I disagree. RN’s track record also disagrees. If these aren’t combatants then why do they need a gun at all???

The RN’s track record is to send whatever vessel it can lay its hands on and afford to send. Thats why we have RFA’s filling patrol slots for chrissakes. Largs Bay has just completed her first APT(N) deployment – a bloody LSL with a bouncy castle for a damned hangar!. Thats the RN’s track record so I’ve no clue what you are thinking of!

Why does it need a gun?. Have you even bothered yourself to read the posts on this thread?. I suggest you do – all the answers are there and I have no intention of repeating myself yet again.

Re Mk8, as you say it’d need development of new ammo, and it’s not that inexpensive the way the UK does things. New-build Mk8s are going to be expensive anyway, and reusing old ones won’t do the whole fleet and would delay time-frames unless you want either the C3 or the previous owner to be floating around without the gun for years due to refit schedules.

Huh???. What possible need is there for the development of new ammo?. We have piles of 4.5″ shells for the mounts that are deployed now. Why would we have use for rounds other than the HE, Base Bleed, starshell and RF decoy we have stockpiled?. In fact that is one of the prime drivers in re-using the mounts.

I recall that in late 1990s base-bleed rounds were much more expensive than non-base-bleed ones – it’s about who is making how many not just materials. Even with base-bleed we are still talking about being within the radar-horizon of shore based AShMs.

Compare the complexity of a base-bleed round to your programmable ammo from your gucci OTO and Bofors mounts. Guess which way the price gradient goes!. Shore-based AShM’s???. Do we currently send our C3 equivalent vessels like the MCMW’s or the OPV(H) into the teeth of shore based missiles?. No we dont. As stated we just had Largs Bay do APT(N) do you think anyone had a Moskit locked on her at any time in her patrol window?.

The 127mm isn’t any better unless you buy Volcano. Now 155mm would do good shore bombardment if you have extended-range ammo. 27km is about what the Israeli Saar-5 was at.

Are you serious?. We have a requirement for an economical patrol vessel that can cover anti-piracy and MIOPS patrol tasks, MCMW through the use of UUVs and disaster assistance.

We cant use front line escorts for these taskings as they are too expensive to deploy and their combat capability is wasted.

Vospers has come up with a design, on 3000tons, which has the promise of performing all those roles. If we add the old Mk8’s to that design we get improvements across all of its assigned roles from anti-piracy to diplomacy reinforcement to low-intensity intervention. It really is that simple.

But, if shore bombardment isn’t required or too expensive, go lighter to 76mm or 57mm, at least then you can get to “CIWS” and still do anti-piracy or whatever you need the gun for.

….but, once again, we do not have a 57mm or 76mm in the fleet and, AFAIK, are not about to add new weapons systems for our cheap-end capability!. The C3 as Vospers designed doesnt even have a fire-control radar to support such a weapon if we did have a 57mm/76mm and including one would add a couple of million to hulls we are trying to keep cheap and, lastly, we dont need CIWS on these ships!!!. On the nightmare event that a C-802 gets launched on a C3 it would bang out softkill as fast as possible and get out of the threat zone at the rush!. Thats what minor war vessels do!.

ashm can be used on different ways e.g. in a bearing only attack with wide fov and without range gates. and esm works in both directions, so why not firing a ashm on a track based esm only? most potential foes of the rn will not care if they hit a neutral ship so i would not necessarily assume that you will see a search radar first.

The radar-guided AShM needs to have a seeker activation point unless you fire it on a profile to allow it to have a wide FoV and active-on-launch. That itself will trip a shipboard ESM set. Most possible foes of the RN will be concerned if they hit an incorrect target as it will waste at least one missile, probably more, and some of the regimes that might oppose us will not be aided by killing innocent sailors.

hsiung feng II for example is already fielded with a dual radar/iir seeker.

