As usual, it is time for our open thread. Talk about whatever you want, even if it's not naval/military related.
The time is approaching for our next virtual meetup (July's being in-person), and I had a thought for adding some discussion fodder by watching an episode of Victory at Sea, a series of half-hour WWII documentaries. They're on YouTube, and generally have lots of interesting footage. Thoughts?
2018 overhauls are The 15" Battleships, Museum Ships - United States, LA Fleet Week 2016, Information, Communication and Naval Warfare Part 1, So You Want to Build a Modern Navy - Aviation Part 3 and Anti-Submarine Warfare - WWII - The OIC. 2019 overhauls are Lion and Vanguard, Wolverine and Sable, Italian Battleships in WWII, So You Want to Build a Battleship - Trials and Commissioning, How to Build a Battleship - 1942 and The Maximum Battleship. 2020 overhauls are Nuclear Weapons at Sea ASW Parts one and two, Coastal Defenses Part 5 and Spotting.
Comments
I think that would be a neat way to foster some discussion! Count me in!
Well, that special time of year is upon us, when Twitter erupts with re-hashing arguments about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
@Blackshoe, Anyone arguing that the whole thing was faked? Because if not, there should be. I think you could get some people to buy it.
The idea that there's some kind of archipelago to the south of Sakhalin is obviously an OSS psy-op. Wake up, sheeple!
That's a debate I find it somewhat difficult to take part in without resorting to bulverism. The amount of wishful and plain bad thinking involved is staggering. Why do we care so much more about the casualties of the bombing than all of the other people dying around the Pacific? Even if we count all civilians equally, if it shortened the war by as little as a month it was a net lifesaver, IIRC. Certainly not much more than that.
So yeah, arguing that Japan doesn't exist sounds more fun.
There are people who deny that nuclear technology exists but they're fringe even by crackpot standards.
But the true fake is the existence of the Iowa class, there are no Iowa class battleships and this whole blog is a plot by the Old World Order to conceal that fact.
I've just visited Portsmouth Historic Dockyard, as previously reviewed by Alsadius. The collection was amazing - I wish I'd allowed more time - but I did twitch a bit on HMS Victory when the family in front of me explained to their children that Captain Nelson defeated the French at the Battle of Waterloo.
@DampOctopus
In 2010 I visited USS Slater DE-766 in Albany, NY. Before the tour they had the group watch a brief video that covered the ship's service in the Atlantic and her later transfer to the Pacific war. In the row of seats in front of me, a woman breathlessly exclaimed to her companion, "wait, we fought the Japanese in World War Two!?"
@Directrix Gazer: If I recall correctly, the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor and then it was all over.
Was watching the physicist Sabine Hossenfelder, in a general way, take to task some of the fluff regarding hypersonic vehicles for both travel and weaponry. (Here in case anyone is interested: https://youtu.be/fTEhG8zzftQ )
She mentions Tantalum and Hafnium carbides as being good materials to withstand the stagnation temps as one moves to higher Mach numbers.
What kind of temperatures are faced for the hypersonic weapons that are being touted for sea level operations? See only mentions a 3000K temp at Mach 8.
Lots of hype, excuse the pun, over this class of weaponry, but are they limited to very short ranges of a few Kms at best by temperature and pressure, or can they actually be employed at long distances in the thickest region of the atmosphere?
Unfortunately she does not mention what temps the aforementioned Tantalum carbide can withstand.
Bean, I didn't see anything in the archive. Is this a topic that you already covered? I know money is starting to slosh around at funding levels, but is there anything concrete going on at the Fleet level for offense/defense?
Drone attack on commercial vessel kills 2!
Basically, Iran flew three drones at an Israeli cargo ship and one of them hit, blowing up some non-vital things and killing two people. Welcome to the future.
https://news.usni.org/2021/08/06/u-s-says-new-iranian-kamikaze-drone-killed-two-in-merchant-ship-attack-u-k-u-s-condemn-tehran-for-attack
@Neal
"Hypersonic" and "sea level" are contradictory propositions when we're talking about a missile (or any aircraft), at least as far as I understand. The suggested hypersonic weapons (boost-glide and continuously propelled) fly the fast part of their flight in thin high-altitude air and then dive onto their target.
