Jonesy.. I think the real value is for large asset survival.

Yakhont in the current state puts the ship much closer to the target (1/2 the range really). This naturally means you’re far more likely to get shot back at. Vulkan types give you the better opportunity to shoot and run if necessary.

I get the point about the deployment options provided by extreme range. The problem is you have to have some confidence that your weapon can deliver effects on target. Otherwise whats the point deploying it? Just firing the missiles and hoping for the best isn’t quite the idea.

Against the kind of targets worth a Vulkan can you conceive of one not being screened by proper air defence? If you look at the fact that the list of states possessing competent air defence covers all of the major NATO naval powers, China, Japan, Korea and soon India and Australia it begs the question who the P1000 would be presenting a highly credible threat to?.

If you look at the sextuple box launcher originally fitted to the yakhont trials boat the missile density appears, at least superficially, feasible to allow for the presentation of a genuine saturation attack, from a Slava, at ranges, targetting issues notwithstanding, beyond most conventional ship mounted countering surface-surface weapons?.

Slava is hardly obsolete is you fit it out with modern electronic kit. Vulkan and S-300/400 is serious business.

Agree on the Slava’s inherently offering value as a more readily upgradeable platform than the 1144’s. What value does Vulkan offer that replacing each launch tube with a, for example, triple Yakhont group wouldn’t do better?.

Every developed navy on the planet is now outfitting with inner-layer missiles like ESSM, Aster/SAAM, with high-capacity direction elements. How does a legacy missile like Vulkan penetrate those types of defences…and if it cant what value is there embarking it?.

Not a good example, as the Harriers wouldn’t have even tried to do that mission. They’d have stayed on deck. That Tornado flight was carrying Storm Shadows.

Ironically if the GR9 IWP/Cap C had been fully completed GR9 would have had Storm Shadow to deploy. The excuse was passed that CASOM breached deck bringback weight restrictions. I always found this an absurdity as CASOM strikes, like TLAM shots, are carefully strike-planned before firing. No GR9 (or GR4 for that matter) would take off with CASOMs for an armed recce mission!. If you launch with a Storm Shadow you are going to fire it at a very carefully pre-determined target.

Putting CASOM in the GR9/carrier force would have had the bonus of siting the aircraft that much closer to the target, in the Libya example, than otherwise would be possible. This allowing for a much later go/no-go decision and a greater certainty that the missile would be fired and not need bringing back.

All academic now of course, but, I always thought the biggest missed opportunity of the shift from FA2 to GR9 at sea was the failure to deploy CASOM where it could have added so much capability to the RN carrier strike group.

I’m not an expert on this but i imagine that the idea is the escorts will have their radars on and the CVF radar will be used only when required. I’d also imagine that the escorts will be a fair distance away from the carrier itself so wouldn’t really be required to steer into wind when the carrier launches aircraft. So the observer would see a couple of radar emissions out there but wouldn’t really see the whole picture.

But as i say im just guessing 🙂 im also intrested in hearing a expert answer!!

In principle Reidy thats bang on. In reality you would try and have aerial radar up as opposed to anything on the escorts, if such was available, and that offset from the main body of the group by as much distance as is practical to keep coverage back over the group. The vessels themselves sharing the picture by LINK16.Taking that further the airborne platforms would, depending on the scenario, be passive themselves and trying to force an opponent active to get a track on him.

Lots of games can be played and deceptive manoeuvre is one of the last few remaining true operational arts left in naval warfare. You might, for example, stick an airborne radar orbitting around an emissions silent, detached, T45 – the intent being not only to gather intel but also to draw opposing air-air forces into the Sea Viper envelope. Another trick I heard of, that worked very nicely, was setting a flying programme from the carrier that forced all aircraft to drop below the oppositions radar horizon at a point offset from the carrier by about 100nm. The aircraft transitting out and back to the real ship posit under the horizon. The opposition went nuts searching around the offset point creating a nice gap in surveillance for the group to exploit. Suffice it to say these, very effective, types of technique are quite impossible to employ if the carrier is beaconing away on powerful radar sets.

Finally, if an ESM platform is in a position to monitor a fleet by its emissions, isn’t it in danger of being detected by those very emissions?

RVF I hope I’ve given you some idea of how surface vessels would employ radar with the answers above. The carriers’ S1850 is there for situations where it doesnt have to be concerned about someone tracking it. On combat ops it will rarely be spun.

Deceptive manoeuver and fleet emissions control are thick playbooks and very much open to interpretation based on the environment, operational scenario, level of training and experience in your people etc.

As Al says RF energy carries on far past the useful distance to its emitter. Radar pulses get transmitted with a rangegate set. This, very simply, means that a return pulse must be received within x time interval of transmission. Even if it bounces off a target and returns to the array, if it is beyond the set rangegate, it wont be processed by the system and wont register a contact. The pulses will, in all likelihood, be strong enough to trip an ESM array and will give a bearing and system profile.

