i doubt that unless the ship is standing still even then its not possible unless the missile is ejected like 40 or 50 meters horizontally which is never the case.

how did you come up with 40 or 50m?

looking at this picture, the distance between the missile hatches and the side of the ship is only a handful of metres.

even if the cold launch doesnt have quite enough power to send the missile all the way over the side, the missile would at worst only strike a glancing blow on the side railing of the ship. might need a new paintjob, but its not likely to cause much damage.

in a cold launch, the missile is ejected out of its container, usually by means of compressed gass iirc, before the rocket engine kicks in while the missile is in flight.

a hot launch is when the missile propels itself out of the container usings its own rocket engine.

the advanatge of using the cold launch method is mostly limited to naval applications. this is because with a cold launch, the warship does not need the complexted venting that a hot launch missile would require.

the downside appears to be a limit on the number of missiles that can be fitted into a given space. all russian and chinese cold launched naval missiles use a circular design cell, which takes up more space per missile compaired to the square cell based design of american hot launch missiles batteries.

other minor advantages for the cold launch missile might include:
– slightly longer range as the missile does not use as much internal fuel to get off the ground.

– better reaction time, re tor’s missile nose pointing ability.

disadvanatges may include:
– limits to missile size on account of the pressure the missile container can withstand.

– missile may face problems when launching in very windy conditions.

as for which one is superior, well i dont think there is a clear cut answer, both have their own advanatges and disadvantages and its ultimately a decision based on the situations one is faced with.

so gun based ciws must be a lot less effectiv than you belief, because even with focus on positives there are a lot of articels in credible literature describing the limits and disadvantages of gun based ciws. and if there are no such articles about problems of systems like ram, those problems must be a lot smaller.

there are several possible reasons for this.

the most obvious would the the amount of time the phalanx has been in service. information tends to leak out over time no matter how well one tries to supress it.

another would be the fairly consistant and easily calculable performance of the gun by its nature. you can calculate hw fast the round would travel, how far it would go, what its accuracy would be etc, and with that information, it would be easy to find the limits of the weapons system.

ram on the other hand has its not important perfromance chateristics conceled. its hard to calculate the probable effectiveness of something when you dont know much about it.

my sense says me that your scenario has two errors. first the ram get continously information about the target, so it can react in near realtime. if the ashm starts turning the ram starts correcting the course, so there is no big lag the course correction.

surely u understand that you cant just put the crosshairs spot on on a target 10k away, pull the trigger and expect the round to hit it. its the same principle with a missile. you need to plot a course that will intercept that of your targets in order to hit it, that means aiming in front of the incoming AShM. if the AShM is doing turns, the ram will need to make even bigger turns.

and secondly there is (imho) no need for ram aiming a lot ahead of the ashm because ram is designed to be used on targets coming more or less towards the launcher (the ashm wants to hit the launcher or maybe a ship nearby) ram was original not designed to hit a target in a flightby and even today such a scenario would be very rar.

so…the ram is just going to hover until the AShM makes its final ew turns and points directly at the ship?

the missile’s ultimate goal is the ship, but if its doing evasive manovers, the simple electronics in the ram will not be able to ‘guess’ what route it will most likely take (and even if the ram can make a guess, we’d still never allow it to follow its ‘gut’). this means that the ram must follow the movements of the AShM all the way and make course corrections accordingly.

to counter this ram block 1 was upgraded with a wide field of view ir seeker. with this seeker they also improved the ability to hit targets in flightby situations.

wider seekers will only give you slightly better field of view, but there will always still be blindspots. the best, and probably only solution is for the missile to recieve course correction data from the ship.

afaik the aim-9l (the first sidewinder which could be fired from all directions to a target) shows good results in head on situations.
“The ability to point the aircraft’s nose at an opponent and quickly fire a missile became far more important than the ability to follow through multiple turning maneuvers to acquire a tail aspect gun/heatseeker firing position. While a tail aspect position did improve the AIM-9L kill probability by reducing the target’s evasive maneuver options, the AIM-9L’s all aspect performance was still superb, as learned the hard way by the Argentine and Syrian air forces in 1982.”
and the aim-9l is nearly 30 years old.

