The Ship Model Forum

I love the idea of enhanced guns aboard as much as anyone else, particularly railguns. But I don't see much chance of a classic Marine amphib landing anytime soon. I think the days of a naval land assault are over. Troop insertion will more likely come either by air ( en masse), or stealthy insertion of Special Forces teams by subs - or land assault from nearby friendly countries.

I don't doubt for a minute that once an area is secured you'll see tons of naval replenishment, but in terms of a first strike with landing craft hitting the beaches, those days IMHO are gone gone gone.

Regarding your first point - that depends on whether an EMP device can have a kill radius large than a conventional fragmentation warhead of the same size. If you can put a 15m radius EMP on the tip of a RAM, I would think it's lethality against incoming cruise missiles would increase. In addition a so called EMP is nothing more than microwave pulse made to sound more ominous. AS a result one could focus the EMP with an antenna just like one does in microwave relay stations that dot many mountain tops.

REgarding your second point, keep in mind that any electronic device that does not require an open air antenna can be completely and utterly insulated against any EMP. This would include any missile using IR guidance. It is also possible to harden electronic circuits that does incorporate antenna either by hardening the circuitry itself, and isolate the antenna circuitry and protecting the rest. Also keep in mind that there are techniques under development that would protect IC on even an unisolated and non-hardened piece of military equipment against EMP by creating a tempory cloud of ionized gas around the equipment. The cloud of ionized gas has the coincident benefit of making the equipment invisible to radar.




Regarding your second point, EMP is basically a microwave pulse that can be focused by a micro

Chuck, that's all well and good, but a 15 meter, or even a 50 meter range is not that helpful for a military engagement, especially if the enemy has employed some degree of electronic hardening. If I can get any device into that proximity to the enemy, I ought to be able to sink or take him.

The explosively formed EMPs I have read about are on the same order as the one offered by a 1Mt fusion device, without any fission or blast effects. Such a weapon would swamp countermeasures for an entire task force if it was set off in proximity.

http://www.milnet.com/e-bomb.htm

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2004/jul/12/sciencenews.crime

[url]EMP car police[/url]

OK lets assume that this bombardment round is in effect a shell. Once fired and this has been mentioned several times on this thread the ship that fired the round has let its presence be known, assuming its not known already and as night follows day an SSM would follow just as quick. So this begs the question "What is the clear advantage of such a gun” when only a small number of rounds could be fired before the ship is taken out. The logic would be to get as far back as possible, use shipboard SSMs and retire. Here the SSMs have a better chance of finding their target and a better chance for the ships own survival The greater the range any incoming SSM has to travel the greater the time available to deploy counter measures. Many of the present generation of SSMs are equipped with ECCM to counter any electronic interference and any agile sea skimmer travelling at Mach 3 or 4 would be very difficult to deal with, assuming that the ships own sensors or any external sensors were able to pick it up through all the sea clutter. Sea Skimmers are and will remain very difficult to accurately detect. Distance is the best chance a ship has therefore no ship board gun can provide the range of an SSM . Land attack using any form of gun round is not cost effective as the level of vulnerability of the ship is raised as the distance between the intended target decreases. 83 nm is to close in real terms and only minutes of transit time for a Mach 3-4 SSM.
Dave Wooley

Can you provide a link?

At White Sands they have an EMP test stand. It produces an EMP over an area that seems to be about 15 meters, and it takes a huge electrical input to do so. What are the police using?

The EMP weapon I read about still used tons of lens-shaped plastique to compress a piezo-electric source

EMP devices are used by police to disable cars. It would be somewhat shocking if those devices used nuclear explosion.




But the area EMP devices that can blanket a taskforce is still nuclear.

I recently read a paper regarding explosively formed EMPs. Evidently it is no longer necessary to have a nuclear explosion to generate a substantial EMP. I would guess the technology is now in the process of adaptation.