I haven't written about hypersonic weapons, but probably should at some point soon. In general, I'd say that there's potentially useful capabilities coming, but also several megatons of hype. Mach 8 definitely doesn't coexist well with sea-level flight, and the US hypersonic programs I'm familiar with are rocket-boosted gliders, not cruise missiles, so they have even more incentive to stay at altitude.
@Doctorpat: I think my favorite conspiracy theory in the area is that the Japanese had their own atomic bomb which they detonated shortly before Nagasaki.
@bean:I am always amused at the moral certitude which a large chunk of that debates carries in to their arguments about actions carried about almost 80 years ago. Also how often the word meaning of the word "surrender" is stretched to meet the needs of the word.
Actually naval-y related: I listened to Hornfischer's The Fleet at Flood Tide, which had some discussion at the end about the Japanese decision to surrender which was pretty good.
Somewhat related: are there any good books (and I strongly suspect it's a question of multiple books) out there that cover the history of peace proposals and discussions on all sides of WW2? Also, I know Shirer is generally considered the best book about the Fall of Germany (bonus: my local library has an audiobook version), and I think a good one has been recommended on here about the Fall of Japan, but does anyone have any recommendations?
Richard Frank's Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire is the source I'd recommend for the military and diplomatic processes leading up to the atomic bombing and surrender of Japan, in case that somehow wasn't the one previously suggested to you.
On the subject of watching Victory at Sea, I'd be down, but I've already seen most of the (and have them on DVD). There is an app that lets you join together and watch Youtube videos as a group. I can see if I can dig up the information.
uh, sorry for my repetition
I'd second the recommendation for Downfall (assuming it's not Philistine seconding me). It's a splendid book, and Franks is a first-class historian. Don't know of anything better on Japan. As for Italy, no clue at all.
The guys behind the Military Aviation History and Military History Visualized channels on YouTube are publishing a new book on the Ju 87 based on new translations of original Luftwaffe documents. It seems like the sort of thing some people here might enjoy. For anyone interested, https://www.stukabook.com should take you to it; or you can search it up on indiegogo.
Thanks @Directrix Gazer and @Bean. I thought there had to be quite a bit of exaggeration in the claims of high-Mach and low altitude--especially over any distance.
I'll also jump in with a recommendation of Franks' Downfall. His scholarship is indeed first-rate. This one is well worth the time.
I typed the link incorrectly earlier, it should just be http://stukabook.com - searching for it at the crowdfunding site still works fine, though.
From Kit's link, can you really call a drone "Kamikaze"? I guess it's a flying object ramming into a ship, but then again so's a missile.
I find the lack of accuracy about missiles and drones to be extremely aggravating. On one hand, yeah, a kamikaze drone is just a missile, and calling it a kamikaze drone seems to obscure the fact that the Iranians shooting missiles at merchies isn't anything new. On the other, there's a significant difference in threat profile between a kamikaze drone and a real ASM, and for a lot of purposes, it can be very important to distinguish between the two.
The term Kamikaze implies a suicide mission to me. I guess the drone "" suicides "" by running into a ship, but on the other hand, it's not a person. I guess that's just me, though, because the term appears to be used a lot.
To my mind, "kamikaze" suggests a recoverable aircraft, being used as a missile if the situation warrants it. Fits a drone, since it's designed to be recoverable but can be directed to ram things. Whereas a "real" missile, once launched, is spent no matter what else happens.
Sounds like we need a Kamikaze Alignment Chart.
Vehicle Purist- must be a fixed-wing airplane Vehicle Neutral- must be airborne Vehicle Rebel- any vehicle Sacrifice Purist- pilot must intentionally kill themselves Sacrifice Neutral- reusable vehicle must intentionally be destroyed Sacrifice Rebel- vehicle must be destroyed
WWII kamikaze Iranian drone V1 Holdo maneuver Quadcopter with IED Missile Suicide bomber The African Queen Torpedo
Neal:
I prefer Zirconium Diboride myself.
Still, as weapons: hypersonic means no stealth is possible and you can't put a seeker on it.
@Anonymous That might work, but I assume that is only if a Dilithium Crystal structure is not available? (A tip of the hat to the original Star Trek)
Good point about not having a seeker/tracker. In this world of big claims from some quarters regarding such weapons, how do they claim to guide them?
I don't think hypersonics mean no seeker at all. It does mean that your seeker options are sharply limited (I suspect to radar, as IR and visual are both blocked by the plasma from the missile's passage).