problems with using that example is that IR AAMs are almost only used in extreme close range, where there is little reaction time for pilots to try to evade. also, the AAMs are launched from fast moving jets, which means that the relative speeds between the missile and its target are huge, this further reduces reaction time. all this means that the missile is aiming for a relatively unmanovering target at very close range with little course correction needed for the missile to hit.

also, tactics and suprise would have also clouded the outcome. the argintine pilots were not armed for AA combat and were also instructed to aviod fighting the british harriers. also, the Aim9L was very new, and many argintine pilots were probably expecting the british to try and get on their tail and so were completely taken off guard by the frontal/sideways shots.

vietnam is a bit old to be used as an example. and without values it is not clear how many engagements were done head on in the past 10 or 20 years. if you can only shot at targets which passed your position it may be a waste of money because they could already fired their weapons on you. (and there migh be other reasons for some of the tail kills, the reaction time for example. if a target passes a stinger position with high speed and if the stinger team is not warned (by radar for example) they might be to late for a head on shot and if the target dosen’t shot at them (and kill them), they can choose between doing nothing or doing a tail shot. (only one suggestion))

you were the one who meantioned SAMs in the first place, i never thought they were a very good approaximation. BVRAAMs are the best case study for head on engagments, i think you will agree. but the hit rate for them have not been very impressive.

so in fact there are supersonic propelled drones and no supersonic towed drones and this is an advantage of? the propelled drones maybe? 😉

i didnt know the US had supersonic drones. thats why they had to go buy russian stuff.

but you will need to use a ship to proof it. but testing the ciws is a bit more tricky than testing the sm-2 for example because of the limited range. of course you have been sure that the ashm would not hit the ship (by the flight path, the flight level, selfdestruction whatever)

well thats just the same in principle as a fly-over on land. you only do that as a hoop jumping excerise for the top brass to try and impress. by the time the gun is placed on ships to shoot down stuff, all the important things should have been sorted long ago. its more a presentation then an actual R&D requirement.

of course they make sure that the ashm will not hit the ship directly. by using a remote ship you can make tests in lower range than with manned ships because risking some damage by fragments won’t risk lives. not all of the tests have to be done this way but doing this sometimes is a good test case.

i think the point of these ‘tests’ is so that they can say ‘ohh, look, we can shoot the missiles down waaaay over there. you’d not even see the splash!’ and not consternate the admirals by having bits of falling drone parts setting an expansive test ship alight. 😉

you are right, both kills were achieved by phalanx 😉
but to be fair (afaik) both were human faults. if they want to shot at the drone the plane has to pass the ship first. normaly they wait until the plane is in a safe area before enabling phalanx but in this case they let the phalanx track the plane and even engaging it. they were in 1994 (and/or) 1996 (not sure) but in one case the aircrew managed to eject themself safely.

interesting to know. thanks.

i’m sorry but even at simple flight maneuvers like a pop up you can only correct your aming on the base of the current flight vector of the ashm. if this vector changes continously a gun is in trouble until flight-physic limits the changing of the vector to the spread diameter of the gun in relation to the engagment range. of course if the ashm only does low g-moves over a longer time without changing the vector the hit area can be predicted and a gun will hit.

im not suggesting that the gun will be able to hit the AShM no matter what moves it makes. the point i was making is that for something the size of most modern AShMs, making tight instantanious turns is not all that easy. this means that there will likely be quite a large turning arc, and while in an arc, the flight trajectory of an AShM is fairly fixed due to limitations of the missiles (areodynamic limites of the missile and the need to keep the seeker facing the target to maintain lock-on), so the gun has a good chance of intercepting the missile.

in fact sources quoted “evasive manoeuvres of 10-15g” for sunburn (decreasing speed of course) and “3d manoeuvres” up to 8g for rbs-15 in terminal phase. and the different between a gun and a sam is that the sam can change it’s flight vector in flight to. a maneuvring ashm would be harder to hit than a ashm flighing straight forward but a sam has a lot better chance to do it.