I think that is why the EMP weapons systems are looking more attractive every day. Whoever designs the first practical EMP weapon is going to transform the battlefield. The weaker power may even accept a general loss of it's own electronic capabilities in order to blind the much stronger power i.e. us.
There is so much we don't know about real world weapons systems. Only when they go into action will we have a clue how easy the supersonic cruise missle is to evade or shoot down. I sat in on a few exercises way back in the old days when we ran radar training programs with the anti ship missile as the problem. These we slow and higher flying 1970s Russian cruise missiles. But they still look fast coming in. I'de hate to see what a supersonic missile flying just off the surface looks like.
In the Falklands the Exocet was a potential war winner. But when you only got a handful, well, that makes it difficult. SOme were successful and others were fooled by simple Chaff Charges. There are no sure bets in war. The over confident are ripe for ugly surprises.

Bob B.

Dave, on the previous page we discussed the gun system, which is 15.5cm.

The "wonder" shell goes 83 nautical miles. It is maneuverable and has terminal guidance.

Obviously, shells, bombardment missiles and cruise missiles have a purpose which overlap only to a certain degree.

As for high-mach cruise missiles, I wonder how vulnerable they will be to the next generation of ESM and surveillance systems, including vehicles which loiter in the stratosphere for days, sub-orbital sensor packages launched from the VLS platform, and of course, satellites.

I would dare say that the defining line between a shell and a guided missile is self propulsion of the payload to the delivery point.

As to counterbattery radar, this may as well be true, but let us all remember that there IS flight time for especially long range naval bombardment. Considering that, no ship in their right mind would fire from a stationary position, lest they, as you have so aptly pointed out, be discovered and engaged by counterbattery fire. With naval gun engagement ranges, in WW2, being in the 40-50km range, conveniently the same as shore-based search radar, let us consider the effect of a 40.6cm, guided, rocket-assisted shell. Delivering its payload, fired from the guns aboard, for instance, an Iowa Class. Maximum range, with AP Mk 8, we'll say he's firing against a hardened shore target, a defensive position like a pillbox. Maximum flight range for the AP mk 8, right off a fresh gun, just pulling numbers from Navweaps, reads 38km.

Assuming a similar ration of increase between the Paladin firing Rocket Assisted versus Conventional projectiles, a ratio of roughly 36% increase in range (30km vs 22km) our 406mm shell has now reached a firing range of 51.8km in flight. Outside of shore radar detection range, and that's just assuming older propellant charges, not a newer, more efficient propellant, or a newer shell with better flight characteristics. With the higher muzzle velocity inherent to the rocket-assistance of the shell, it would also, I should think, provide a faster time to target. Our shell is also smaller, thus a harder target for countermeasures to engage, versus the size of a cruise missile, conveniently, such as the Tomahawk.

Gentlemen, you continue to hail and vaunt your modern, or even ~20 year vintage missiles against weapons systems that have only mildly been given lip service by most nations. Of course the missile is more advanced, more impressive performance, more everything, it's also, need I remind you, More Modern. It's like comparing a Sherman beside an Abrams, of course one's going to win. Short of the mind of a genius such as Gerald Bull, whose work remained unfinished, most of the world has set artillery guns aside as pointless and outdated. I should hardly have to mention that had he finished the work, Babylon was projected to have a range long enough to shell Tel Aviv from deep in the Iraqi desert, thus why he was assassinated and made to vanish, before the weapon could be finished. Nothing truely new with regards to artillery has been seen in practice and use, short of new rounds for venerated calibers, since Schwere Gustav.

You gentlemen continue as well to purport that your missiles are immune to the countermeasures you so aptly confer. By no means is the Moskit/Sunburn immune to countermeasures, it simply has the benefit of its ramjet engine giving the unfortunate target all of five seconds to actually do anything about it. Of course, it also comes with a rather hefty pricetag for its impressive performance.

*pulls on his ear defenders for the inevitable barrage of counterfire to his argument, so he can actually tune it down to a dull, comprehensible mumble instead of deafening shouting*

