'm calling bullshit on your "lol 600+ bombers shot down" attack on my bomber force and calling for Marina to nullify it.

[Shroom Man 777]

Jesus. Shep, you're scarier now than when you had HUEG nuclear-powered planes flying over Goddamn Libertopia and nuking cities willy nilly.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

Shady, I'm dumping 500 million on you to get the operation fast and going so that you can produce not just your own, but mine in a year. I'll pay for the fighters as they come.

I might even double the order if I need to. And Shady, if you need more tanks. Say so, I'm about to restart up production for the K-2 Black Panthers to replace all the tanks in my reserve legions, and possibly create new legions.

The 120/140 mm electrothermal cannons will be fielded by the end of the year.

BTW PeZook, what do you need for your army?

[CmdrWilkens]

The biggest weakness of BOMARC was the datalinks controlling it. Jam them, and they were useless for long range shots.

How sad that BOMARC is so big it carries it's own active pulsed radar, even in the early IM-99A versions of the late 50s.

Except that without mid-course correction or initial guidance provided by your SAGE centers the missiles are basically firing in the blind and their pulse radaras will have a very narrow cone from which they need to be somehow able to pick up targets in a high ECM environment especially because that pulse radar, even if you have upgraded it, will still have nowhere near the power of even EA-6Bs flying jamming missions. Will you get hits? Absolutely. Your accuracy, however, is gonna hit the fucking deck. You've got 2400 missiles but even with 1 SAGE center per squadron (as the original plan called for) that's 15 targets for us to turn your accuracy into shit.

[Beowulf]

The APG-71v1 is a filled AESA array will approximately 3k elements, with each element capable of an average of 2 W, and a peak of 10W. They're also LPI design, to increase jam resistance, and decrease the change of your RWRs going off.

The E-2D carried by Tian Xia carriers utilize the APY-9, with about 3 times the volume covered compared to the APS-145. That comes out to about 70% greater range, or about 430 miles. At the 300 mile mark that the CAP was at, that's a just a bit shorter than what I wrote.

Of course, detection range is a bit moot, since you're lighting up the sky like the sun with your jammers. And AMRAAMs have home on jam mode, so your literally painting a target on yourself. Congratulations.

I said nearly universally. A number of the Tomahawks still have unitary warheads.

As for the Bomarc, sure it's big enough to have its own radar. AMRAAMs are big enough to have their own radar. They're still command guided until the terminal stage. And AIM-120Es have significantly improved kinematics over a AIM-7F.

Lastly, the EW FAST packs have a total of 4 jammers with the 10kW power level.

[K. A. Pital]

You might have a point if this game was taking place in ths 1960s. By 2008, the technology used in BOMARC is pretty cheap

Shep, Pakistan does not have 2400 BOMARC missiles in 2008.

Awesome! You've managed to destroy, what, a dozen or so BOMARC shelters, and I have 2,400 of them!

I told them to use ARAD missiles, but if they use something else... well, too bad.

How sad that BOMARC is so big it carries it's own active pulsed radar

Doesn't matter. Many missiles do. But without guidance until terminal, they're worthless hulks for the most part.

Still, I can't slide all of my antennas back under ground, some have to stay up in order to provide continous guidance and air defense updates to the IADS.

If your IADS is under massive attack, the radars would be out and running. If you hide them for half or hour, you'll get fried by bombers.

As for Beo's carrier "nullification" of the bomber run, that's of course bullshit, I must agree with Shep and voice a second motion to Marina that this is just wrong. Shep's swarm attack, especially if his penetration force is fitted with standoff missiles, should have a measure of success. And that's underestimating it. 600 bombers.

[DarthShady]

By the way, with this war and all that scary stuff, I don't think the Shadow Navy can visit Shroomania. The whores will have to wait.

Sorry.

I don't think they'll mind, what with them actually wanting to invade Sjenska. Visiting Shroomania would just slow down and give the medical corpsmen a lot of additional syphillis cases

PeZook dearest of all my friends, you know me too well.

That's fine by me Shroom, the fleet has already moved past Shroomania and is continuing it's trip.

Shady, I'm dumping 500 million on you to get the operation fast and going so that you can produce not just your own, but mine in a year. I'll pay for the fighters as they come.