from what i have heard, that is just a serious of ‘s’ shaped turns. fairly standard flight pattern with fairly long turning arcs.

if anything, sudden, high-gee turns will affect missiles like ram more. sure the ram can turn in flight, but its aiming for a head-on hit. this means that it will be following the movements of the missile and ploting a flight path to put it a fair distance in front of where the missile actually is at that moment (or else you’d risk it overshooting and having to tail chase – ie garry’s two hit joke). this means that the ram will have to make very large course corrections for a standard ‘s’ pattern manover. this greatly increases the chances of overshooting, and that is assuing that the ram can keep the AShM in its seeker’s field of view during all this (the closer you get, the smaller the field of view gets).

i don’t know about a supersonic towed drone and it’s hard to belive that a drone at the end of a 8-12km long line can do high-g evasive manovers (it’s also hard to belive that the altitude is as low as from real ashm, it’s not even clear if they use them in head on flight paths).

i did say ‘theoretically’. 😉

i think it won’t be very realistic to set up a test where the target is recovered. if they uses real ram’s with warheads (which i suppose if they speak about “production rounds”) there won’t be much to recover.

remember that the example you gave was for the testing for the phalanx gun, not missile. different tests call for different tools.

(imho) there is no more realistic scenario than using ashm or ashm like drones heading to the defender. there is only one problem (besides costs) with this scenario, the defender is in danger if the ashm is hit to close to the defenders position (afaik there were some casualties showing the problem of guns destroying targets at a safe distance). so they must use a rarely remote controlled ship for the tests or they set up the defender on a coast or they doesn’t aim at the ship which would be more or less a flightby scenario.

i dont think i ever heard of tests whereby anyone has been firing live missiles at a CIWS and hoping that it’ll stop them all. bascially you’d set up the CIWS on a remote part of the coast and programme a missile or drone to fly over its position to simulate an attack. if the drone is real fansy, they might even be able to programme it to fly low and also do some sudden turns and stuff at a certain point of the route (ie where your CIWS is) to simulate the evasive action of hostile missiles.

which stil is below 500m

got any sources that says that phalanx’s optimum engagment range is below 500m?

if the ashm moves randomly the increasing accuracy is only caused by the decreasing engagment range.

no matter how ‘randomly’ you programme a missile to move, it still have to follow the laws of physics and is restricted by areodynamics. the sea-ram might have better flight charateristics, but it still has limits as to how fast it can turn. a turrent also has limitations in the speed it can turn, but the speeds that mount of the phalanx can manage is more the enough to beat any missile’s turn rate.

maybe because they only have to maneuver within the effectiv range of gun based ciws? this fact will make it more easy for ram to hit the ashm before it comes to close to the ship.

fair point, but then they can always upload a new programme.

of course not, ask the pilots which where shot done by seawolfs.

A4s are a hell of alot easier to shoot down then exocetes. especially considering the fact that many of the A4s shot down had actually finished their attack run and was turning to head for home. for a AShM, that would be too late.

also, iirc, seawolf was radar guided. so apart from the fact that both are missiles and have the word ‘sea’ in their names, what relevency does seawolf’s performance have on that of sea-ram?

as i have sayed the max hit rate will be somewhere in the middle but why should a ram not hit a target at 10km? it will lose agility and speed after the burnout but there is stil a good chance for a hit. they have tested ram against exocet at the nominal range to verify the ir-all-the-way mode for the block1 missiles (for example).

so sea-ram has ‘a good chance’ to hit a missile at its upper engagement range, but phalanx is only effective below 500m?

and please have in mind that the values for ram are no calculated numbers out of some paper combats, the hit rate is not “projected”. they have fired a lot more than 100 production rounds against various targets, so these values are the best you can get in peacetime. it’s no question that the hit rate will decrease in combat, but this will effect every system.

they also had a 4 out of 5 hit rate for pheonix; amrram, sparrow and even seawolf all did pretty well in trails. phalanx has also been tested against ‘realistic’ threats. however, the reality is that weapons systems never ever outperform their test scores in real life useage. as such, the .95 hit rate should be taken with a pinch of salt as usual.

