AirStrike
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ISUCyclone
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Mark Petersen
- Posts: 96
- Joined: Mon Jan 10, 2005 5:30 pm
- Location: Kenosha, no, not the Pass the other one
The world is different than the last time we had carrier borne aircraft engaging ships at sea. Today the aircraft would be engaging from beyond the horizon from all around the compass. Any vessel's layered defense's would most likely be swapped by mulitple missiles. And a lot of the first ones might be HARMS. Another scenario, take Clancey's A-10s bracketting the Kirov from from "The Hunt for Red October". Could a flight of A-10s on the deck get that close? Good question. But if the fecal matter had ever hit the fan the odds are IMO that any HARMs launched in such an operation would be from a vector around up to 120 degrees of the axis of attack.
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Mac
- Posts: 77
- Joined: Tue Jan 11, 2005 3:16 pm
Mark,
I'd thought of the same thing (attacking ships with HARMs) and I think it was discussed here in a thread that was lost when the board got hacked. I'm not an expert, but some people with more knowledge than me said the HARM scenario isn't very likely against a ships with modern air defenses.
Here's a summary of what I remember (which may or may not be accurate) from that discussion:
First, HARM range isn't as long as antiship missiles, so the aircraft would have to enter the ships SAM range to fire.
Second, HARMs would be detected at the extreme range of the ship's radar. HARM is not a sea-skimmer, so it would be up high and easier to hit with SAMs.
Third, HARMs are designed for stationary targets like SAM sites on land. I don't know if they are programmed to account for the ship's motion between launch and detonation.
Even if these limitations are true, I think your saturation scenario would still cause a problem for a ship's air defense system.
Mac
I'd thought of the same thing (attacking ships with HARMs) and I think it was discussed here in a thread that was lost when the board got hacked. I'm not an expert, but some people with more knowledge than me said the HARM scenario isn't very likely against a ships with modern air defenses.
Here's a summary of what I remember (which may or may not be accurate) from that discussion:
First, HARM range isn't as long as antiship missiles, so the aircraft would have to enter the ships SAM range to fire.
Second, HARMs would be detected at the extreme range of the ship's radar. HARM is not a sea-skimmer, so it would be up high and easier to hit with SAMs.
Third, HARMs are designed for stationary targets like SAM sites on land. I don't know if they are programmed to account for the ship's motion between launch and detonation.
Even if these limitations are true, I think your saturation scenario would still cause a problem for a ship's air defense system.
Mac
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chuck
- Posts: 3384
- Joined: Mon Jan 10, 2005 1:21 pm
- Location: equidistant to everywhere
The AA system on the Kirovs seem to have been designed to soak up a strike by one 1980s USN carrier airwing. It's not clear how the balance will tip if it really came to a struggle, but at least the balance didn't seem to professionals to be so tilted as to make one side or the other clearly ridiculous.
It is also not perfectly clear whether the underlying technology could have continued to permit the construction of Kirov's style ships throught the 1990s and 2000s to keep pace with chnages in USN CVBG. But whether or no, political changes removed the only player who had the resource and the inclination to try. So no one possess any ship that can stand up to even a partial carrier strike from a USN CV today.
Certainly it is for the want of trying. But whether any attempt could have succeeded is not known.
It is also not perfectly clear whether the underlying technology could have continued to permit the construction of Kirov's style ships throught the 1990s and 2000s to keep pace with chnages in USN CVBG. But whether or no, political changes removed the only player who had the resource and the inclination to try. So no one possess any ship that can stand up to even a partial carrier strike from a USN CV today.
Certainly it is for the want of trying. But whether any attempt could have succeeded is not known.