JonesySurely that is incorrect? Overland and oversea are different situations which present different technical problems.
Its utter gibberish Village. Its a rare wave that generates multipath reflection at 500knts on a specific target closing bearing!.
Jonesy….then again I could be wrong!!! 😀
http://defensetech.org/2010/06/08/if-you-find-one-of-our-undersea-robots-please-call-us-navy/
JonesyWan,
Which USN and ROKN assets were involved in the exercise?
Dont know if thats been released. Suggestion has been made in the media, that Pinko highlighted, that there was an inshore group of Cheonan and at least one other corvette with a joint US/SK destroyer group, apparently, 75nm to seaward.
What platforms were in support of the ‘inshore group’ hasn’t been mentioned, but, it would be strange for the destroyer group to be standing that far off it was conducting intensive chopper ASW ops with the corvettes. 75nm downrange is knocking an hours endurance off the choppers on station time to little real benefit. Certainly there is little more safety to be found at 75nm than there is at 35nm from any mid-range SSK!.
Swerve,
“You’re suggesting that using its active sonar may have prompted the attack? Presumably due to the supposed N. Korean mini-sub captain fearing detection in a place where he shouldn’t be, & would therefore be at risk of attack”
I cant think of a more plausible scenario. Cheonan was on a littorals ASW exercise and found something it wasnt expecting. Whether the Cheonan crew decided to torment the minisub (if thats what it was) and got a torpedo for their pains or whether the NK was just having a bad day and decided he wanted to shoot someone I dont expect to find out, with any credibility, to be honest!.
Jonesysorry but single panel saturation has absolutly nothing to do with rotating systems vs. fixed panel systems. it’s simply a matter of sarh vs. active seeker sams.
Not sure I follow your point there Radar?. APAR is allegedly capable, with ICWI, of providing terminal illumination to four missiles on four seperate targets per face. Obviously if you embark an active missile then you only need dwell sufficient to plot position and angular velocity until seeker capture. Fire channel limitations therefore become a function of the back end processing and link update-rate to the missiles.
If you are going to embark an active missile though an X-band set makes no sense. The reason to go X-band is for the resolution required for Semi-active missile shots. You pay a price for that resolution in range. If you dont need the resolution why take the range hit?.
A fixed panel with a semi-active missile, even with ICWI, has a distinct and fixed limit on simultaneous engagements because of the need for beam dwell….especially on a heavily manoevering ‘dancer’ inbound. That is a limitation that can be exploited in an attack scenario.
IF I knew, for example, that the simultaneous engagement limit of APAR, per panel, was ‘x’ targets and that APAR’s installed height above sea level gave a radar horizon of ‘y’ 000yds. All I need to know then is the minimum engagement range of the inner layer missile carried (ESSM here) and how fast my missile will traverse the distance between radar horizon and ESSM min range. Then I know how many missiles and/or decoys I need to shoot, down one threat bearing, to oversaturate that single panel.
It may still be a large number of missiles required to breach that ‘virtual attrition’ equation, but, the fact that the threat reduction exercise, against APAR/SM-2, is so much simpler than against a rotator/active missile makes a significant difference.
Jonesya rotating array is lighter but it can’t look in any direction at once. personally i prefer the apar/smart-l combo.
It can look further over the horizon though (especially in conjuction with the lower RF band) which can add crucial seconds to the detect-to-shoot cycle. Plus its, by definition, invulnerable to single panel saturation that both APAR and SPY suffer from.
Its all a balance of factors of course. We accept the heightened risk of mechanical failure for the rotator array as a ‘penalty’ for the above mentioned advantages.
JonesyThis would give credence then to the claim by BAE (once a few additional systems are installed as expected over the next few years) that the Type 45 is the worlds most advanced air defence destroyer – Hurrah!!!
Ship on ship that is the case. The thing that many observers fail to note when comparing a US design with ours though is the differing design philosophy’s involved.
An Arliegh Burke is never likely to find itself, in a significant threat scenario, outside of the USN support system-of-systems. It matters not a bit if there is no VSR on the hull as its getting the feed from an E-2 over L16 anyway. It matters little if there are only 3 available channels of fire because there are another 3 Burkes and a Tico cruiser in the group for more than a dozen fire-channels. In the USN model their ships work just fine thanks.
Problem is that isnt our model. Its easily conceivable that T45 could find itself as the sole Fleet Air Defence vessel in an RN group with, perhaps, an ASaC chopper in support. The vessels air defence capability has to be that much more advanced. Hence the VSR, hence the active missile and hence the superb Sampson radar.
JonesyWhy had Cheonan gone active in the first place?
The plot appears to thicken…
There’s a lot in the article that is extremely disingenuous though. For example:
“the U.S. and South Korea were engaged in joint anti-submarine warfare exercises just 75 miles away”
JUST 75 miles away???. In ASW terms 75nm, 150,000yds+, might as well be the other side of the Pacific. You arent going to get a hit on a minisub in a high ambient noise environment, such as 60ft shallows, from 150,000yds without SURTASS-LFA.
The best platform to hunt in those waters is a pinger chopper with a FLASH type dipping set. Second best, ironically, is a platform like Cheonan with an active medium frequency set. Problem is always going to be that active detection even with such a set will be a couple of thousand yards at best. Meaning that a sharp sub skipper always stands a chance at getting a HWT shot off. This being the reason for the preferred littoral ASW sensor platform being offboard and netted back….like a chopper, a UUV, a USV or a buoy based solution.
