i know what you trying to say but look at this and think

sure missiles will aim further ahead when intercept faster object
however faster anti ship missiles change their directions slower due to smaller turn rate

You may not realise this, but what you put up is actually supporting my point. Also remember that a missile doesn’t want to change direction, they want to fool the defence. The end point is always the same, the ship.
The point is that the anti-missile system is a slave to the requirement of always trying to figure out where the missile is going to be.

The same is true for intercepting a supersonic missile. A big, fast, heavy missile is not going to make quick direction changes due to inertia and due to the relatively small size of its control surface actuators, at high speed and dynamic pressure, its not going to be pulling large control surface deflections. Its basically a fast flying truck.

The ship know’s the point where the missile is heading to (the ship, duh), so it can compute the parameters the inbound missile will need to fly within to hit. With that, the knowledge of its speed and it turn capabilities, performing an intercept is easier than hitting a target that is constantly dodging for computers with nanosecond reaction times and vector computational ability.

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– This diagram shows a scenario (roughly to scale) of a maneuvering inbound missile A at M2.2 with 15G turn capability. If my calculator’s are right this gives it roughly a 17km turn radius.
– The ship has an option of firing 3 interceptors B in quick succession in 3 different directions to cover all of missile A’s possible trajectories at that stage.
– Well before point C the ship’s systems know that the missile needs to pull a maximum G turn all the way to the ship to make a hit, so it can fire interceptors directly at the appropriate intercept points to meet missile A, no turning required.
– If head to head interception is required, then the ship can fire its interceptor in an appropriate direction so they intercept missile A head on. The missiles have no problem in turning inside the incoming missile A to line up a perfect head to head intercept as shown with D (Mach 3.5, 40G SM-2) and E (Mach 2, 60G RIM) showing the relative turn circles.

Personally I think a swarm attack comprising of dozens of $30,000 MALDs interspersed with 0.00001m^2, low IR emitting NSM, JSM or LRASM’s would be infinitely more scary. Consider the MR-800 radar. According to Janes, it has a detection range for sea skimming targets of 0.01m^2 of just 6nm. A stealth missile of 0.00001m^2 would be detected at around 1.1 miles. This gives the crew roughly 7 seconds warning of the threat. The top sail radars need to be pointed in the right direction in the first place (50/50 chance there’ll be a 3 second delay in detection) … so odds are high they’ll have just 4 seconds left to react. The defensive launchers wouldn’t even have time to move before the ship was hit.

Saw someone mention the advantage of AESA target detection speed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRkpFsXz9yk

The tiny (comparitively) APG-81 array, from the moment it is started is picking up 50% of the targets in its FOR within 1 second, 73% in 2 seconds, 87% in 5 and 100% in 9. How much quicker would a SPY-1 do it with lower frequency, less targets to track in the FOR allowing more time for volume search, a 25% smaller area to cover (90 degrees vs 120 for the APG-81) and an array roughly 30 times the size with 200 times the power output? Fractions of a second sound about right. With a 45nm range against sea skimming targets and the ability to classify a mach 2.2 sea-skimming object as an ASM within a few nanosecond pulse trains, pretty sure reaction time is not going to be a big issue.

BTW that video has some clues in it as to the range of the APG-81. Very similar/slightly better than the Irbis-E it seems.

AA finally, good post, now we are talking. This is along the lines of what I am trying to say, I think you’ll catch my drift. The opposite side to this is that the missile has figured out how exactly it will hit the ship. Unfortunately even if the ships computers have figured out where the incoming is likely to be based on current course and missile characteristics this is still a guess, educated but guess nonetheless. There is a number of ways the incoming may alter direction to get to the same point in 3D space (your excellent diagram is 2D, excluding a multitude of close equally valid trajectories the missile may have pre-chosen) without violating its kinematics. Even if the ships computers have software clever enough to figure all out the ship would need to realistically put up more than one projectiles to cover for these (if at all possible) which means that you again arrive at a finite number where saturation and therefore impact is extremely likely. We are far from 100 missiles here, I believe for a tico class that would be about 14-16 missiles to assure a hit even if the ships missiles achieve near perfect hit ratios, safe also to assume that not all ships have tico class capabilities hence safe to assume for other ships will be more vulnerable.