Another strange one….I’ve still to see an obvious IR transparency in the nose of that weapon that would make me believe there is an IR seeker there. Unless its in the blister on the top of the weapon that is?. I wouldn’t put the technical capability beyond the Taiwanese, but, it is another one I remain to be convinced of. Even granting HF-2 IIR you’d be pressed to find a third!.

you do not belief that new technology can turn the tide. nsm for example as a iir only ashm was tested successfully with decoys and distinguished between the decoys and the ship. with a second type of seeker and sensor fusion you can further improve such ashm.

You may have missed the threads where I gushed about the capabilities of NSM to the point where I was asked if I worked for Kongsberg’s marketing arm?!. It’s not the ‘new technology’ I have a problem with – it’s the old technology that most current and near term AShM’s still use that I have no faith in. Active Radar Homers and passive/active types are great for open, clear, blue water as soon as you get into the littorals or heavily trafficed regions they are next door to useless. That is why the US has left them off the Burkes and is why we are leaving them off the Fleet subs in favour of additional Spearfish or TLAMs.

you can call sea wolf whatever you want, the quoted range is 6 km so i call it a ciws (11km for crotale and 16km for rim-7 m/p/r/…).

OK I’ll call it what it is – a PDMS – exactly the same as Crotale, Sea Sparrow and any other short-reaction point defence missile system!.

my work experience tells me that sooner or later you will reach a point where keeping a old system in service is a pure waste of money. but maybe the c3 will be sold first. 😉

My service tells me that the RN keep old systems in place a remarkably long time if they work well enough!. Also that ‘wonderful new weapons’ sometimes arent exactly all they are cracked up to be and can take a lot of time and expense to bed down in service. For a vessel that needs to be delivered as effective as possible and as cheaply as possible new weapons systems will be very unlikely to fit the bill.

i do not make an opv a warfighter, i get it more flexibal and 3p is no “fancy” anti missile ammo, it’s just a flexible pregrogrammable round. maybe you mixed it up with dart?

Ah ok so the 3P-firing mount doesnt require an interface with a fire-control radar in order to set the fuse rangegate so the round bursts at the correct distance?. Sounds pretty fancy to me. I agree that a mount firing 3P is more flexible…..flexible to do what though?. Answer, as I’ve said all along, is that its more capable of shooting down aircraft and thats about it. Once again C3 doesnt have to have that capability any more than our current minor war vessels do.

that is not what i sayed. the 76 mm will place more weight in 10 sec or 1 min than a mk8. it’s the time in which you can take down your target that counts, not the number of rounds spend.

Take down what target though?. The Mk8 mount on an OPV would not be to have it taking targets ‘down’. The only ‘target’ I could see it engage would be shore-based artillery in which range is the key factor anyway or perhaps an opposition gunboat or something equally low-tech in which case, again, range is the key factor. Anything more advanced C3 is going to run screaming from because its an OPV and NOT a warfighter.

lol. so now you have just placed the opv in a high density warfighting scenario. sorry but the falkland war perfectly shows where you will end without a ciws and this is definitely no place for an opv.

Who mentioned the Falklands?. I said South Georgia, ie Op Paraquat, a situation which was decidedly NOT high-density warfighting. In that situation a few rounds from a Mk8 and a couple of squads of RM’s, with the ships Lynx over top, could have very well done a job – without all the troubles of deploying an escort group. Classic gunboat tasking….all possible because of the inclusion of a ‘cheap’ big gun.

it’s also a question on how many guns the shore battery has, 6 105 mm guns e.g. can provide round about 70 rounds per minute, hard to counter this with a single mk8. so at the end with mk8 or not you will evade and call for an airstrike (and to say it again this is a warfighting scenario)

Sorry that is absolute rot!. Manually laid shore guns against an automatic naval mount isnt a contest. The shore battery is putting the rounds out, but, against a moving target they are hardly providing aimed fire. Against that the Mk8 is putting shells down on the target coordinates at 20 a minute. Nothing beats a naval mount at counterbattery. Where is the airstrike coming from?.

if you want to make gunboat diplomacy you will not send a opv.