I think the big gun is fine if you have already established complete air superiority over the enemy, have taken out his fixed and mobile anti ship missiles and have cleaned out any artillery within the landing zones.
To do this you need Carrier Air Groups operating form a secure position way out at sea. Before you move landing forces in, the enemy must be more or less completely defeated already.
Would anyone care to be on the Gun Fire Support ships before the above situation has be realized? Not me.
Hitler had wonder weapons as well, but they didn't always live up to the the sales pitch. As the Marines say, "The enemy has a vote". Too much supposition takes place when one doesn't consider the enemy.
Guns are no doubt cheaper in the long run for shore bombardment, but they only can exist in so far as the USN has the world class Carrier force it has now. Nothing is gonna happen without the Carriers. If I was going to challange USN sea control, I'de be in the Submarine, High Tech Torpedo and supersonic anti ship missile business. Better to defeat the enemy at stage number One than let then stand off a blow hell out of you from the Carriers for weeks on end.
It gets to be the old "How many angels can dance on the head of a pin" debate. Bottom line is, the Carrier Air Groups will do 90% of the work. The last stage of a landing when the marines hit the beach, you would have made a parking lot out of the rear areas before anybody got a toe wet. Coming within missile range of the coast before the missiles are taken out? The enemy's vote will count very heavily. You can't bombard with guns till that threat is gone. Even with the new wonder guns. Shore based radar isn't the only way to get initial target information upon which to launch anti ship missiles. Passive detection is way underrated, since most USN ships broadcast on enouh radiation spectrums to say loud and clear "Here I am".
The enemy has already figured out that passive detection systems work for both aircraft and ships, and modern computing power can turn all that information into real usable data very easily. It just another possible chink in the armor.


Bob B.

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And no doubt these smart rounds can turn , dodge and out fly an incoming AMM. I take it these bombardment rounds are fired from naval artillery? What is the range of these rounds? And is the round in service or still under development? The other question is "when is a shell not a shell but a guided missile". What you have described above is more like a guided missile than a shell .
Dave Wooley

Bombardment missiles make use of existing airframes, gutted of their original guidance and replaced with a GPS system to make them little more than artillery or smart bombs. The advantage is cost and simplicity for a mission that does not require the sophisticated flight profile or range of a multimillion dollar cruise missile.

Here is a bombardment missile based on SM-1 technology:

A Burke could carry up to 90 bombardment missiles and/or 1,000 or more "wonder" shells. Reloading the bombardment missiles requires a yard visit (or at the very least a tender), while more shells can be delivered by helicopter.

As for cruise missiles, a couple of Burkes could carry more "wonder" shells than the number of Tomahawks which exist in the entire national arsenal.

"Wonder" artillery is like a bombardment missile without the need for a motor section. As a result, you get more "bang" for the buck in a robust, proven system.

These artillery shells are obviously a long way from the munition you are thinking of.

Actually, on second thought, that is not entirely correct. A ballistic shell receives almost all of its impulse at the beginning, and afterwards its trajectory is modified only by aerodynamic forces that can be estimated. So its point of launch can be pin pointed even if the counterfire battery only acquired the shell near the end of its flight.

The bombardment missile receives continues propulsive thrust from its rocket engine for as long as the fuel lasts. In this case, the projectile's trajectory is additionally modified by the magnitude and variability of the thrust, which make it impossible to backtrack the trajectory to the point of origin if the missile was not acquired by the radar very early on.

In that case the missile is functioning more like Katyusha rockets rather than guided missiles, and would expose the ship just as much as if the ship had fired a gun.

No, there needs to be no navigation aboard the shells to do this. By varying the amount of propellants and the elevation of the gun, you can get a huge range of different muzzle velocities and achieve a huge range of different ballistic trajectories that all connect the same two points. Each of these trajectories would have a different flight time. It is a relatively trivial matter to calculate a different sets of propellant loading and elevations needed to ensure several shells fired at slightly different times arrive on target at the same time.

Doing this does mean, however, the gun could not achieve anywhere near its maximum ballistic range. Maximum ballistic range is associated firing a shell at around 45 degree elevation while using the maximum amount of propellant to achieve the maximum muzzle velocity. In order to get several shells to arrive on target at the same time, it is necessary to fire the fastest shell last ,and give it a low, flat trajectory that would ensure the least air time. Thus to ensure all shells arrive on target at the same time, the high propellant shell must be fire at a low elevation much below 45 degrees. So the gun can only achieve a fraction, in the ball park of 50-60% of its theoretical maximum range if it were to ensure a series of shells fired in sequence all land on the same target at the same time.

The cruise missile fulfills quite a different mission than a naval tube or a bombardment missile. They are complementary weapons systems. The cruise missile competes with aircraft and unmanned aerial vehicles in a more strategic role. The gun tube and the bombardment missile are close support for ground troops.