Stas Bush wrote:
You almost have it. The only thing which you'd be truly lacking versus the USSR is your Navy. Just as Shep, incidentally.
Hardly, the Soviet Union had close to twice as many divisions at some 150, and some 7,000 combat aircraft against my 2,000. As he discussed before, I also don’t have any nuclear forces.
I'm not Great fucking Britain. I'm a continental power. Incidentally, I didn't see Norseman slip into unrestricted submarine warfare, but sure, let him do it. It would be a good task for my Navy, hunting down modern SSKs.
So what, every nation with a sea coast uses maritime trade heavily and will suffer from its disruption.
Are his SIGINT systems even capable of picking up that chatter at 700 km away from his coastline?
Spy satellites pick up those kinds of transmissions from as much as 35,000km away, and in addition you’re flying in-between two areas of Japanistani held land, over the routes most of my navy is busy convoying stuff to the untamed continent. If I picked up any chatter it would be passed right along, never mind the potential for actual radar detection, though I’d assume your planes flew clear of any active radars, which would eat into fuel reserves even more.
Why would they, if they were following in tight formation, and the only planes that were refulled pre-operation were MiG-31s and Tu-22M5s?
That would be a pretty epic feat of coordination and navigation over what is it, three thousand miles?
That's assured. The decision was taken in secret by the Supreme Soviet. I have no diplomatic ties, no ties with Astaria at all.
So that means he can’t possibly have even one plane spotter in your entire nation? And that absolutely no other ship or plane possibly noticed? And that his air defence forces are just brain-dead when they’ve just had a whole modern war to study?
I fired 1600 in a single raid. That should count for something.
It would count for a lot of wasted missiles when a dozen missile a single radar that decided to just turn off, that’s for sure. That’s exactly why the great HARM swarm didn’t knock out all of Iraqs radars, nor those of Yugoslavia.
What a bunch of bullcrap Skimmer. It was escorted, but so fucking what? I pinned it down by long range KS-172 missiles which are specifically designed to kill AEW&C planes from beyond escort engagement range. MiG-31's PESA is more than capable of picking him up at the range.
Whatever, you fucking acted like your planes just swept across the sky with no fighter opposition.
About 100 of all fighters? Skimmer, he probably has a total of 5-7 fighter/interceptor regiments with the number of fighters he has, depending on how he shuffled them. which means not many airfields to look at. In 15 minutes he could lift around 100 total machines into the air, but shouldn't the airfields come under fire by that time? Once the MiG-31s relay data, Mach 3 cruise missiles are sent against them. That means in the the same 10 minutes missiles from SSGNs and CGNs will start impacting their airfields.
You say below the MiGs were targeting SEAD missiles.
I'm more interested in how many radars he has, since radar supression is more important than individual launcher supression. Also, remember that ROE of S-300 is lower than MiG-31s radar detection capability and lower than the Kh-31PD strike capability. Those are dedicated ARAD seekers designed to engage them specifically at oh-150 km.
So what happens when one set of radars shut down, and another set turns on? All your ARMs go to waste, which is why firing off a billion of them in one giant wave doesn’t work. If it did Iraq would have been 100% defenceless in the first 24 hours.
That's the way Russia used them in Chechnya.
Against what? Moving vehicles maybe? And to cue what weapons? Were they actually designating targets to be attacked, or simply finding targets in general terms, which were then identified and attacked used the sensors on the attacking plane?
Really? In that case, aren't the bombers with ALCMs totally worthless?
What bombers and what missiles? A US bomber with AGM-86 ALCMs would in fact be totally worthless without detailed and protracted mission planning. Before GPS removed the need for TERCOM this meant radar mapping the way to the target, and then collecting infrared imagery of specific impact points to program the optical seeker. Like I said, we had to take six months to plan the cruise missile attacks on Iraq in 1991.
This is BTW why so few nations have long range cruise missiles in the real world, despite the technology not being super advanced. They are extremely difficult to employ operationally and require large scale mission planning and reconnaissance AHEAD of time. Heck TERCOM has been around since the 1950s.
I mean, the Tu-160s cruise missiles were designed to be able to use targeting data from Tu-95, Tu-22, MiG-31 and other plaforms capable of being used as R/C craft.
