It's time, as usual, for our open thread. Talk about whatever you want, even if it's not naval/military related and isn't Culture War.
During the last virtual meetup, Trofim_Lysenko pointed me to this video, which is of a presentation by a senior Navy acquisition officer analyzing the Death Star program from an acquisition point of view. Highly recommended.
2018 overhauls are Bringing Back the Battleships, Why the Carriers Aren't Doomed Parts two and three, Stability, Pre-Dreadnoughts and Basics of Naval Strategy. Overhauled from 2019 were Interwar Naval Diplomacy, Commercial Aviation Part 5, Falklands Part 10, the Spanish-American War Part 1, The NOAA Commissioned Corps and Ship Structure and Strength. And 2020 overhauls are Aerial Decoys, Pictures-Iowa Enlisted Quarters, Escorts and Cool Facilities-Bayview.
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You were in the list of recommendations for acoup.blog 's latest Fireside Chat. Congratulations!
Great News! Scott Alexander is back, with a new blog at Astral Codex Ten.
@FXBDM
Yeah, I saw. Thanks.
To continue the discussion of warship aesthetics from the previous open thread, say what you want about the capabilities of the Littoral Combat Ship, you can't deny that it looks damn cool.
@bean
I just heard that and was on my way spread the word. Looks like it's going to be a very exciting new chapter for Scott as well as his readership.
Question for the tech savvy. Is there a way to plot a line between two points on Google Earth and then save it so the link can be sent out?
Here is what I am trying to do. In January 1943 a Pan-Am Martin M-130 flying boat departed Honolulu with ten Naval officers on board. One of them was the submariner Admiral Robert English- COMSUBPAC as of May 1942. I assume some of the other ten were members of his staff.
The good news: with a strong tailwind the flight arrived 3.5 hours early over San Francisco. The bad news: they could not touch down due to foul weather as surface winds were from the South at 45 knots with gusts along with low ceilings. Winds at 2000' and above were estimated to be between 80 and 90 knots. A real howling bit of weather to be sure.
The crew decided to fly west and wait until the weather improved. They had a lot of extra fuel for a long hold. If they could not land they would go to San Diego.
They reported taking up a westerly heading and climbing to 7000' to find a smoother ride. My guess is that they perhaps wanted to hold over the ocean and away from any terrain induced turbulence.
Not long afterwards, the aircraft hit the terrain at about 2500' near Ukiah--not that far from Santa Rosa. It took some time to locate the accident site. The military was particularly keen on securing any surviving documents that Admiral English was carrying as no doubt was carrying sensitive information.
Obviously there was no CVR so we will never know what they were discussing on the flight deck, but what is intriguing is how they ended up in Ukiah after taking up what I assume to be a 270 heading out of the bay itself.
Two factors. If they climbed into an eighty or ninety knot wind from the south and they were flying at 160 knots, then they were obviously going to get blown to the north.
What is a bit more subtle, even to me and my colleagues who have flown in and out of SFO tons of times, is that a 270 heading might not put you over the sea right away if you start from NE of the city/pier itself. You could be over land (except for the bay itself of course) for a stretch.
I am trying to mark out on Google Earth what a possible flight path might have been with the southerly winds so strong. In other words their heading and ground track were quite different and if it were possible that they never reached the ocean but were over land the entire time.
While that might sound simple, what complicates it for me is that they said they were climbing to 7000 for a better ride but yet they hit the terrain at 2500. Had they been over open water but had a problem and descended again without realizing they were that much further north? That's impossible to say.
Anyway, I am trying to figure out how to plot a line to see if a 80 knot wind could have blown the that far north without them ever having first reached the ocean and then coming back onshore. In other words they descended while they were still flying the original 270 heading.
I can post the link to the CAB accident report. Stanford University was kind enough to find it for me.
BTW, an ocean apart, apparently PAN-AM had flights over the Atlantic even during the war years. I see references elsewhere of service out of Portugal to North America. Not sure if they were going through the Azores.
@quanticle
I actually kind of like the LCS-2 design. It does look rather...otherworldly (the angle I saw it from in person wasn't its best, but it was definitely striking). And it's got that amazing flight deck. Definitely the better of the two, even if it was designed to a weird set of specs.
@Neal
There are ways to make custom maps on Google Maps. It's what I've used for the Naval Bases From Space series. Can't remember exactly where the button is, but I'm sure that...er...Google can tell you.
I've gotta say the LCS-2 doesn't look bad either.
But the choice of major city names for a heavy corvette will never not gall me.
How much sense would a destroyer sized Little Crappy Ship 2 make? (assuming sensible specs, i.e. no 45 Knots unless it has an N in the prefix).
Would the extra deck area the trimaran configuration allows provide enough benefit over a traditional hull form to be worth it?
@Jade
Yeah, I'm with you on this one.