Just found here: :confused::confused:

http://dsjunshi.net/forum.php?mod=viewtree&tid=786616&extra=page%3D1

I knew they had like a couple for dissimilar air training. But that is different, I have no idea how it would end up in CG!!!!

is this a movie maybe?

Which is only proof of the US Navy’s knowledge that a missile tracker can be misdirected by a missile jinking. If you have ever seen a missile director operate during an engagement sequence (pretty sure theres a few clips on Youtube etc) you’ll see the antenna group visibly ‘twitching’. It was particularly noticeable in the mechanical-arm launcher days because, usually, the launcher train and elevation was slaved to the tracker so you’d see launcher and attached missile having an apparent fit for no sane reason. This process was caused by the tracker following the target. Its normal operation to cope with the “tracker overshoot” that Friedman details.

Now, of course, with electronically scanned tracker arrays and active radar PDMS systems that becomes more and more a legacy issue.

Oh, I don’t disagree with all you said, it simply backs up what I was trying to say. Supersonic, flies low, makes manoeuvres, trackers overshoot (and therefore projectiles may overshoot and miss too)

How effective measures & counter measures are at this stage is irrelevant. The original question was super or sub, and some pros were put forward as if they were exclusive to subsonics. Our last couple of exchanges prove they are not.

The only thing remaining is the larger RCS the big Russian missiles have (potentially larger IR signature too) offering a somewhat earlier warning to the ship. I believe another member posted on that issue, it is not the one that poked my interest when I was reading comments on this thread.

Falcon,

You’re shifting goalposts so quickly here it’s hard to keep up. We’ve gone from jinking in terminal phase at 10km to target, which is very definitely PDMS range, in your earlier post to, now, 100km from target in the area defence envelope.

Again we’ll bypass the obvious comment that if we are talking of deceptive manoeuvre at 100km it shows the value of the determination that the supersonic could effect surprise and pop up at 30km!.

You are talking now of a time on target attack. Missiles in salvo flying slightly longer course tracks for the first weapons launched…with the latter flying direct path so that all arrive at target coordinates at the same time on converging bearings. Sure but that’s not what was being discussed is it?.

We were discussing mid course exposure to defending sensors. I’d assure you that a ships warfare team is not going to fall out of air raid stations just because an inbound appears to be a few degrees off an intercept course…and we do have that point that watching it flying duplicitously off-bearing does mean that the ships warfare team have detected, tracked and engaged the supersonic a very long way away. Which has been my point all through.

Ok first of all, my apologies, I did not mean to be perceived as changing the goalposts. All I did was take the extreme case of the argument that defence systems can detect and engage at long ranges, to illustrate my point.

Second, I am not sure what you are trying to say, picking up the incoming doesn’t mean you can intercept as well. Subsonic missiles are equally susceptible to detection as supersonic ones. Detection isn’t necessarily linked to successful hit on the incoming. So tracking for a long time or not you still have to hit something to stop it.

institutions, technical libraries ?

Falcon

What has the SR71 got to do with this?. Whether or not that type was interceptable has no relationship to the problems created by deploying supersonic anti-ship missiles. The Blackbird, to the best of my knowledge, gave up directly overflying well protected targets many years before it was finally retired as inefficient. Instead it raced along a tangential course and imaged off sideways looking sensors. The antiship missile has no such luxury to select evasive courses…. generally being far more effective when flying directly at its target!.

If anything the SR71 proves the point that an air target wishing to use ludicrous speed is incapable of achieving strategic or, often, tactical surprise. This being my key point about the employment of such missiles. They don’t shorten the window for a defender to react because the defender sees them earlier. Just as, supposedly, the Soviets were able to assemble intricate traps of interceptors to engage Blackbirds so would a destroyers warfare team have chance to get air raid red condition set.

Three real warships have found themselves faced with a very short reaction time missile threat over past three decades or so. Each was hit by a subsonic missile. You don’t need big go-faster weapons to achieve the effect you detail.

Not true. Most anti ship missiles can fly various patterns to avoid interception, maximise damage on target and surprise to reduce reaction.