i have look around but there is little info on the projected number of targets the phalanx can be expected to engage, as it is being treated as classified information for obvious reasons. if you can find some realiable figures i would be very grateful.

imho that is not true, to do a continuous adjustment it would be the best to have a continuous measurment of the hit area which is only possible with a continuous firing. you have to remember that the closed-loop-control of a phalanx has a deadtime (the time, which the bullets need to reach point a) so you must wait for every burst to reach the hit area. if the first burst misssed you fire the second which maybe will also miss the target. with a continuous stream of bullets you can correct the position of the gun barrels earlier because you have a continuous update of your hit area. imho there is only one situation in which bursts will lead to the same results than continuous firing, if the ashm cruises on a straight line. in this case (and in a perfect world) the second burst will lead to a hit on the missile. but normally a continuous stream of bullets will lead to an earlier hit than bursts but maybe you will run out of shells before you hit, so bursts are a compromise between shell usage and response time.

you only need two points to make a straight line. we are talking about computers after all. a few short bursts can draw a line just as well as a continuous stream.

besides, you are talking like the phalanx can only aim by taking a pot-shot and then measuring the distance by which it missed to have another go. thats how humans used to do it…in WWII, but with radar targeting and computer adjustments, your really expect the phalanx to hit the missile with the first burst if the target is within optimum range (around 1km, and with the speed of the rounds also around 1km per second, the dead time isnt exactly huge for follow on shots).

the only factors that can really affect the aim are wind and the movements of the ship and missile.

wind will not have much time to affect the trajectory of the rounds, and also, the gun is firing bursts of 60~100 (which tends to spread like a shotgun round) so slight movements will not be all that important; the movements of the ship can have a serious affect on the accuracy of the gun, but that is only relevent to smaller ships and really bad weather conditions. but smaller ships will be unlikely to have phalanx or ram, and in typhoon conditions, you’d not really expect any missile to have a better time of things so its not all that important; if the incoming missile is making sharp turns, it’d make targeting really difficult, but that’ll probably affect the sea-ram more as a turret can turn faster then a missile.

if the missile dispends chaff and the phalanx fires on the chaff (only one or two bursts) there is no time for retargeting because in this time the ashm will move trough your last line of defence and hit the ship, game over.

it really depends on how fast the missile is traveling at, and in most cases, you’d expect the gun to have chance to at least have another shot.

maybe you misunderstood this. this is a question why all of the navies with “slow” subsonic ashm with limited range have not build in a decoy spreading jammer on their ashm if it’s that easy. of course a ciws should be prepared to counter all available weapons. and ram is prepared 😉

because there are only about four or five nations in the world that can even make the ‘slow’ AShMs, and the rest are just importing their weapons. the list of nations that can make jamming pods for fighters also consists of rought the same countries as before. this means that the vast majority of navies simply dont have the means to make, let alone improve on what they are using.

anyways, there is always the cost issue. if something is working fine as it is, there is no need to spend more money on something that will likely only just be overkill. the big fast russian supersonic AShMs have thus far been enough, if someone really wants that capacity, they can buy it, so there is no need to spend large amounts of money tweek around with existing stuff and risk it not working in the end.

i do not know about such a ashm but maybe someone could enlight me. and with a cruise missile you can’t attack a ship because you will need a seeker. if you want’s to know how many range such a seeker eats you should take a look on the old tasm tomahawk specs.

many cruise missiles actually do have seekers (remember those old nose cone vids of watching a building come at you?) as well as a loads of other navaigational aids like terrain following equipment, enercia navigation suits and sat-nav kits. the weight of those systems should more or less off-set the weight of a radar seeker.

maybe i missed the parts but wasn’t it you how sayed it would be to expensive to put expensive electronic in a seeker which is destroyed by every shot? but you would develop jammers smaller (and more expensive then the ones for aircrafts) and put them onto ashm? of course such a ashm maybe possible but there is no reason why a ram seeker can’t be improved to counter this threat.