@Anonymous
It depends on what you're trying to do. Note that the LCS-2 has a deck that's bigger than you could get on a conventional ship below something like 20,000 tons. So there's definite potential for a bigger version, but at the same time, this strikes me as more of a happy accident, given that so much of the rest of the design is optimized around high speed. But someone might see the benefit for it at some point down the road.
I wonder if the deck space might make it closer to the right tool for a FIAC-buster, loaded up with drones or Cobras plus a few 57mm/76mm guns and short-range ASuW missiles? The current design seems like it wants to be that, but goes off in the weeds somewhere.
I'm not sure there was ever really any need for a specialized ship in that role, given that a normal frigate with a helicopter can do it pretty well. Today, given the existence of APKWS, a single helicopter should be able to take out a dozen or more FACs in a single sortie, so you're even less constrained by helicopter numbers than you used to be.
As Bean says, the helicopter is your weapon of choice against small craft, and it really needs to be a naval helicopter with radar and other naval combat systems, not an Army or Marine attack helicopter. The MH-60R can carry a pair of Naval Strike Missiles, eight Hellfires, or thirty-eight APKWS, depending on how tough your targets are, and any proper warship ought to be able to carry an MH-60R or two.
If you need to defeat small craft with on-board armament, we know from experience that a pair of old Sea Sparrows can mission-kill even a destroyer escort; the current version can engage surface targets out to the radar horizon and you can quad-pack them in any VLS cell. For swarms of small boats, RIM-116 has a surface-target mode and comes 21 or 11 to the launcher. Or you can use an old R2 unit. And of course the ubiquitous medium-caliber gun, whether that means 57mm, 76mm, or 5". All of those are versatile weapons that offer useful capabilities against an adversary that isn't limited to Boston Whalers with rocket launchers.
If you really need more, there are plenty of bolt-on stabilized gun mounts with automatic cannon and electro-optical sights that you can stick on wherever they fit, rather like HMS Dreadnought did with its 12-pounder guns.
But really, you want helicopters. Which means you want a frigate that can support naval helicopters and use all the capabilities they bring to the table. Everything else is just hedging against the enemy attacking on the watch the helicopters aren't available. And a frigate can support a lot of anti-FAC hedging without compromising its primary mission or demanding investment in specialized anti-FAC-only systems.
FAC today seem like "things that are used by navies who can't or won't operate naval helicopters"
What about small craft with fighter and/or SAM cover? FACs are supposed to operate close to shore anyway, which doesn't sound like the most healthy environment for naval helos.
@AlexT
The short version is that if you're going to provide fighter cover for your FACs, it's probably better to simply put the missiles on the fighters and cut out the middleman. As for SAMs, fitting a capable system onto an FAC is very difficult, and most have to make do with missiles that are outranged by the helicopters.
Or you end up scaling up your FAC to the point that it's more of a corvette or even a small frigate anyway, which somewhat defeats the purpose.
Except a fighter is much more expensive and also much harder to hide on a coastline waiting for some juicy LHD or DDG to approach. I'd rather keep the fighters inland, waiting to dash in to kill the occasional naval helo, without entering risky airspace.
FACs operating close to shore would be reasonably well covered by land batteries, unless attacked by long range standoff weapons. At that point, a group of 10 cheap FACs, 8 of which are even cheaper decoys, would be a great way to absorb 10 very expensive missiles.
In other news, the US Air Force now has a black Chief of Staff, Charles Q. Brown, Jr., the first black person to hold the job. I was all ready to make fun of the USAF, but the world and Donald Trump are determined to spoil my fun. Congrats to the USAF for being more inclusive than The Church of Latter-day Saints.
bean:
I'm thinking normal destroyer duties, basically whatever a Burke would do.
bean:
So what are the downsides to the trimaran configuration?
Ian Argent:
FACs are pretend warships for those who want the prestige of having a Navy but can't afford a real warship. Wouldn't be surprising if they can't afford helicopters.
Jade Nekotenshi:
Sounds like an LCS.
AlexT:
Waterships are slow, fighters are fast.
LCS isn't really an FAC scaled up to be big enough to have a real SAM system. It's as fast as an FAC, but that's kinda where the similarity ends - for one, it doesn't have the usual payload of AShMs that FACs are known for, and for another, it doesn't have a real SAM system, except the point-defense-only RAM.
It's big enough to carry ESSM or something similar, but doesn't, which is part of the gripe with it. It's not a giant FAC, it's not a conventional frigate, it's this weird thing that's neither fish nor fowl, and doesn't seem to really answer the questions anyone was actually asking. (Sacrifices everything on the altar of speed, and then does... what?)
"FACs operating close to shore would be reasonably well covered by land batteries, unless attacked by long range standoff weapons. At that point, a group of 10 cheap FACs, 8 of which are even cheaper decoys, would be a great way to absorb 10 very expensive missiles."
The cheapest price I've seen quoted for a Chinese Type 022 Fast Attack Craft is $15 million. The highest price I've seen quoted for a Naval Strike Missile is $2 million. So even in your scenario, and even if the decoys are free, it's cheaper to kill them with missiles.