I might even double the order if I need to. And Shady, if you need more tanks. Say so, I'm about to restart up production for the K-2 Black Panthers to replace all the tanks in my reserve legions, and possibly create new legions.

The 120/140 mm electrothermal cannons will be fielded by the end of the year.

BTW PeZook, what do you need for your army?

Excellent, my factories will work extra hard to complete your order by the end of this year.

As for tanks, I'm already making my own T-90 so I'll think about it.

[Czechmate]

As for Beo's carrier "nullification" of the bomber run, that's of course bullshit, I must agree with Shep and voice a second motion to Marina that this is just wrong. Shep's swarm attack, especially if his penetration force is fitted with standoff missiles, should have a measure of success. And that's underestimating it. 600 bombers.

While I support his idea of a large-scale spoiling attack on the bomber formation (it'd break their cohesion and leave them far more vulnerable as they continued in, to say the least), I agree that the run should not be 'nullified' as such, merely broken up.

Take, for example, the massed Luftwaffe bomber raids during the Battle of Britain; large-scale interceptions, the 'Big Wing' concept, proved far more effective in disrupting and attriting Luftwaffe bombing units than piecemeal interception by separate Spitfire and Hurricane units. Beo has made the correct decision, but is incorrect in the real result of such an interception.

I reiterate; Beo's mass counterattack on the bombers should have broken up the formation (by forcing them to scatter) and attrited their numbers, as well as taken out key jamming and if possible command aircraft. The result, that the Shepistani bomber raid is reduced to a large number of separate units staggering toward the target rather than one large formation and thus more susceptible to local surface-based and air-launched weapons within the target zone, is actually preferable to outright destroying vast numbers of them with the mass interception, which is unrealistic.

Essentially, once the Shepistani bombers have been broken up and are forced to attack piecemeal, they will suffer accordingly high attrition rates as they enter, cross, and exit the Old Dominion air defense zones. They'll end up taking heavy losses and the overall effectiveness of their runs will be decreased.

/end rant. *breathes again*

[Sea Skimmer]

Except that without mid-course correction or initial guidance provided by your SAGE centers the missiles are basically firing in the blind and their pulse radaras will have a very narrow cone from which they need to be somehow able to pick up targets in a high ECM environment especially because that pulse radar, even if you have upgraded it, will still have nowhere near the power of even EA-6Bs flying jamming missions. Will you get hits? Absolutely. Your accuracy, however, is gonna hit the fucking deck. You've got 2400 missiles but even with 1 SAGE center per squadron (as the original plan called for) that's 15 targets for us to turn your accuracy into shit.

If the datalink and or radar is jammed... the missile is going to switch to home on jam and start using its 600 mile range to chase the jammers around the sky, or else attack them on the ground in the event ground jammers are used. Home on jam works quite well these days, this is the primary reason why so many modern fighter planes are getting towed decoys now. The decoy not only provides a second radar and IR target, it also has an antenna to emit the aircrafts radar jammer singles.

However making such a towed antenna is not nearly as easy to do when you have high power jammer planes, which are meant to jam a dozen or more radars at once, thus requiring numerous antennas. Each ALQ-99 pod has like eight or nine rotating antennas inside its housing. A fighter in comparison is only trying to jam one or two things at a time to save its own ass only.

Since Bomarc already forces the use of much longer cables thanks to its 1000lb warhead, probably what you’d have to do is pair a high power jamming generating/computing pod with a second pod that actually carries the huge cable with numerous antennas along its length. This would mean an EA-6 would be down to the equivalent of two instead of three pods on a typical mission, but in return the worst home on jam can do is cut off the antenna, something which can be easily replaced. Course no ones ever mentioned having anything like this for a jammer, but its not any terrible stretch for them to be around. Electronic warfare would be getting way more funding in SDN world then in real life because so many nations can actually compete in terms of air warfare.

As for SAGE centers, that was back when the necessary computers literally weighed 50 tons and required ten men to running around replacing vacuum tubes in real time to keep them running! No one would be stupid enough to retain such an obvious vulnerability after developing ever better versions of Bomarc for literally 40 years. Today the job can be done with nothing larger then a desktop computer and a huge amount of redundancy could easily be built into the system. Literally you could have the software integrated into the computers already used to run modern air search sets. This really isn’t hard to do at all with a system that doesn’t even remotely pretend to have mobility.

