I’ve, personally, never heard of an impact nuclear warhead unless we are talking of a ground-penetrator RV.

Missile warheads are generally airburst and the fusing will be for optimal burst height – which is dependent on the yield of the weapon. Greater the yield the higher the optimal burst altitude. There is a lot of reading you can do on nuclear blast effects – including lots online – but simplistically if you imagine your immediate-effects blast radius is 1000ft you dont want your weapon to burst at 500ft as half of the blast energy is going straight into the ground/water and doing relatively little. So your weapon will be fused to detonate at about 1200ft etc.

As to the hypothetical would you aim for an airburst weapon or a subsurface burst the answer would likely be the airburst. Whilst you wont vapourise or sink serious warships like a carrier the shock load will likely shear fuel lines, knock out electronics and seriously mess up the soft, crunchy, things that do all the work. You dont need to sink ships to remove them as a threat. IF the requirement is absolutely to sink a hardened target like an old battlewagon or a CVN then its nuclear-tipped torpedo time.

dionis

What the Russians could easily do is shoot a group of nuclear armed missiles in first, have them air burst detonate at a safe yet effective EMP range perhaps – crippling the CVBG’s ability to detect anything, then pummel away with the rest of the payload.

Don’t you think that NATO have been aware of nuclear EMP effects for decades, and equipment has been designed to survive it?

Thats about right TVI. Provided you get warning, which all of the big supersonic ship-killing missiles definitely provided, EMP can be mitigated by the simple act of isolating the antenna/waveguides from the electronics. Essentially there is nothing magical about EMP – its basically ‘just’ a surge current that will short circuitry. Stop that current making it to the circuitry and its not going to have much impact beyond the antenna. Obviously more advanced electronic scan systems are more vulnerable.

For ‘conventional’ radar types the antenna damage need not be critical as the ‘follow-up’ strike would have to be outside the EMP radius so as not to get fratricide-killed by the EMP themselves!.

Not dumb, just cheap.
They’re too cheap to fit catapults and buy the F-35C. :rolleyes:

Ahh the careful study of the UK Carrier Strike requirement lead you to this conclusion has it?.:cool:

while it might not technically have been ‘laid down’, steel has been cut, construction has begun, orders have been placed and contracts have been signed

a redesign of this magnitude would be HUGE, at least a 2 year delay and all the costs that entails

for an already expensive program, yes it would be ‘the end of the world’

Whilst I’d dispute his point about an EMALS fold being unsuprising Lawrence is bang on about the problems of integrating conventional steam cats with this CVN being far less than is being portrayed here.

The redesign puts back the basic elements of steam cat technology that the USN have implemented for at least 4 decades. There is no-one else with the USN experience of installing, supporting and operating those systems. The really expensive bit, whole-life support, is already in place. The system is already spared up and the training programme well-established.

Fitting the cats themselves, plus a standard arresting engine, is actually only modestly different than the EMCATs. Running high pressure steam pipes requires more thought than running very heavy duty cabling, but, its not like you are running 13A domestic cabling from the alternators – to carry the loads required that cabling is going to be hefty!. Running pipework to tap HP steam off couple of heat-exchangers in the reactor spaces will be fiddly, but, wont actually present much of a technical challenge.

Doc,

100% agreement. Maybe time for a change. The 3 services aught to get together, & work out a united policy for defensive & offensive operations. Black buck type operations are still needed with several aircraft involved not a single aircraft, therefore several Vulcan / replacement squadrons should be in service.(US B52 bombings in Afghanistan) Local air superiority a must for ground operations, whither a commando raid or full armoured division deployment therefore a forward flexible airstrip equals aircraft carrier.

There is merit in what you say – of course there is – and in the utopian ideal something like that would probably happen. In reality though gunfights happen over who has what capability.

Take your Vulcan/UK global reach platform. What requirement would this fulfill?. Coercion force, as were not likely to get enough or be able to one-time deploy enough for saturation, precision capable and with an ability to penetrate defended airspace. RAF will say F/A-22 or a UCAV development of Taranis perhaps and point to the old FOAS requirement. RN will say ‘already got it, its TLAM Blk 4’ and ‘instead of inducting a new aircraft type with massive whole-life costs into the airforce, give us two more Astutes and a couple dozen more TLAM in the stockpile’. Then they’ll go on to show how useful the extra 2 SSN’s would be for high persistence intel gathering, chokepoint monitoring etc, etc.