And really, the FACs are probably twice that price, whereas the NSM will come in at under half that price in serial production.
Also, if your FACs are more than twenty kilometers or so from the ground-based air defenses, they can be killed by helicopters with even cheaper Hellfires (~$100K) without the helicopter ever coming above the ground battery's radar horizon. If they stay within twenty kilometers of a ground air defense battery, they're not doing anything you couldn't do just as well with an even cheaper ground-based antiship missile battery.
Fast Attack Craft do complicate matters for anyone planning operations in enemy coastal waters, but they are simply not survivable against a modern blue-water navy that takes the time to deal with them properly.
@AlexT
Remember, air-launched missiles have significantly greater range than surface-launched versions do. I'd be surprised if it were generally possible for a fighter to shoot down helicopters threatening an FAC and not hit whatever target the FAC could hit with the same missile. You keep the fighters well inland, then send them to dash in and kill the LHD or DDG, instead of trying to kill helicopters (which are also a lot faster, and thus more likely to get inside your decision loop if you leave the fighters at range).
@John Schilling @bean OK, that makes a lot of sense, thanks.
Jade Nekotenshi:
The original proposal that led to it was very much a FAC but then it was enlarged so as to be something other than completely useless.
"The original proposal that led to it was very much a FAC but then it was enlarged so as to be something other than completely useless."
One original proposal was for a faster, better FAC that could out-FAC the other guy's FACs. The other original proposal was for a cheap ship with a helicopter or two, because helicopters are the dominant weapon in modern naval combat (unless someone brought a real aircraft carrier).
Neither of these proposals are bad, per se, though the first one isn't a good fit for the way the US Navy normally does business. The problem was being unable to decide, and saying "let's do both!". That gets you a bastard frankenship that can, yes, carry a helicopter or two at forty knots, but can't do much of anything else - like say weather even a modest storm, or take on a WWII surplus destroyer. And with helicopters cruising at 120 knots, it turns out to not make much difference whether the dash speed of the pad is 20 or 40 knots.
I don't think that's quite right. There was only one original plan that I know of, which was essentially an FAC with a helicopter. Somehow, this got taken seriously, but by the time they were designing a ship which had all of the capabilities they'd promised, it was the size of a Frigate, and thus the LCS we know and love was born.
(I plan to do a design writeup on the LCS at some point, but it's new enough that I don't have great sources, and the Seaforth Annual with the LCS-1 is the 2010 edition, which is the only one I don't have because it's really expensive used.)
Re disadvantages of the trimaran, D.K. Brown (Rebuilding the Royal Navy) talks briefly about the RN's tests on Triton, the first large military demonstrator of the concept. He said that while most things are tradeoffs, this seemed to make everything better at a small cost in structural weight and complexity.
I was just looking at the trophy APS being installed on the Abrams and was sort of awed by the ever-decreasing size of APS in general. Have these smaller systems been tested against anti-ship missiles? I can imagine the relatively small shaped charge warhead is a lot easier to disrupt than a big dumb penetrator backed up by a lot of explosives, but I really know nothing about naval warheads. Does this change any of the calculus for FACs?
It wouldn't work nearly as well at sea, because the relationship between weapon and target is different. An RPG/ATGM is only a threat to a tank if its warhead goes off in the right place. An anti-ship missile can still really mess up a target even if it's a dud, because any modern warship is lightly protected compared to a tank. Note that one of the main drivers behind RAM was the need to kill anti-ship missiles at greater range than was possible with CIWS precisely to keep debris from hitting the ship, and CIWS is a lot more expensive and longer-ranged than any tank-based APS.
@bean, while most things are tradeoffs
People say this a lot and it just isn't true. Most difficult decisions are tradeoffs, but there are all sorts of cases, probably the vast majority, where there are no significant tradeoffs at all.
In which case the decision is obvious and we don't bother talking about it.
When designing a new fighter plane, nobody sits around discussing "Will we use a jet engine? Or a propellor driven by a coal burning steam engine? Well it's a tradeoff..."
That's not a discussion that happens, because there are no factors worth discussing in which there is a tradeoff in this case.
A stupid pedantic nitpick I know. But most things aren't tradeoffs. There is usually a total dominance of one side in the decision. So we shouldn't be too surprised to find another such case.
This is true, but it's coming from a book that spends a bunch of time talking about all of the weird options that naval architects have come up with since 1945. So the comparison class is stuff like SWATH and surface-effect, both of which do have significant tradeoffs.
(And note that even obvious cases may be less obvious than they appear at first glance. "Should we build this ship out of steel or wood?" "Well, it's a minesweeper...")
In the most February 2021 issue of WIRED magazine, the entire magazine is devoted to telling a fictional story about how a future conflict between China and the United States might turn out. Unfortunately it doesn't seem available on their website so I'll have to summarize. It's set in 2034 and the conflict starts when the Chinese intercept a US freedom of navigation patrol consisting of three destroyers is attacked by a Chinese carrier group. The destroyers communications are completely disabled by some form of Chinese cyberattack on their systems, and since nobody in Washington DC is certain what is happening reinforcements arrive too late.