so you expect a ram to cost the same as a club AShM? we are always talking about things in prospectives here. do you really want to shoot off a couple of million$ SAMs to counter a $500k AShM? but it sounds alot ‘sweeter’ shooting off a couple of million$ AShMs to sink a half billion$ cruiser doesnt it?

there is also the size issue. an AShM has a huge nose and body, so lots of room for a dish and electronics. not all that much space in the body of a ram for more stuff. this means that you’d likely need to have higher grade stuff in the ram compared to the AShM, which = higher cost.

also, note the jamming pods for fighters are extremely complext and carry a great deal of equipment, much of which would be redundent for a missile that doesnt have to have such a great survival rate. for one, you wouldnt need so many rounds of chaff and flares, which will cut on space; you’d also not need thread ID functions etc. a stripped down verson means just that – the bare minimum needed. besides, even if you do strap a fully functional unit into the missile, if it means you have a 400% higher probablity if hitting the target, its still economically viable as you wouldnt have to shoot so many missiles at the target.

maybe the current ram-versions will get problems with this type of ashm but systems like phalanx have problems facing current threats like supersonic ashm without jammers/decoys. i can’t follow your argument. guns are not the best for shoting down todays ashm but there is a theoretically chance that there will be threats in future where the gun is the best choice? ok lets talk about this threats if they exists and maybe i would choose the gun then.

again, i am repeating myself. i never said you should use the phalanx instead of the ram, i said you should use both (if anything, i was countering the argument of using ram instead of gun). i guess my argument is getting stuck because of the limitations of the phalanx system, but a gun+missile CIWS like kashtan would be alot better.

the jamming missile is just an example of why its not a good idea to rely soley on one TYPE of defence – because it only take one break through to best all your diffierent lays of defenses. whereas if you had something like the phalanx or kashtan, you’d at least have one system that has a decent chance of working properly.

only to give you a opposite example to your decoy spreading, activ jamming supersonic ashm and to show you the absurdity of a diskussion about future ashm which maybe will never exists. how about changing the warhead of a ashm? if the ashm releases a lot of super/hyersonic bullets/penetrators/fragments at maybe 500 or 1000m before the ship, the ship won’t be sunk but there will be significant damage to the superstructure, the sensors,.. ->mission kill. how can a gun counter a weapon which is invincible at the very last km? is there such a ashm? no! is it possible? maybe.

you are completely getting the wrong idea of why i make that example.

and another remark: of course everybody talks about the big russian supersonic ashm but at a objective view there are some disadvantages of these ashm. because of there size they could be replaced by subsonic ashm at a rate of 3 or 4 to 1 and they are detected easilier because of the bigger rcs, ir-signature and a higher flight level. and last but not least a lot of ships are to small for big ashm but some of these ships are fast and small. personally i won’t underrate the danger of a well timed saturation attack of subsonic ashm, programmed to a similare impact time. in such a scenario a 21 round ram launcher would also do better services than a phalanx.

and a gun+missile system like kashtan will best both.

you are getting the wrong end of the argument. im not saying phalanx is better the ram, im saying phalanx + ram will be better then either alone. in such a saturation attack, the gun+missile system could fire off its 4 or 8 missiles at 4 or 8 targets while engaging other targets in the mean time.

so in this case the ciws isn’t the first line of defence? and why should i assume that phalanx will get a ashm which stayed undetected before it enters phalanx gun range (not to talk about the shortest effectiv range of ram which is round about 500m, so within the phalanx range)?

there are no garentees in real life. if you had phalanx + ram, you would have a far better chance of servial that having either by themsevles.

it’s a bit unfair but seawolf which is combat proved in real world, is a missile system and the only combat action i can remember to phalanx was a engagement of decoys which were launched by a nearby friendly ship (and of course uss stark but there was no action for phalanx but i won’t count that as a phalanx fault).

and seawolf sucked. it was meant to be able to shoot down shells, but instead hostile bombers were overflying the british fleet and causing damage with free fall bombs!

it anything, the gun has infenately more real combat experience then any missile. with the gun, you have a consistant and dependable system, whereas the performance of every missile type is totally new on account of the different seekers being used.