The issue is that whoever is the arbiter of this kind of utopian defence requirement study would face an impossible challenge trying to referee all the viewpoints and competing proposals. Ultimately you’d simply have the same situation that exists today but without the funds spent on the review!.

As Scooter says some degree of competition and rivalry is good here as it fosters the service identity which can be vital. Where it goes wrong is when it turns into one service trying to get anothers projects cancelled in favour of their own without regard to the greater force mix. If we can stop THAT the thing will work just about as well as anyone elses.

Great Video!!! Thank you very much!!!

But, It’s bloody annoying how the RAF & RN are taking pathetic pot shots at each other…Its kinda embarrasing. They really, REALLY have to realise, and the British army too, that they are always going to need each other everytime, no matter what. I’m sure they do realise, but don’t want to admit it, saying that, if any one was in the sh*t, I’m 110% sure the other two services would be there to get’em out of it!

How tragic it is that you are embarrassed!.

Service rivalry is very, very much more subtle than your fervent flag waving paints it. Until you have worn the uniform – whatever its colour and shade – you’d be advised to try and understand the service ethos before making such sweeping commentry.

Part of the problem the RN has with the RAF is exactly that they were NOT there to help us when they said they would and we lost men and ships because of it. Further than that they went to the extreme ends to dredge up a few old bombers with bits, literally, off a scrapheap – staged a few ad-hoc long-range sorties and then made out their attacks bottled up the cream of the enemy air force back defending their capital!. As if we should, in fact, be grateful for their august presence. To a lot of us that does not sit well.

Now many of us, who have served, have friends in the other branches and we know that the institutional rivalry between the services has a time and place, but, it is very, very real. To some, though definitely not all, it is part of the sense of identity and pride we feel about ‘our’ service and is indivisable. To be informed, in such flippant fashion, that we should all ‘just bally get on with it’, if you will forgive the paraphrasing, also does not sit well.

I have to admit I find myself having some sympathy with the creators of that site.

You would never wish such a tragically early end for anyone – certainly not a mother of small children. I have two girls under 2yrs and the idea of leaving them, not seeing them grow up, is utterly soul destroying.

That said though Goody is the absolute embodiment of everything that is wrong with our society. She is poorly educated, loud-mouthed and bigoted and has been lionised for that. She has courted fame and celebrity without one shred of talent or skill and her, sad, legacy will be one of the perpetuation of the current view that there really is such a thing as a free ride. The generation now coming through have a perfect role model for someone who’s done absolutely nothing with her life yet still has been annointed a media ‘icon’.

I saw, on the BBC’s homage to Jade page yesterday, one contributor who wrote ‘she is our new queen of hearts’ and that, to be honest, had my skin crawling off. Diana’s work with all corners of society, local and international, demanded respect. Goody’s international commentary has set back the view of racism in British culture by a good three decades.

Would I wish her dead – of course not. My wish for her is that she finds a little dignity in the time she has remaining to counterbalance a life lived largely bereft of it.

These barrages behave like a sort of white noise (so they have “all” frequencies). There is a limit on what yoy can do (Cramer-Rao) and even the most powerfull computers-algorithms-sensor combination can’t avoid sucha limit. Algorithms can filter but the detection range is greatly downgraded and the sonar can be rendered almost useless.

They are also very limited in geographical area. As soon as the missile boat moves away from the barrage zone it becomes notable as the barrage, like a white noise jammer, can be plotted and filtered. What you do with the active accoustic barrage is create a warning that something maybe coming out.

Delta-IV don’t cross the SOSUS line. They remain in bastions. As far I known Akulas and Sierras do it; and do it mostly undetected whithout problems.

As I said myself ‘until the SLBM’s obviated the need’!. The point was one of tactics over technology. The comment was that good tactics can defeat a technological advantage….my point was that there are notable situations where that plainly is not the case.

There are examples of inferior boats using clever tactics to defeat a superior opponent. The story of Igor Britanov’s Yankee class SSBN getting the drop on a US 688 being exactly that. Thing is you cant use such a happy combination of environmental conditions, timing and skill to create a general rule. More often than not the technology, properly applied, carries the day.