I was starting to wonder whether such a communications blackout would be possible, when I ran into bigger questions. The next scenario in the conflict features two US carrier groups following the same freedom of navigation patrol route. China moves to intercept with one carrier group, and manages to wipe out both US carrier groups without suffering a single lost ship. WIRED's explanation? The Chinese used cyberattacks to disable both carrier groups weapons and communications systems, rendering the US ships helpless. Here's a quote from the piece:
"Reports are that nothing worked. We were blind. When we launched our planes, their avionics froze, their navigation systems glitched out and were then overridden. Pilots couldn't eject. Missiles wouldn't fire. Dozens of our aircraft plunged into the water. Then they came at us with everything...Thirty-seven warships destroyed."
Now I read this and thought, "This sounds like nonsense to me. Surely that isn't within the realm of possibility." My second thought was "Bean would know exactly why."
Do you have any thoughts? I don't trust journalists to speculate on military matters.
I don't trust journalists, either, and this kind of thing is why. The short answer is that the Chinese didn't invent the idea of cyberattacks, and the US military isn't ignoring the threat. I've had some contact with US cybersecurity requirements and they look pretty rigorous. I'm not an expert, but they check for a lot of stuff. And the US can play at that game, too. In fact, I suspect the lack of information on US cyberattacks is probably evidence that our people are better because they usually don't get caught.
And then there's the fact that "all Chinese cyberattacks work, US unable to respond" is just stupid. And they'd be idiots to gamble on that.
If this is all the same conflict, I'm sceptical about the part where the US responds to three of it's destroyers being attacked on a freedom of navigation exercise, by sending a bigger fleet on the same route. If the US had responded to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor with a freedom of navigation exercise off Okinawa, I expect that they'd have lost their carriers, all without any hypothetical cyber attack.
Instead, I think some cruise missile attacks on some of their 'Great wall of sand' bases would be relatively proportionate, damaging infrastructure, but not a direct attack on the mainland. Did the article explain why the US wouldn't directly retaliate to the first attack?
bean:
So why isn't everything a trimaran?
Another way to ask it might be: how (except for having a steel hull) is Little Crappy Ship 1 better than Little Crappy Ship 2?
Doctorpat:
But we don't talk about those.
Doctorpat:
Well the coal burning steam engine won't need oil so could be useful for a country with coal but no oil (and no ability to make synfuels) at the slight cost of having massively inferior performance.
It can also be built by a country that can't manage to make the superalloys needed to make a jet engine have a lifespan measured in something more than single digit hours.
@Anonymous
I'd guess it's inertia. We have a lot of experience with monohulls and navies are inherently conservative organizations. LCS was unusual in that radical solutions were pushed, and it looks like one of them may have been a very good one.
I think it's slightly cheaper, and it can be built in Wisconsin. I'm not sure which had more to do with the way the contracts were awarded.
(LCS-2 doesn't fit through the locks on the Great Lakes. In fact, it's very close to the maximum beam for the old Panama locks, which is likely to be limiting for any trimaran destroyer/frigate the US builds for a very long time. Not sure what that would do to an attempt at a bigger trimaran.)
I find lots of people who talk about the PRC threat to be much more willing to credit their hypothetical US-inertia to attacks to cyberattacks than to the uncomfortable probability that the PRC can operate in our political system very powerfully.
@Bean
I realize the new Panama Canal wasn't built during LCS planning, but going forwards that seems like the new constraint would be the larger New Panamax criteria, right? Or has the Panamax box ended up defining a lot of subsidiary things like drydocks and crane capacity, such that even new designs will be capable of using the original canal?
Or does the Navy prefer the original canal because of redundancy, etc?
I would think the limitations on the trimaran are more width for a given volume (kind of the point - it has a shallower draft by spreading the volume over a larger area) and less usable internal volume (since you've got three small hulls instead of one big one.)
But for the LCS, having a nice, wide flight deck and a shallow draft is more important than whatever internal volume you're giving up - it's not like VLS cells take up that much space, anyway. That might not be true for, say, an aircraft carrier, where you want lots of internal volume for aircraft and supplies.
(Although aircraft carriers also like having a lot of deck area and being able to move fast, so who knows...?)
@Blackshoe
Good point. On the other hand, there's also a strong tendency to treat China as entirely competent, which I think is dangerous. At best, they'll have as many issues as we do. At worst, a lot more.
@redRover
There are three sets of locks, two old and one new. I'd guess that they want to keep within Old Panamax to make sure that they don't end up with ships having to go around Cape Horn if the new locks go down for whatever reason. (Militaries are a lot more paranoid about this kind of stuff than commercial shippers are. Can't imagine why.) And yes, I'd suspect that drydocks tend to have similar limitations, although not exactly the same ones. Google isn't particularly helpful here, but I'd be extremely skeptical that you could push beam much past 108' without seriously impacting your ability to drydock in the facilities that normally support the Navy. That's been basically the standard limit, except for carriers, since 1914.