sorry but i (still) can’t imagine a scenario where i run out of 21 ram’s (per launcher) and in which (for example) a phalanx+4 rams will do better service.
i don’t want to replace either essm or ram because both have advantages. maybe for you both are only missile systems with no redundency but in fact these are completely different systems (for example in terms of ship controlled semiactiv radar seeker vs. fire and forget rf/ir seeker). so if essm fails there is no good reason why ram will fail too.

and can you think of scenarios where you would likely run out of essm missiles? if not, just fire two essm for every target instead of one, with the second essm in place of the ram you would have fired anyways.

the four rams are saved for anything that definately gets past the two essm rounds, and the phalanx closes the last 1000m gap. can you think of many scenarios where this will not be enough?

of course but if i can get the ashm 10, 8, 4 or even 2km before it hits the ship and without any damage to the ship i will do this and a gun system can’t provide this range. ram on the other hand can be used as near as 500m, leaving only a small gap.

500m gives you a lot of time in terms of defences. in that time, i’d rather have a gun that has a good chance of at least detonating the hostile missile shooting away instead of putting on my life jacket and hoping the missile doesnt hit anywhere near me.

fas.org says about phalanx: “The gatling gun fires 20mm ammunition at either 3,000 or 4,500 rounds-per-minute with a burst length of continuous, 60, or 100 rounds.” so the bursts are not that small and the best results of a close loop control would be continuous adjustments and continuous firing but number of shells are limited so normally bursts are used.
and if there is enough room for engaging a ashm first with a ram and than with a gun you could also fire a ram wait for it to hit or miss and fire again.

continuous adjustment doesnt need continuous fire. if your bullets are hitting point A while the target is at point B, you dont improve the chances of hitting the target by spraying the space in between point A and B.

another very important charateristic of the gun is that its accuracy improves with decreases in distance, whereas for a missile, the reverse is ture, as the missile’s computer has less time to calculate the vectors and issue orders for the control surfaces. this means that if you wait till the first ram misses before you fire the second one, the chances of the second one hitting the target will be less then that of the first ram.

maybe you compare two different things, the ram uses a passiv rf and a ir seeker but no radar seeker. and i have only sayed that a bigger sensor won’t guaranty a sucess. if the radar which is “20 times bigger” than the seeker, is jammed, the ram might be home on jammer.
and the phalanx would have less time to aquire the right target than ram because the ashm would pass the last km very fast.

home on jam only works for radar seeks im afraid.

besides, the point is very simlpy. bigger sensor = better resolution, which gives you a better chance to tell the real target from the decoys.

the newer phalanx with IR and radar sensors are even better as you are using two sets of target data that you can cross reference to eleminate fakes even more efficiently. either way, bigger is better, there is just no denying that.

at the start flares and chaffs are in the same direction as the ashm and they will fall back behind the ashm very soon. a bad retargeting ability is even better then no one. if phalanx starts firing at the chaffs, thats it. (and because of the very low altitude of the ashm, spreading decoys isn’t that easy)

what are you talking about? as if the phalanx cant re-target after firing a burst. the phalanx can re-target, but a missile will have a far harder time doing so if it went after the wrong target first.

ot in this thread but how many navies around the world have supersonic ashm with 200km+ in service? 3? and how many have subsonic <200km? 50 or more? (btw which ashm has a range of “several thousand Kms”?)

so, instead of fousing on the threats that can actually hurt you, you would rather be able to more efficiently counter the threats you could already deal with quite comfortably? come on.

as for AShMs with thousand km ranges, well iirc, there was at least one old russian AShM with a range of 1,000km+ (cant remember the name, but its not likely to help even if i did as i read about it a chinese source, maybe someone else can help me out). but whether or not there is such an AShM in service is beside the point. note that i said ‘missiles’, there are cruise missiles that have ranges in the thousands of KM. that is the point i was trying to make – if you can make a missile with that range, cutting a significant percentage of the fuel away and putting a jamming pod in its place will still give you a missile with ranges on the hundreds of km, plenty for an AShM.