I've always been amused at how often a lot of the defense press (and press in general) throws around the word "drone" in discussing how scary these new things can be, but then describe them in ways indistinguishable from, say, the P-15 Termit/STYX.
It's even more fun when you can go the other way and describe existing things in terms of the new scariness. "Why would your autonomous killer robots change everything? They're not even new. No, they're really not new. We've had them at sea since the 1850s."
@Bean
I've long been fond of pointing out how many of the proposed "no killer robots!" rules and treaties would outlaw Mk.48s... or FIDO for that matter.
@hnau: that was beautiful. Thank you.
bean:
The plasma is good at blocking radio waves so no radar (did you really forget about comms blackouts on reentry?).
Though it only blocks radio waves in one direction so you could use command guidance from satellites, assuming you have a platform that can keep track of the target.
Directrix Gazer:
I first saw that idea (but with a different weapon as example) in a book on AI (aimed at the public) I read more than two decades ago.
But our autonomous killer robots aren't very smart and have to have a human in the loop somewhere while the expectation is that eventually the robots will make the decisions about whether to shoot or not shoot and will not be as rigid as a Phalanx or Goalkeeper.
I did not. Plasma is complicated, but IIRC there are some gaps in the RF blocking, or some other way around it. I don't know the details, but I've seen enough hypersonic guided missiles to be pretty sure there's something that can be done.
Short of AGI, there will always be a human in the loop at some point. Systems like you describe have been becoming increasingly common at sea for decades. Aegis can, in the right mode, detect, track and engage a target entirely automatically, with the human operator primarily there to veto if needed. I don't see any bright lines between where we are now and whatever the latest fears are.
A plasma transmits electromagnetic waves with a frequency above the plasma frequency which is proportional to the square root of the density of free electrons which increases with temperature. This is why HF radio is reflected by the ionosphere and VHF and higher frequency penetrates it. Unfortunately I have no idea what the numbers would be like for a hypersonic missile and where the plasma frequency would be with respect to the frequencies of radar seekers.
bean:
For re-entering spacecraft the way around it is to use satcom, I wouldn't be surprised if non-inertial guided hypersonic weapons were command guided.
I have looked into this in the past, and came away pretty convinced you could do proper guidance, but I don't remember how right now. I'm pretty sure satcom-inertial isn't the answer, because ships move, and trying to build a kill chain where a satellite sees the target and then updates the missile while the missile is doing Mach 6 seems unlikely. Not to mention you have to be very careful to time your missile when the right satellite is overhead.
Stick a sensor package on a craft (some kind of glider?) that deploys from the hypersonic vehicle and slows down to a more sensible velocity? Obviously you have to hope that the guidance drone gets deployed somewhere that it can see the target.
Might work better with salvoes, so the first guidance drone to spot the target can send the location to all the missiles.
Kind of defeats the purpose of being hypersonic if it has to slow down to get a target lock.
Is the plasma sheath equally powerful on all sides? Read somewhere that the Shuttle could talk via satellites during reentry, through a hole in the plasma behind it.
You guys are trying to poke me on this until I give up and do a bunch of research, aren't you? Well, it won't work. Probably.
@AlexT
You could totally communicate with satellites during reentry. Same could be done here, but it makes seekers kind of difficult.
To change the subject to something humorous: naval combat kind of resembles a stereotypical RPG.
It has character classes (battleship/gun cruiser = fighter, submarine = rogue, missile cruiser/destroyer = blaster mage, carrier = petmaster mage) that travel in a party (battle group), traps (mines), illusions (ECM) and healing (damage control).
However, I'm not sure if this is more resemblance than other forms of real-world combat. The creators of D&D did also work on a naval wargame, but it was an age of sail one, which doesn't have most of the above.
A bit of research turns up the Air Force saying that this won't be a problem. According to them, the plasma generation isn't too bad for most hypersonic weapons, because they're not dumping tons of energy into the atmosphere like a reentering spacecraft. This makes sense to me, and the alternative is digging through hypersonic aerodynamics textbooks, so I'll go with it.
Thinking about hypersonics, and how it's likely the target will be showered in high-velocity debris even if it manages a short-range intercept:
How hard/awkward would it be to embed an AESA into the surface of a plate of armor? To kill the radar, you'd have to shred a significant percentage of the armor plate.
This would prevent a modern battleship (ie armored enough to resist things it can't shoot down) from being mission-killed/blinded by missile debris or light hits.