@beleester
That's not quite right. Below-water volume is exactly the same as any other ship of the same displacement, just laid in a more annoying way. Above-water volume is up to the designer, but could be quite a bit greater. More stability means more ability to carry topweight, and a wider ship means you can get more volume at a given level.
In theory, a trimaran carrier could work pretty well (good stability and a big deck are both definite pluses in that role, and carriers are notoriously volume-constrained) but you're going to need a whole new set of docks because of the width issue. About twice as wide as on the existing carriers, based on a comparison between LCS-1 and LCS-2. And that gets expensive really fast.
@Alexander
"Did the article explain why the US wouldn’t directly retaliate to the first attack?"
Yeah, there was a lot more detail then I put in. Essentially as the destroyers were going through disputed seas they encounter a fishing boat on fire. It wasn't running any flag, and it wasn't putting out any distress signal or responding to radio hails. The Commadore of the patrol thought this was suspicious and came alongside to fight the fire. After it was put out they tried boarding and the fishing crew resisted, which seemed even more suspicious. They searched the ship and found a lot of high tech military technical equipment in the hold. Soon afterwards the Chinese carrier group appeared and demanded that the fishing ship be released to their custody. US refused the request, then the destroyers were attacked. It turns out that all of this was a ploy by the Chinese to spark a conflict that would solidify their claim to the territory while also showing the world that they were strong enough to enforce their claims. The electronics on the ship were of no real importance, just bait.
The US didn't respond with war because the President at the time was not a war hawk and was hesitant to start a war over the incident. In the story the Chinese explicitly expect that the response to their attack on the destroyers will be political posturing and sanctions on the US's part. They don't believe the US has the will to force the issue. However, though the President wants to avoid escalation the public is outraged and hawkish insiders end up forcing the issue.
@Bean: assuming that a navy ship's computer systems were hacked or shut down by an enemy cyberattack: would a modern ship by completely helpless, or is there a lot they can do "manually" so to speak, without using computers?
That's not actually a terrible plan from the Chinese, if they're convinced that the US won't retaliate. There are plenty of opportunities for them to back down while making tolerable concessions, and they won't actually attack until after discovering if their cyber attack was effective. The idea that the US response would be sanctions, or a large freedom of navigation exercise, I still find highly improbable.
I'm guessing that a cyber attack that shut down all the targets computers would be incredibly effective, leaving them reliant on their eyes to detect targets, and manually aimed guns to attack them. That'd be plenty for fending off pirates, but not much good against an anti-ship missile. I don't think that there is any reason to believe that the Chinese (or anyone else) could develop such a cyber weapon however.
One of the big limitations on cyberweapons is that quite simply, not everything is on the Internet. Most tactical systems aren't, for example. They have datalinks, but busting into those from China is not exactly trivial. It's not as simple as hacking a web app. Anything you could trick ENS Newbie into clicking on could, at worst, cause moderate inconvenience.
If you somehow could "shut down all the computers" with a cyberweapon, sure, things could be crippled. But it would depend a ton on the details. Many things would be a reboot away from recovery. It'd be much harder to permanently destroy hardware (or permanently corrupt its stored software) than to simply crash it.
Basically, everything runs on computers these days, and has for at least 30-40 years. But as Jade says, none of it is connected to the internet, and while it may not be quite the same level of specialized hardware it was back then, everything involved is still being checked a lot more rigorously than anything you deal with day-to-day.
@Blackshoe I find lots of people who talk about the PRC threat to be much more willing to credit their hypothetical US-inertia to attacks to cyberattacks than to the uncomfortable probability that the PRC can operate in our political system very powerfully.
Because that stands a high risk of starting a culture war conflict, which is not something that a magazine like Wired would be comfortable with.
Start any talk of fifth columnists and a lot of people are going to view this as an attack.
After some thinking about what I can and can't say, I'd say that most things on a modern US warship that can be disrupted by the kind of hacks that corporations keep getting bitten by are on the order of "dammit, the CO is massively inconvenienced for a few hours and you really don't wanna talk to ITCS Jones right now", not "we are really boned if someone lobs a C-802 at us right now".
Well, not with the Chinese government anyway.
BTW, I know we give the LCS a lot of crap, but I'm really interested in this idea of putting a few Fire Scouts on them.
It seems like a cheap (by US military standards) way of getting helicopters with nice radar and e-o just about anywhere you want.
That seems pretty useful for a situation like (totally hypothetically) enforcing a distant blockade on chinese shipping around the SCS straights.
bean:
But they're building more LCS-2s than LCS-1s.
bean:
If Wikipedia is to be believed the LCS-2 is 3104 Mg full load with the US FREMMs to be 6700 Mg, the Flight III Arleigh Burkes are 9700 Mg, the Zumwalt class (which I'll compare to a Trimaran cruiser) are 15907 Mg, the Iowa class are 58460 Mg and about 100000 Mg for the Gerald R. Ford class.
