Not a picture of me and a plane, but something better, my fiancée. Taken in June this year.

😀

The first pic, Aviatik? Halberstadt?

The second last pic is the Mitsubishi Ki-51.

What does scare me in fact, is the fact that Kursk was indeed laden with 24 Granit missiles… I expected their ships never to be laden with their full armament, like Pyotr Velikiy (which most of the time only carries a maximum of 16 SA-N-6 missiles instead of the full 92 of them). The fact that Kursk was fully laden, might mean all of them are armed fully in that way.

The fact that Kursk was indeed fully loaded throws into immediate doubt any speculation that other capital ships on exercise for the Russian Navy might not be fully loaded. And I think that would include the Pyotr Velikiy.

What number of naval TU22M operational?

At least two regiments of Tu-22M3 attached to the AV-MF as far as I know.

There is no DF-41 designation now, as far as I have discovered. Likely to be a DF-31A, which is apprently the modified longer range version of the standard DF-31.

Funny how little credit some give the Russians.

Oh for crying out loud Garry, I am simply commenting on the scenario that dionis presented; a massed attack with conventional air launched AS-4 and AS-6 on a USN carrier group. Once you start talking nukes, its a completey different ball game! I don’t under estimate what the Russians can do, just that in that particular scenario, the US has trained for years to deal with it.

oh! and i also saw an article somewhere that was complaining about how even the SS-N-22 Sunburn (Mach 2-2.5) would be too fast for the AEGIS system? It seems that while the ranges are nice and dandy, the ship wouldn’t be able to calculate a good firing solution for the missiles as they would only have 2.5 seconds to do so. (vs like 25 seconds for something subsonic like a Harpoon), which means very few of the Mach 2 missiles would be stopped.

At 2.5 seconds flight time to target, a Mach 2 missile would already by within 2km of the target, and so yes not much would be able to handle it then, but the most of the inbound missiles would be dealt with well outside that range. That is the role of AEGIS and the Standard SM-2 missile for fleet defence. For example, at a range 70km to the Mach 2 missile, AEGIS would have nearly 2 min to reach a firing solution, and ripple fire SM-2s to intercept it, or them. Even against a Mach 4.5 missile detected at 70km, AEGIS will still have nearly a minute to compute a solution and send missiles off to intercept it, or again them.

Given very high closure rates, the intercepts would occur much closer to the ship, but they would occur. But, like I said, even this system could be overwhelmed. No system is perfect. These AEGIS/SM-2 vs. supersonic anti-ship missile arguments have been done to death. Enough already.

if enough are fired? They missiles are Mach 4+ … Phalanx becomes worthless @ Mach 1.5

Fire a lot, and the fleet is gonna sleep with the fishes.

Ah, you are forgetting AEGIS and SM-2, as well as ESSM in time. The AEGIS system was designed to deal with a saturation attack, and SM-2s can be ripple fired off in large numbers to ranges out to 40km+ against supersonic targets. Admitedly, it would not take too many hits from large supersonic missiles to mission kill a 9,000-ton destroyer, or worse, sink it. Phalanx useless against the remaining missiles that penetrate the outer defence layer? Well yes, but that is my point. Fire enough AS-6/AS-4 to get some past the SM-2s fired against them, and some will probably get through and hit targets.