I realize ships like their radar high and their armor low, so this might be more useful for point defense targeting radars. Which keep the ship alive, so.. probably worth it?
AlexT:
The problem is that metal will block the radio waves so the radar modules would have to be placed on the surface where it'll be knocked out once something hits (and probably easy to mission kill with HE ammo).
If you have some kind of ceramic or polymer armor then maybe you could put radar equipment behind it, assuming you can find such materials that can take a shell.
Probably much easier to have your antennae consisting of dozens to hundreds of tiny independent units that have their inputs and outputs combined electronically in the computers. The computers are deep behind armour. That way you can lose some big chunk of the independent units and your radar capability just slowly degrades with each lost subunit. To totally get the radars offline the enemy need to systematically destroy every square metre of the relevant surface.
And yes, I know the phased array systems already have the combined subunit structure. But I have no idea how well this is set up to keep operating as random subunits stop working.
I think the problem with lots of independent units is that each one wobbles, shakes and twists independently with the various bits of ship where they're mounted, and also depending on how and how well they're attached. Might make it hard to process the readings, when you don't know where each sensor is.
I'm thinking more in terms of building the antenna array right into the upper layer of the armor, at the factory, when the plate is made, so the two form a solid piece. No idea if that's doable.
The kind of ship I'm thinking about has failed if an enemy got in shell range. Supersonic shrapnel, at the most.
I don't think you could really embed the radar into the armor. You'll probably cook the modules before you can actually pull that off. I think the solution is to distribute the modules along the ship. I don't know what kind of rigidity you need between the modules, but at worst you have a bunch of small arrays each of which forms its own beams, and which are coordinated by the computer to work together. I suspect that there's some ability to compensate for disabled modules, but no idea what the limits of that capability are.
I was about to make the case, by analogy with the Mk41, for HIMARS/MLRS as launchers for surface to air missiles, when I read that HIMARS had already been tested as the launcher for SLAMRAAM (which makes sense, an AMRAAM is about the size of a M26 artillery rocket). The flexibility of the Mk41 VLS is really valuable for warships, and while there wouldn't be quite as big a gain for land forces (you can alter the vehicles in a battalion more easily than the weapons of a warship) I think that there could be worthwhile logistic advantages (especially for smaller militaries than the US Army) to a common rocket/missile launching vehicle along those lines.
Anyone interested in a diplomacy game? See this thread on DSL (datasecretslox)
https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,4252.0.html
We need two more for a quorum.
So in non-naval news, uh, how about that Afghanistan thing?
HOW ABOUT IT GUYS? WHAT IF I HIT THE POST BUTTONS A FEW MORE TIMES?
Blackshoe:
US pulls out and the Taliban take over isn't really a surprise.
Blackshoe:
Don't yell.
I rather spoiled his joke by deleting three of the four repeats he inadvertently posted. With that context, it was actually rather funny.
@Alexander
I don't think the common VLS would buy nearly as much on land as it does at sea. The big difference between a HIMARS battery and a SLAMRAAM battery isn't the launch vehicles. It's everything else. A HIMARS battery isn't going to have the right radars to use SLAMRAAM, and while a SLAMRAAM battery might be able to fire conventional rockets, they won't be trained for it, and they probably won't have the rockets. And if the roles are going to be split like that, then you have to weigh the benefits of commonality against the drawbacks, such as the fact that you can fit 4-5 SLAMRAAM on a HMMWV instead of 6 on a HIMARS that weighs four times as much.
Are artillery rockets much heavier than comparably sized SAMs? Or do HIMARS have more armour? The missiles on HMMWVs are exposed, which is often the case with SAMs. Perhaps the seekers need to be unmasked? There must be some reason that HIMARS is preferred over sticking the rockets on the back of a HMMWV. I suppose it could also be for ease of reloading?
Regarding radar, how much difference is there between counter battery and air defence radars? To a civilian, seeing a group of trucks/tracks, one with a radar, the others with rockets, it's not immediately obvious whether they are artillery or SAMs. I'd be interested in the various distinctions that their different roles entail.
@Blackshoe It is like the Rape of Saigon all over again.
@Blackshoe
There is almost too much to try to digest at one time isn't there?