The volume (and hence displacement) of a ship scales as the cube of the linear dimensions so by taking the cube root of the ratios between ships we can scale the dimensions as follows: ∛6700/3104 = 1.292 ∛9700/3104 = 1.462 ∛15907/3104 = 1.724 ∛58460/3104 = 2.661 ∛100000/3104 = 3.182
The LCS-2 has a length of 127 m, beam of 32 m and draft of 4.3 m so assuming a straight scale-up: Trimaran Frigate: 164 m, 41.3 m and 5.5 m Trimaran Destroyer: 186 m, 46.8 m and 6.3 m Trimaran Cruiser: 219 m, 55.2 m and 7.4 m Trimaran Battleship: 338 m, 85 m and 11.4 m Trimaran Flattop: 404 m, 102 m and 13.7 m
Compared to similar monohulls the Frigate, Destroyer and Cruiser are longer and wider but not as deep, the Battleship is longer and wider with about the same draft and the Carrier is longer and wider and also seems to be a bit deeper.
Old Panamax is 32.31 m beam so… New Panamax allows 51.25 m and the Seuz allows 50 m which would still be a problem for the Cruiser (but it could probably be designed to fit).
Looks like there is indeed a reason, though Navies that don’t have to operate in multiple oceans may not care.
Blackshoe:
The leadership just doesn’t understand democratic countries well enough to really pull that off.
Jade Nekotenshi:
Didn't save Iran’s centrifuges and they didn’t even have a datalink.
Jade Nekotenshi:
But if they manage to steal the software and designs for the hardware then they can play with it to find vulnerabilities.
Still risky because they might not steal everything (like with the capacitor plague) and maybe the US would find the problem themselves and fix it without bothering to tell them (or even deliberately let them steal software that’s been backdoored).
Jade Nekotenshi:
If they get root they might be able to corrupt the software or at least corrupt something.
Jade Nekotenshi:
Most of those are low-effort automated attacks done by people who don’t care who they target just as long as they get someone.
Actual targeted attacks by nation-states are much worse.
echo:
The comparison would be with shore based Global Hawks.
But the big problem with blockading with drones is that drones can’t really board a suspect ship.
@echo
Normally, that would be done primarily by land-based aircraft, a mix of P-8s and MQ-4Cs. The surface warships would be tasked with showing up and boarding suspected ships, which LCS-2 would be pretty good at, as you get two helicopters and plenty of room for the boarding team.
@Anonymous
Yes. I think it is the better design, and I suspect that the Navy wanted to pick it as the winner, but was told they couldn't in 2010 because of cost and the Wisconsin congressional delegation, so they split the pie.
Re trimaran designs, I wouldn't be surprised if you could get a heavier trimaran on the same width with a bit more draft and less attention to speed. But you're still going to have docking facility issues even if the canals are irrelevant.
Yeah, but the Israelis didn't have to trigger it at a specific time, and had good access to the hardware they were attacking.
Iran's centrifuges may not have been on the internet, but they did have USB ports. Anything that needs to be truly secure, needs to not have a USB port for about the same reason it needs to not have an internet connection. Yes, I know how inconvenient that is. Everybody who is serious about security, puts up with the inconvenience. I can't speak for the US Navy, but the Air Force has a lot of no-internet, no-USB computers.
I'm not trying to claim "nah, cyberweapons can't ever work. They're a waste of time, and anyway we Americans are too smart and big-dick to ever fall for that" or any flagwavy bologna like that. What I'm saying is that the idea that China has or will likely ever have a "magic turn off all the weapons and sensors switch" is more fantasy than reality.
Getting some kind of malware into something tactical, that could happen. Getting in there at the exact moment you need it, under fire, or getting it in there in advance with a remote-kill capability, so that it turns off exactly what you need, or enough stuff to cripple an entire force - that's harder. Hard enough that I wouldn't bet on it, and I'd bet China isn't betting their whole strategy on being able to pull that off, either. It's definitely something to watch out for - hard doesn't mean impossible - but every world military with a working brain has considered the possibility.
The last thing here is that it's mostly going to be a suckerpunch weapon. The first time a cyberattack shuts down anything important, they'll find it and fix it. That'll take time - whoever pulled the attack will probably land their suckerpunch - but the same trick probably won't work again. (And patching that one attack will probably close off others, and might ferret out other lurking malware, depending on what exactly they have to do.)
Americans get unpredictably angry when Other People Kill Americans. On top of the gamble of cyberwarfare.
@FLWAB
In the case of that scenario, what I imagine would happen is that the an older less computer-dependent carrier, on its way to becoming a museum ship, would shepherd a ragtag fleet of American survivors away from the Chinese in a last-chance effort to find sanctuary in the original homeworld of the 13 colonies, the mythical England.