Anyways, Arabel is not employed in any real DDG, and both french and italian DDGs employ the very same triad LRR+MFR+Aster30 as the Darings, in the same very way, plus the DART system as extended CIWS to be refitted later on the italian DDGs.

It could be that SAMPSON is a better MFR than EMPAR or the british CMS is better than the italian and french one, as could be true the opposite, but the philosophy behind is just exactly the same.

No intent to score points here Verbatim, please dont think that, EMPAR fit the requirements for the French and Italian ships – no problem with that at all. Our requirements were tougher and, conveniently, fit the resulting product of 20+ years AESA research from BAE!. Quelle suprise that Sampson was part of UKPAAMS!.

What you are saying about Arabel is quite the point I was trying to make to 52. SAAM is a more basic system than either the Franco/Italian PAAMS or what we turned into Sea Viper. Its not a system to site on a principle AAW destroyer….rather its a local area capability for escorts with a close protection tasking or for a particularly high value unit. The local area tasking is far less demanding than the full Area air defence capability and can be delivered by less capable systems. Full up PAAMS isnt a requirement to deliver local-area coverage only.

I did mention 57mm guns earlier on this thread, I would love to see 3 or 4 of these on CVF instead of the 20mm Phalanx….
Talking about missiles, CVF is due to have artisan and a long range air search radar so fitting Caams silos could be an easy and affordable option at a future refit especially if the threat level is perceived as great enough and the missile is seen as useful after a few years of use on Type 23/26.

57mm Bofors would have been an excellent choice had the funds been available. Millenium 35mm’s probably more suitable for minimsation of ship impact and similarly effective in the surface role. Thing is either would be unique weapons systems just for the CVF’s and would add complexity to the logistics chain unnecessarily when we have Phalanx-1B already supported across the fleet.

If a vessel is nuclear then the admirals have more of an argument to arm that vessel to the teeth with defensive armament. CVF isnt going to be nuke powered (unfortunately) otherwise we might have seen a design with Aster and 30mm goalkeeper as well as a couple more T45’s.

Nope we wouldnt have seen the carrier progrmme survive. Nuclear costs money….developing a suitable reactor from PWR2 for the carrier would have been prohibitively expensive….building the support infrastructure for nuclear surface vessels would have been similarly expensive. Defensive armament would have been the absolute least concern for the program!

PAAMS must be both superior to FLAADS and necessary, or it wouldn’t exist.

This being the flaw in the logic though 52. FLAADS does a different job to UKPAAMS. UKPAAMS is area defence out to 100km+. The local area variant of the Aster weapons system is the Franco-Italian SAAM arrangement. As you know we dont have SAAM or its longer ranged variant as used on the Forbins and their MMI siblings. We elected not to use those versions because our requirements for UKPAAMS were significantly more stringent.

UKPAAMS IS capable of undertaking the inner-layer mission, replicating SAAM’s raison d’etre, but is more flexible and powerful as a system. The price we paid for that was loaded onto the T45 build.

The reason for that extra capability, in UKPAAMS, wasn’t the local area defence mission though and this is where the logic fails. Rather it was the whole scope of the battlespace that the system could cover, the track volume etc, etc. The Franco-Italian EMPAR array was considered insufficient by the RN – who were in the loop on the continuing MESAR research BAE had been undertaking since the 80’s (iirc).

As already described the requirements for coping with the two different engagement zones (area and local) are significantly different in sensor terms. Certainly, close-in, our European partners (plus the client states) are quite satisfied that the less-advanced PESA Arabel and Heracles arrays are satisfactory for their incarnations of SAAM. Easy job for the MFR pointing the missiles nose onto the threat, banging out a couple of updates (comparitive to a 100km shot) and letting seeker capture do the rest.

Now though we have active seeker technology on cheaper systems like VL Mica. We also have a ‘new breed’ of accurate 3D search/track sets capable of enough resolution to provide Target Indication to a missile that just needs a bearing, elevation/declination and a predicted seeker capture point. If we find, as VL Mica ostensibly has, that the need for SAAM’s beamshifting MFR and the whole expensive system infrastructure to get the SAM seeker to capture was never really there does that still make SAAM the optimum system for local defence or just one thats massively over-specced for the job…..with the price tag to accompany it?.

IF FLAADS can do about the same job, locally, to SAAM/Aster15, but, with the standard RN 3D search/track set for cueing and with quad-pack capable installation how can any claim be made for it being replaced with SAAM or UKPAAMS with Aster15?.

Without self defense, CVF skippers had better plan to never go anywhere a salvo of C-802s would constitute a mission-killing ambush. Especially troubling are narrow straits where ships navigate in single file.

Who suggested that the CVF would not have last-ditch self defence?.

The context of the conversation was very clear in that the money spent adding an AESA MFR plus Aster SAMs was gold-plating at a time when funds were very tight. The ship will be outfitted with Artisan-3D capable of providing TI-cueing for FLAADS if, at some later time, money was available to augment ship self-defence and such an upgrade was deemed necessary. Until that time the ship will be outfitted with standard RN CIWS and soft-kill.