“To us, stealth denotes the latest technology – billions of dollars in research and development in armaments,” said John Park, a Korea expert at the U.S. Institute of Peace. “The North Korean version of stealth is old-school diesel-battery operated subs that evade modern detection methods.”
This is jibberish – it says nothing about how the ‘North Korean version of stealth’ is limited to waters where the subs can exploit their small size and low acoustic signature. It says nothing about how short a radius of influence ‘North Korean stealth’ has within those defined waters. It says nothing about what ‘North Korean stealth’ can achieve outside of those specific waters where the conditions favour its systems.
There does seem to be a, miserable, irony in the fact that Cheonan’s ASW ‘exercise’ hunting may have been precisely the thing that got it torpedoed though!.
Jonesy‘no so smart yet not exactly dumb mine’?
Precisely!.
Lets face it if you underslung a 21″ CAPTOR variant on a modestly enlarged REMUS6000 UUV, akin to the configuration of the WW2 German Marder midget subs, and set half a dozen of them off on a racetrack course in your favourite chokepoint you have much greater capability than even a flotilla of two or three of these minisubs!.
JonesyMini-subs….the last word in mine warfare! 😀
Poor sensors, poor situational awareness, poor mobility, limited endurance. Essentially a lot has to go wrong for an offensive task force commander if he’s let one of these get in so close that they get a firing solution on a major unit!.
JonesyMy major criticism with Type 45 and Sea-Viper is it should have more silos for Aster.
Why?. We have fought a mid-intensity air-sea war in recent history and not one of our anti-air destroyers shot out her initial loadout of Sea Dart. You might say that the targets came in out of envelope, but, had they not have been they wouldnt have been coming back to need to be shot at again would they?.
Who has hundreds of antiship missiles that they would be able to deploy en masse before we could start to attrite their ability to launch strikes against us?. China’s coastline we aren’t going to go after, alone, even if we had 128 VLS cells on every Daring class!.
So why is 48 cells – with space to add more if threat levels ramp up dramatically – all that much of a handicap?.
JonesyOnly recently put up. Very sad to see them in a such a state and im assuming they are going to be broken up????
To be honest I dont think they look in all-that-bad condition given the environment they’ve been sat in for the last, what, 15 years or so.
Given the, apparent, lack of bracing on the hulls for transit the assumption would have to be that both boats are still structurally sound. Solid boats by the looks of it.
JonesyWell, the bubbles starting busted
No Pinko they dont. Those articles are scarcely credible. The only point made is some contention that the recovered torpedo propulsion section isnt a precise match to a very generalised set of schematics representing the NK weapon type. It deliberately ignores the fact that the recovered propulsion section appears at the same site as the location of a vessel destroyed by a large under-the-keel detonation.
The other vessels indicated – no less than 5 AEGIS destroyers wasnt it? – were not in these waters supported by SSN’s. 60-90ft depth is marginal for SSK’s and, in the Yellow Sea, very risky for peacetime ops with an SSN. I have a hard time accepting that they had 5 destroyers working those waters with the SK corvette. A credible source showing the involvement of those vessels in confined waters would be needed!.
JonesyI think is important, because these kind of operations so close with the borders are not done by some happy sailors doing their travel alone, remember it was an ASW ship, and in general there is ..or should be some kind of information sharing and reconnaissance linked with any ship’s operation.
Its a 1200ton corvette with a small ship hull mount MF set. What else do you think was in the area that was LINK’d in sharing the subsurface plot?.
Not even the LF sonar…which it works to detect at longer range, but if a submarine mostly emit at MF frequencies, then how great is this tool?
LF ACTIVE sonar. What difference does it matter what frequencies the boat emits???. Even then what you say is irrelevent as, for passive detects, LF travels the farthest and is therefore most detectable.
Such nice clean strike for a submariner with only 1 torpedo, without any warning, is something that even the US Navy SSN force would be jealous about
Whats so special about that?. If the submarine was laying in ambush until the range closed to 2000yds or so or the Cheonan had no sonar watch set the sub couldnt have had an easier shot. You do fire torpedos in the expectation they work….plus one torpedo hit…..who’s to say that another three weren’t part of the same salvo that missed!.
JonesyIf the NK Navy did it, that was a very successful attack, and prove that SSK’s are still very valuable.
It proves that against a lone 1300ton corvette equipped with a small hull mount MF active/passive array that an SSK, even an obsolete one, in the shallows can be a threat. I dont really know how much of a revelation that might be?.
I dont know what relevance you think that might have for a trans-oceanic navy who would have active low-frequency towed arrays and ASW choppers with advanced dipping sonar to counter just such a threat?.
JonesyF-35C is near term and equal to the surveilled depth that is near-term possible for any nation attempting theatre entry denial. No-one has surviveable systems to detect, track, identify and hold contacts at 700nm+ currently or projected.
The question has to be asked whether the PRC has the backend systems to coordinate the input of so many diverse sensors so as to be able to track the volume of contacts that a surveillance zone 1000nm deep (that includes some of the busiest waters on the planet) would present. It would be no small achievement managing that.
Until someone can do surviveable cued target identification and tracking over those kind of depths 700nm is plenty. Use of an internal-carry standoff munition like JSM adds an extra 100nm to the -35C’s precision-effects range also very cheaply. After that a full LO UCAV penetrator is obviously the way forward. Even then having the -35C to operate in the a scenario of UCAV-attrited reduced-but-extant theatre-entry threat will still be of value.
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