[Raj Ahten]

Take, for example, the massed Luftwaffe bomber raids during the Battle of Britain; large-scale interceptions, the 'Big Wing' concept, proved far more effective in disrupting and attriting Luftwaffe bombing units than piecemeal interception by separate Spitfire and Hurricane units. Beo has made the correct decision, but is incorrect in the real result of such an interception.

I don't know if I'd be touting the big wing concept as such a huge success. The damn things took a hell of a long time to form up and didn't have a great combat record, despite what their proponents in the RAF at the time would say. (One of the reasons they had a reputation for turning back German aircraft is that they often engaged the germans at the limit iof the German's range). They also committed most of the available aircraft, leaving little in reserve. Sending in small groups via centralized control guided in by the radar just worked better. It wore down the enemy while using the smallest force possible while keeping a large amount of fighters in reserve. After all, big wings or anything else aren’t going to stop all the bombers, it is simply a matter of winning the war of attrition.

It should also be noted that when the RAF war gamed the big wing tactics using historical data, they results were disastrous, with a lot of airfields simply being destroyed.

This is in the 1940’s though. With Modern technology Big Wings might work better, though I would imagine forming up would still take a lot of time

[Czechmate]

Yeah, the Big Wing takes time to form, but with the speed of modern aircraft should form reasonably fast. What Beo did was basically a Big Wing counterattack, with standoff missiles no less. Still, he was incorrect in the result of such an attack. They don't reap the enemy, they break him up for later reaping.

[PeZook]

Fingolfin, I was thinking about buying the K-2 and upgrading my Leo 2A6 and 2A4 inventory with ERA and active interception, possibly electrothermal guns. Shepistan's shenanigans should allow me to up military spending next year, so I'll have around 10 billion bucks to throw around.

I'd also love to adapt some of the Russian barrel-fired ATGMs for use in the smoothbore 120mm gun of the Leo.

However, air defence should be getting the most funds now. Shep's bomber swarms scare me, frankly: We can defend against Japanistani human waves with relatively cheap equipment, but it would be a lot easier to do so with our industry intact, or at least moderately undamaged.

[DarthShady]

It begins.

[PeZook]

How about Karic catches wind of the coup and purges the general?

He is supposed to be a smart bastard, isn't he? And that way it will actually be exciting, rather than a curbstomp

[DarthShady]

How about Karic catches wind of the coup and purges the general?

He is supposed to be a smart bastard, isn't he? And that way it will actually be exciting, rather than a curbstomp

Yes, that's a great idea, but I don't want to lose the General(He has an Awesome name).

[PeZook]

Yes, that's a great idea, but I don't want to lose the General(He has an Awesome name).

Well, the purge may result in lots of disorganized urban combat on the streets between troops loyal to the general and to the president, random artillery shelling and arrests and a gigantic general mess which will catch the organizers of the carefully prepared operation with their pants down.

The general doesn't actually has to die

[DarthShady]

Yes, that's a great idea, but I don't want to lose the General(He has an Awesome name).

Well, the purge may result in lots of disorganized urban combat on the streets between troops loyal to the general and to the president, random artillery shelling and arrests and a gigantic general mess which will catch the organizers of the carefully prepared operation with their pants down.

The general doesn't actually has to die

I like it.

And the USSR Marines come to save the day.

I'll incorporate that into the story, because as you said "a curbstomp" wouldn't be nearly as interesting.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Shep, what's the overpressure rating on BOMARC shelters? And are you using the IM-99B? Because if your missiles are doing Mach 4 they're going to be a lot harder to intercept than Mach 2.8 using AAMs.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

As for Beo's carrier "nullification" of the bomber run, that's of course bullshit, I must agree with Shep and voice a second motion to Marina that this is just wrong. Shep's swarm attack, especially if his penetration force is fitted with standoff missiles, should have a measure of success. And that's underestimating it. 600 bombers.

Yeah, Beowulf's "nullification" is itself modified, though I may reverse myself if someone can find me the overpressure ratings for standard BOMARC shelters on that issue and give them some more success, though none of the cluster munitions had a single damn impact on the shelters, that's for sure, but Wilkens' conventional big bombs might have sloshed some around, too.