So lets say Taiwan is the target and they have bought 1,000 NSMs. The Chinese are in open hostilities with Taiwan and decide they want to turn international opinion against Taiwan to make their current action against them politically easier. They launch a Ka-31 and they wait for a passing Russian Sovremmeny class vessel and transmit a blast of energy from their Ka-31 from the vicinity of the Russian Sovremmeny. The Taiwanese detect the Ka-31 and launch a salvo of NSMs on the appropriate bearing. Lets say one or two get through and the Russian Sovremmeny is sunk in international waters… We know the NSM can distinguish between different types of vessels but can it read flags and determine nationality. In the gulf where a vessel type might be in use in three different navies simply firing on a bearing a missile that can recognise a class of ship is simply not good enough.

of course this may happen but as we have figured out there is no other way because in war you can not get close enough to identify the flag of a ship. but if a war gets hot nobody else than friend or foe will enter this area because everybody knows the risk to get shot in such an area. it’s like war on land. no professional soldier will shot at civilians if he knows that but a lot of civilian get shot because of mistakes. this is bad of course but it happens. so it may also happen to civil ships but the captains will know the risk.
of course most of this depends on situation like which country is fighting in the war and how hot this war is. if a high tech navy foughts a third class navy the high tech navy will gather more information on the target than the third class navy. if you are hopeless outgunned you will shot at anything as long as it is possible to hit an enemy too.

Every launch was probably aimed at the Hermes… if it had been aimed at Hermes it probably would have fared much better than the AC did.

if an carrier has been hit early in the war, maybe gb would have lost it. (maybe not)

You need a pattern of flares of different intensities to create a shape that might represent an aircraft from a certain angle. It is the same with these ship decoys. A trainable mount might be good for firing distraction rockets away from the ship, but to hide it fixed launchers make more sense.

the number of decoy rounds needed depends on the size of the decoys. whereas the small pk16 rounds are carrying less than 2kg payload other bigger rounds carrying more than 10kg. imho screening the ship is only the last way out because it does not only hide the ship but also the attacker. the ship will have big trouble to track the attacker through this screen. i do not know if the western ships with srboc have the ability to completely hide the ship, i have never seen it.

The Launcher is remotely controlled from the control console. Elevation angles are fixed from 0 to 60 degrees in 10 degree intervals. Traverse angles are also fixed from 10 degrees to 60 degrees.

Seems to me they cover every possible angle and would be fired depending upon incoming missile info.

maybe they are refering to different possible assambly options on the ships. it seems that the launcher itself consists of 16 parallel launching tubes all at the same angle ( http://www.milparade.com/catalog/pdf/548.pdf ).

Field date would be in the 2011-2014 timeframe (though God knows why it should take EIGHT YEARS to figure out how to put an AIM-120 seeker on it)

simple answer: money! if the navy would push the program with more money it should be done in maybe 2 years but it is a less important programm and so nobody really needs it in two years (or at least nobody is willing to pay so much money in such a short period of time for it to get it asap).