I certainly leave any political discussions to others, but I have been continually nagged by one particular aspect. A friend of mine from the Army War College (now retired) told me a few months ago that nearly two dozen general officers pinned on a 4th star in order to assume command in the Af-Pak theater. I haven't fact checked that yet, but we know the routine well. They roll in at the change of command ceremony, accept the guide-on, the band plays, and then they deliver their "vision" statement.
Yet I have to ask if these very models of modern generals had anyone on the staff to say that the Afghanistan forces were not capable? Any Afghani male knows how to fight so that was not the issue, but rather one of corruption, if our idea of a national army nd unity could be overlaid there, etc.
In other words, did the military leadership there ever speak frankly? In my most humble opinion, along with the course work at the senior service schools and Kennedy School of Government, the GOs should be required to take a course in learning the word "No." It isn't that hard to pronounce and with practice can be quite useful.
Just one aspect of many obviously and perhaps but a minor one, but as I sit and read of the incredulity in some quarters as to how fast the Taliban regained control I hedge the belief that most any O-3 or O-4 on the ground could have seen that coming.
Really feel bad for those who aided us and now face almost certain wrath.
Having spent time at a five-sided office building in NOVA I would, early on, hear talk of having a presence in Iraq and Afghanistan so as to check Iran...seriously. Head meet concrete wall.
@Alexander
A MLRS rocket is twice the weight of an AMRAAM, and HIMARS is designed to shoot unguided rockets, which means you probably need a pretty rigid platform, more than you can fit on a HMMWV.
Quite a bit. Radars tend to be fairly specialized, although less so today than 30 years ago. They're looking for different things at different ranges, which means different beam setups and such.
Okay, makes sense. If they are carrying around 3 times the weight of rocket, and need a sturdy launch platform, then weighing 4 times as much sounds about right. Of course all Mk41 missiles are guided, so that is another reason they are more practical than a truck based equivalent.
ike:
Much worse, the North Vietnamese had a strong pragmatic streak while the Taliban take their religion seriously (while also having an interpretation that isn't very compatible with basic human rights).
Neal:
Most of the enlisted probably saw it coming, they and the junior officers were the ones who got to see Afghan forces running away from fights (fights the Taliban lost).
@anonymous
Isn't 'Cuius regio, eius religio' one of the oldest principles in international law?
Regarding bloodbath ratios, don't forget the Vietnamese had a substantial Catholic population for the VC to run up their numbers with.
Couldn't HIMARS vs HMMWV be as simple as "we've deprecated the HMMWV and don't have enough JLTVs to go around yet?"
Also, will either of them be carrying targeting sensors that are more than the ones on the missiles and the Mk.1 eyeball? If you need a radar truck anyway, why not reduce the number of different chassis?
Remember, this is the army whose MOS 91F is described as "As a Small Arms/Artillery Repairer, you’ll perform maintenance and repairs and keep a wide array of weapons, from small arms to field artillery and large ballistic missiles operating properly."
That sounds about the same job description as a navy Gunner's Mate, though I don't know how much either of them specialize in practice.
ike:
Does using a dead language make something old?
ike:
There are still Catholics in Vietnam and they mostly practice their religion openly.
I should also note that much of the opposition to Christianity and particularly Catholicism was more a reaction to oppression of non-Christians (mostly Buddhists) than anything else.
Gentlemen, it appears someone is more obsessed with minutiae than us.
please find below a very long treatise on "technicals" based on LandCruiser frames.
https://tanks-encyclopedia.com/type-1-technical/
I make no judgement on the accuracy of the content, but there's a lot to digest. (and some cool pictures in the "what were they thinking" genre)
Cuius regio does date back almost 500 years, to even before Westphalia, but it's a very clear violation of a lot of various human rights law. So I don't think it really applies any more, although the ability and willingness of the international community to enforce the current law is doubtful in this case.
The VC had been dead for years by the time the Republic of Vietnam fell.
Diem was a Catholic, and the Catholics tended to be heavily aligned with the Southern government. The North's Catholics pretty much all left for the South in the 50s, after all. Remember that Communist countries are officially atheist, and most took that seriously, at least that early.
Regarding a truck based Mk41, apparently there is a requirement for just such a thing, as part of the army's 'mid range capability'. This means being able to cope with Standard and Tomahawk, but that would presumably allow quad packing ESSM. No reason to assume that it would also be suitable for shorter range artillery rockets, however, and presumably less mobile than a HMMWV or HIMARS.