What happened to the Turkish order for these systems?I read that they were to buy four of them but have heard nothing since! And also Italy were also looking at them, what are they going for?

IMHO, this system represents the best value for money in both operational costs (being supported by local airline carriers with a very high degree of cominality to their fleet) but also in long term costs as the 737 has been going now for over 30 years and is still going strong.

Here we go SAS Outeniqua

On closer inspection of one of the pics of Drak, I can see A-302 What ship is that? It looks similar in size and shape to Drak and I know that the SAN did have a second ship of that class but it was retired years ago due to lack of parts. Is this it???

I took the liberty to cut and resize the piece of the pic so that you could all see it as well.

Again if I might interject here…

It doesn’t matter how many missiles each ship carries, if you surround your target and loose off all those missiles in a saturation attack, some are bound to get in.

It all boils down to cold hard numbers, as the old saying goes, the more the merrier!

The man behind the Krapp

Here is a pic of “Professor” Carlo Kopp, didn’t know he was a lecturer at Monash, there goes my faith in that institute! Also I’ll include a link to his website, for those in need of a good laugh!!!

Carlo Kopp’s webite at the Monash University

Wow I thought there was to be no politics in this talk, oh well.

Getting back on track, the use of missiles to take out ships these days boils down to one of two things:

1. That the missiles you have are smart enough to not be fooled by any decoy system and provide a killing blow to the ship, wether that be by disabling it enough to then be boarded, or by taking it out altoghter, this is where the different designs come into play:
Russian Missiles Systems; Fast powerful and lots of explosive (shy of Nukes), designed to take a ship out of any troubling equasion, they are basically along the principle of point and shoot!
Western Missile Systems; Small, with just enough fire power to disable a ship for boarding later or to break a ships back. These systems, whilest slower than their Eastern counterparts, are much smarter and not as easily fooled by decoy systems. Some systems have microprocessors in them giving them a “thinking” ability, this means that if it’s programed to hit a ship and it sees two masses on it’s screen, the moving mass- rather than the brighter mass, or stationary mass- must logically be the ship and therefore it’s intended target. These systems are more human friendly, they allow time to get off the ship before it goes down and in the west with governments being ellected by civilian populations, the use of these is not as drastic and more acceptable than those of the East which if you get hit by one, you’d wake up in heaven!

2. That you have enough missiles to be able to press home any attack even after the opposition has expended all of their resources in defence. Basically this means a saturation attack. Has anyone here ever read Tom Clancey’s “Red Storm Rising”? in it is the best display of a saturation attack I have ever read about and follows along the line of standard Russian doctrines. You surround your enemy, fire off dummies and live shots and the target won’t know which are the real “Vampires” and which are fake. The target then wastes all his ammo on trying to knock down all these targets which are coming at him.

The Phalanx CIWS only has enough ammo in it for a maximum of 2 minutes fighting, now when you think about it, two minutes isn’t really a long time now is it? And the furthest away it can target is 10Km effectivly, how quick would a Sunburn missile chew up that distance? On a plus side, the Russians have that new system that incorperates both short range missiles as well as guns, the missiles I would better put into the MRIWS, that is Medium Range Intercept Weapons System, leaving thew guns in the traditional CIWS.

Anyway, I hope this helps, this is what we were taught back in the navy and now I teach you in the hope of better understanding!