Wait no, that's the plot to the Battlestar Galactica reboot. Where I think wired got its scenario from.
Overall I think politics-wise the situation is ludicrous, if the Chinese wanted to show they could dominate a US fleet in the South China sea there are better ways than to start a war with the US, as that gives the US license to attack you literally anywhere else on the globe. Besides, who are you showing off for? All the other countries with blue water navies? I assume that wired wanted to talk about a technical threat and just wanted to a bombastic scenario to make it interesting. (Probably still better plot than most military thrillers.)
@bean
Yeah, that was what I was imagining: an oil tanker supposedly bound for Indonesia starts heading towards China after passing through a Malacca Straights checkpoint.
The closest LCS gets a drone in the air and radios a polite order to heave to and prepare for inspection. The ship holds course and doesn't reply, and gets a slightly less polite order and even less polite Fire Scout APKWS across the bow.
Meanwhile your actual surface combatants are providing distant cover, with any available carrier groups providing overwatch for them.
Any chinese destroyer that comes to make the LSC's life difficult gets outrun and finds itself in the open sea in range of a warning flyover from a US carrier, or just meeting an attack sub if you've already gone weapons-free.
Even the useless speed would be slightly beneficial in that scenario, although probably not worth what was sacrificed for it.
How are trimarans (or multihulls in general) for survivability? Intuitively, a missile that would punch a big hole in a monohull, could break a trimaran completely apart.
@echo
I'm not sure how well "outrunning" works in this model. If the US picks up the Chinese ship before it gets within launch range, pretty much anything in the fleet has the legs to stay away from it until we can get some Hornets to deal with it. If we don't, then speed isn't likely to be a huge help. Might help you get out of range faster, but even LCS isn't that fast compared to missile range, and I'd rather have an Aegis system than the extra speed.
@AlexT
That is a good point. My biggest concern would be asymmetrical flooding from damage to one of the outboard hulls, which could induce large lists very quickly. That could be (and probably is) mitigated by extreme compartmentalization in the outer hulls, but you're still going to have trouble. I'd be less worried about total structural failure. If you get a hole that big in a monohull of similar size, you'll probably not have a ship soon.
Happy Birthday to America's Last Battleship
I usually treat commissioning instead of launching as the appropriate birthday. Although the Missouri's launching does have Margaret Truman covering herself in champagne to amuse us.
Curious why battleship guns seem to wave around shortly after firing, as seen here.
I wouldn't have thought it was for reloading, because IIRC from the gun series they could be reloaded at a wide range of angles. Is the fire control resetting between each shot or something?
No, that is for reloading. Most, though not all, battleship guns loaded at a fixed angle because it was mechanically a lot easier to set up, and in most cases, other things limited your ROF more. The Iowas loaded at (IIRC) 5 degrees, which is what you're seeing there.
I just happened across this. I'm really quite surprised that there's not more NIH syndrome at play here.
I wonder if SM-6 would also displace Patriot PAC-2 in the theater air defense role? Seems to me like it could, depending on what control system they rig it up to.
Also, if they use a modified Mk 41 to launch it, I wonder if that'd make it possible to also carry an ESSM quad-pack for shooting down enemy ARMs, bombs, etc (or their delivery systems).
Interesting. I'm rather surprised you'd try to adapt an SM-6 to a pure surface-to-surface role, because that seems overkill. But if they're also looking at it as a SAM, it makes a lot more sense. I don't recall exactly what its performance is like relative to PAC-2 and PAC-3, but it could be quite useful. And likewise ESSM, although that's more likely to look like a conventional SAM system.
By overkill, are you thinking of it as being too fast, or the warhead to large? How would it be targeted (GPS?) and what would it be targeted at? From the article I'm getting the impression that it's supposed to help dismantle air defences, but it wasn't terribly clear.
I was thinking that you're paying for a lot of capabilities you aren't using. Then again, defense procurement is weird enough that it might make fiscal sense to buy an existing missile even if it has extra capabilities. Targeting would be GPS, maybe aided by some seeker tweaks. (SM-6 has both active radar and IR seekers, and some combination might be useful.)
Not having to maintain parallel supply chains for a different set of systems might save time and energy, if not money directly, and if you already have a SAM in the system, that might allow entire replacement plans for things like Patriot to be cut, with the entire military standardizing (or, Standard-izing, as the case may be) on one system.
It could also reduce the ammunition supply problem - if your SAM, AShM and land-attack missile are all the same missile, you don't get stuck with the issue of running out of one and having too many of the other.
I'm not very knowledgeable about the capabilities of various missiles, and I'm not that sure about where there is an overlap in requirements, and where your better off with a different weapon.
E.g. AMRAAM, HARM and ESSM all seem sort of similar, being fast (rocket rather than jet powered) and radar targeted. One is surface launched, and one is an anti-radiation rather than radar homing, but I don't have an intuitive understanding of why that means you want three different weapons. Likewise for the British AKPWS and Martlet, or Spear 3 and Sea Venom.