Against SHIPS, sure. Ships are easy distinct radar targets, though long range targeting is still a plague of naval warfare, an airfield is not aside from the runways, but this is why any sane air base has taxiways that can be used for takeoffs too. Coalition attempts to shut down Iraqi and Yugo airfield runways mostly failed, even if you crater a runway, the planes can often just taxi around the crater. The Soviets went even further, and gave airfields hidden runways which had full foundations, but grass surfaces and thus didn’t even show up on most radar images. Nations the world around also build connections to nearby highways to further reduce this vulnerability.
Your claiming to do all targeting on the fly without prior reconnaissance, so you couldn’t even think about optimizing all your impact points.
I presume I could hit an airstrip at the very least, no?
See above, runways are viable targets, but highly wasteful. In Israelis famous 1967 surprise attacks they actually bombed the runways last.
Sea Skimmer wrote:
So what if you make that tenfold the number? If he has 300 SAM launchers, that means he has 4-6 times less radars for his PVO systems. I mean, fucking 1500 SEAD missiles versus hundreds of radars. Shouldn't that work?
It would work if every last radar was on, and stayed on. No one is dumb enough to do that, if a bunch of NVA conscripts could figure out that they could flip radars on and off, so too can his men. I’m sure your attack would cause major disruption of the air defence system, but it would not destroy it. A battery face with a clearly overwhelming SEAD attack will shutdown and single a nearby battery to switch on, and then hope none of the ARMs memory modes is good enough to inflict damage. Without GPS those modes just don’t work that well, because an ARM doesn’t really have any means of range finding.
This is all precisely why the US had to fire off 2,000 of them in Iraq, and yet didn’t normally spam them by the thousand, nor wipe out every radar in the country dispite having six weeks to try. Fire one or fire ten at the same radar, the effectiveness will be about the same if you do it all at once. That’s why ARMs are used for Suppression, and other weapons not so easily employed are used for actual Destruction.
350 miles away? I used the realistic range at which he could do it for his AEW radar, the Shmel, on A-50. It's around 400 km for high-flying targets.
With what radar cross section? You can’t see a fighter that far out, but the E-3 could see a large 50-100m/sq target like an airliner, transport or unstealthy bomber at that distance. I was assuming A-50 was not inferior in antenna size and raw power, so it should have a similar maximum range.
Not really, the 1980s upgrade program for radars and command link they had was a disaster, and then the Cold War ended and they decommissioned most of the system, and every last SAM battery. NATO has long ceased flying standing AEW patrols. But as is so often pointed out SDN world is not the real world, its more like a Korean DMZ mentality spread to the whole world so people aren’t going to be caught napping as easily, never mind during an actual crisis.
I didn't use Kh-101 as SEAD. I used Kh-15P, Kh-31PD, Kh-22P as my SEAD munitions.
So the MiGs are targeting SEAD missiles? If the launch platform can’t detect the radars then you’d be stuck launching the ARMs without them even having a firm target, just putting them into a basket to find a target themselves basically? That would make ARM spam even less effective as some missiles would fail to guide at all, while others would over concentrate. And if that’s what the MiGs were actually doing, then how did you target the airfields at all, let alone with cruise missiles relying on optical/IR terminal guidance?
) with very limited food. Finally they mutineed, which forced a standoff between fishers and slavers, wheer the former were not taking any food. Ultimately the vessel could not fish any longer, and the slaves managed to take over a comm facility and send a message to coastal guard. That was 2004.
As I noted, his IADS is broken up in a few regiments, which means 5-6 airfields/AFBs. A typical airfield is an object 100 m wide and maybe 500-600 m long (50000 m square). Expending 16 high speed missles for greater CEP equates 2 per airfield in the very first minutes of battle - just to cause disruption and slow down his IADS reaction process. When Tu-95 bombers come over, they add some 30x2=60 Meteorit-A missiles, which are of course now guided more precisely, and have a time-to-kill of, uh... around 50-200 seconds, i.e. around few minutes. That would give over 20 cruise missiles per airfield even if some Tu-95s are downed before they release the Meteorit-As, discounting the numerous SEAD missiles which could home on airstrip radar facilities.