the defence have been improved (for example with ram) and there is a good chance to destroy a supersonic ashm with it but even the subsonic ashm didn’t have a jammer and decoy dispender? why?

er, because those missiles were designed decades ago, and in all the time since, their speed alone was more then enough to ensure a good chance of penetrating ship defences.

maybe there is also a difference between a aircraft of maybe 25tons with a pilot which is normally reusable and a ashm of 500kg or 1000kg without human intelligence and designed for single use? maybe using such a equipment 2m above sealevel controlled by a cheap computer isn’t that easy? maybe because countering such a ashm would be very easy (with sensorfusion of different sensors for example)? maybe because the integration is a problem (of course not into the russian 4000-5000kg ashm but into a harpoon sized missile, where the pod would weight the same as the warhead and without room for a second antenna for the jammer facing forward.

did you miss the parts of my post when i said things like ‘stripping down the jamming pod’; ‘modifications’; ‘re-designing a missile body to incorportate the jammer’ etc?

also, when did i say anything about having to stuff everything into a harpon sell? i though the perametre of ‘missiles with ranges between 200 to several thousand Kms and warheads in the hundreds of kilos’ would have ruled out things like harpoon.

if a missile the size of tomahawk can have ranges in the thousands of KM and still pack a massive warhead, i think its well within the relms of possibility to make a missile of similar size that has a jammer in it with a range of 200km+.

as for all the other points, well thats just development issues. it might not be easy or cheap to make such a missile, but it sure as hell is possible. and if defenses get good enough, then sooner or later someone will make something like it.

imho there is only a small range in which i would prefer a good gun based system: below 1000m. in this small window a hardkill is very important and even with a hardkill the ship might take damage from the fast ashm fragments. if i could get this with a lot of rams ok but if not i will put my money into the 10.000m to 1.000m (maybe 500m) area. waiting until the ashm gets in range of phalanx is a bad idea. so if 2 or 3 rams fail to get the ashm and if the distance drops to 1000m than it’s time for a gun but i would have enough rams to try as hard as i can to get the ashm before it reachs the 1000m.

are you getting confused about what we are arguing about here? :confused:

i said this repeatedly before – the job of the CIWS is not meant to be the first line of defence. its the last ditch effort to save your ship when all else fails.

with modern warships, you are trying to kill the AShM tens if not up to a hundred km out, you only resort to the CIWS when all your previous attempts at shooting the thing down with missiles have failed.

as i said before, if ram is so good, keep it. increase its range and use it to replace essm, but not the gun. the ram is just like a shorter ranged verson of the essm. using it in place of a gun creates redundency problems while taking away from the real close quart capacity.

for example, as you previously said, if there are essms en route to intercepting an incoming missile when the missile gets within ram range, you would shoot off a ram or two anyways. which i agree with. but the problem with that is that if you start doing that, you might run out of rams when you need them the most.

if you wait till the essms misses until you fire, well then the longer reach of the ram does count for all that much.

the gun is only really any use up to 1,500 ~2,000m max, and really effective below 1,000m. but thats exactly the hole that missiles like essm leave. having a pure missile last line of defense makes little sense, if all you are trying to do is push the engagement out, then why not add more essm cells and fire off two missiles to meet every threat in stead of one? that’ll surely greatly increase your intercept potential and will likely give you a hell of alot more missiles then your ram launcher.

the problem with trying to push the engagment envolop outwards by using the ram instead of the gun is that you start taking away you margin of error. as if an AShM manages to get under your gaurd without you noticing (which can easily happen in real life combat), your longer ranged weapons will likely not be as effective as the gun at closer range.

its all fine to say that shooting down the missile at 200m will still cause damage to the ship, but does that mean you should stop trying after it gets within 200m? after all, shooting down the missile 50m from the ship is still a hell of alot better then having the thing hit the ship square on. dont you think?

another part of the argument against ram is that if the opposition have come up with a way of defeating missile based defenses and have penetrated two or three lays of missiles already, do you really want your last line of defense to be yet another missile?