Your posts on armaments help, but I still don't really get it. That makes seeing the problems with Standard as a surface to surface missile tricky, but it is something I'm interested in.
Welp, I should have read the guns articles better. obviously was confusing them with the secondary batteries, which could reload at high angles, right?
How much attention is being given to non-gps backup targeting systems these days, do you think? Is anyone openly saying we'd better not rely on having satellites for more than fifteen minutes in a peer conflict?
Alexander:
Not that similar, one is active radar homing, one passive radar homing and the other semi-active radar homing.
HARM also has less need for maneuverability than the others since it's targets don't move much but also tend not to be quite as fragile (ESSM could be replaced by a SAM version of AMRAAM, say the AMRSAM).
Is the logic there something like: An air launched missile benefits from Active Homing, because it has greater range thanks to being launched from a fast moving aircraft, rather than the surface. Also, the aircraft has a smaller radar than a warship, and is more likely to want to turn away after launch.
How much of the mass of a missile does the seeker represent? How much of the cost? If both are pretty small, adding a different type for flexibility is probably fine, if either are large, you can't afford to. And how big a difference is there between a passive radar homing seeker, and a semi-active radar homing seeker?
The point about target manoeuvrability is a good one, and could well be what bean was getting at with the SM-6. If you are targeting GPS coordinates, you don't need to worry about the target moving. I'm not sure how different the warhead on a HARM is thought - aircraft are pretty fragile, but I don't think you can armour a radar either (hence the AGM-122).
Keep in mind that it's only in the last maybe 20 years that we've gotten to the point where standardization between seriously different roles is a serious option, due to miniaturization in electronics. Before that, you had to pick one and stick with it because each seeker was just too big to use in combination. And a lot of our weapons date back to before that.
Re AMRAAM vs ESSM, AMRAAM is 335 lbs, ESSM is 620. A lot of that goes to launch environment, as planes are more weight-critical, but less space-constrained. Also, operating environments and targets are different. Thin air high up vs near sea-level, and ESSM needs a much faster motor.
Pretty much. Semi-active puts a much greater constraint on an airplane than a ship. Ship can point illuminators any way it likes, while the airplane has to keep flying towards the target.
While you may not be able to armor the antenna, you can definitely armor the rest of the radar site, and the antenna is easy to repair. HARM is slightly heavier than ESSM, but has a much bigger warhead, with some really nasty tungsten fragments to make it able to kill the radar van instead of just the antenna. The AGM-122 was essentially because they had AIM-9Cs laying around and a dead antenna is better than nothing, particularly when you're flying an attack helicopter. There's a reason it wasn't replaced.
@echo
Yes, you could definitely load those at high angles. It's not that it's impossible to make a battleship gun that you could load at any angle, and some people did it, but it introduces a bunch of mechanical complexity because you're having to ram uphill. Smaller shells have several advantages there (one big one being that the powder is protected by the case instead of being bare and potentially crushed by the rammer) and there's a much greater need to make it work because you're firing a lot faster, and at higher angles.
And there's a reasonable amount of work being done on non-GPS systems. But the GPS constellation is safer than you might think. Most existing work has been done on low-orbit ASAT, and they're pretty high up. Not invincible, but a lot harder to kill than you might think.
An anecdote I heard was that in the Korean War, an Essex-class carrier actually conducted several NSFS missions. Is there anything about this anywhere, or is that just another of the batty sea stories that make the rounds from time to time?
I have not heard that, and it smells like an urban legend to me. First, it's totally contrary to all doctrine, which is that carriers shouldn't be risked like that. Not to mention seriously disrupting flight operations to come close inshore, fire and then get back out to where you can operate. And you have at most 8 5" guns, with crews who are not trained or equipped for NSFS. That's less than two destroyers, so you'd wonder why they'd do it.
Doesn't mean it didn't happen, but I'm definitely not believing it unless I have a ship and a time.
It didn't sound right to me either, and I figured someone might have been getting confused by the one time a carrier (albeit not an Essex) did actually get in a surface gunfight and score hits, that being Samar. But the fact that every version I've heard said it happened in Korea, not WW2, made me wonder.
So I went ferreting - apparently, something kind of like it did happen, but it wasn't an Essex, or even a US carrier. It was HMS Unicorn, per this Wiki article, where it's noted with a citation. I haven't read the cited book to confirm, and doing NSFS with four 4" guns makes even less sense to me, but it's also a light carrier tasked mostly with support, so maybe it's more expendable.
That makes more sense. I don't have that book, but it's by David Hobbs, and I do have several others by him, including British Aircraft Carriers. I checked, and it provided many facts. First, Unicorn wasn't a carrier at the time, she was basically being used as a transport, so a lot of the operational considerations don't apply. Second, yes, she did indeed do the bombardment, against North Korean Coastwatchers. My guess is that it was a jurisdictional thing. The USN probably told the British no, and Unicorn was the only ship available. But the targets were also pretty light.