The C3 is, often, going to be the nearest vessel on scene to any situation around the world by nature of its taskings. If you make the C3 capable of gunboat diplomacy, cheaply, you might just save having to deploy a more capable vessel, of which we wont have all that many anyway.

Distiller,

Distiller I think a C3 is more likely to attack a land target with a missile than a gun. Also I wouldn’t dismiss the air threat, where the Mk8 is limited by its max 55° elevation.

I cant see, in any concept of C3 to date, where a land attack capable missile has been put forward as even a remotely possible equipment fit. I’d imagine, to keep within the bounds of financial sense, the only such missile on a C2 would be the blkII Harpoons and the land-attack capability limited to fixed targets and GPS direction.

As to the air threat, its not dismissed, but its also not considered for this vessel any more than it has been for any of our serving minor war vessels or for analagous hulls in other navies. Units like the new Dutch OPV or the, oftmentioned, Thetis both may have OTO76’s but they arent the new, bells-and-whistles, guided round capable versions….they are the old Compatto variants refurbished to provide a cheap capability. The AAW offered by such mounts isnt massively greater than what could be provided with REMSIG guns and a few MANPADS stowed aboard and rightly so.

These are not warfighting vessels and, just because they sport a medium calibre gun, shouldn’t be considered as such.

Ed,

Having the physical space for the Phalanx to be bolted on isn’t too unlikely, even if there are no true intentions to actually fit the system. Similarly, it may even be possible to bolt a small CAMM launcher onto the work deck, tied into the ships existing systems. This may add some cost to the basic design, but would probably be useful for the potential export market. It doesn’t turn the C-3 into a frigate, but would at least give it more ability to deal with more hostile situations.

For-but-not-with for additional weapons is fine provided its played down until we have the C2’s coming down the slips. The problem is modular capability like that you are proposing is the very worst kind of capability creep. It gives the impression that the vessel is capable of more than it routinely is, which gets other necessary projects binned and, when you need that modular capability in the field, you find out you dont have it available. Huge loser that one.

I am not arguing about the effectiveness of soft-kill or CIWS, but rather that in the event we need to put the C-3s in harms way for their MCM mission, then we need them to have as much in their favour as possible! We will not always be able to just avoid sending the C-3s into harms way, precisely because one of their main roles will be MCM.

There is a difference between opposed MCMW in an advanced threat environment and that in support of ops like Sierra Leone. Mine Warfare is THE best form of asymmetric warfare in the naval spectrum…even the most banana-ish of banana republics can buy a few dozen ground influence mines on the black market and, sown in the shallows and covered by a battery or two of 130mm towed artillery, make a good stab at forced entry denial for a much more advanced intervention force.

Currently with the Hunts and Sandowns the MCMW work would not be able to start until the artillery could be neutralised by external forces. A deployed C3, perhaps on station ahead of the main group, could quite easily get a spot off its chopper, kept out of MANPADS/trashfire envelope, and engage the artillery itself.

That being just one of many potential uses for the gun. None of the reasons being vital to the performance of the C3 mission, but, for the likely costs of swapping the mounts over it seems daft not to have the extra capability offered.

Last point for all those who still want a warfighter for C2 is a point towards todays news that we’re putting the B2 T42’s at extended readiness!. We really have to start getting a grip on our routine patrol deployment costs or this will just keep happening until we have a fleet of shiny and terrifyingly beweaponed frigates and destroyers that sit at anchor because we wont pay for them to be deployed!

EDIT: Just checked and the Thetis doesnt seem to have refurbed guns as I thought they did. They mount Super-Rapido’s…the point still stands that one SR plus a single fire channel does not make the ship a warfighter.

Some nice touches there. Not too sure about the semi-swath part or what the difference is between your COGAG plus electric waterjets and conventional IEP driving waterjets would be, but, its your hull!.

I like that A-Frame sensor mast concept, but, would point out the need to go ‘aloft’ occaisionally to work on the masttop arrays, so, making the ‘legs’ wide enough to allow for internal access to the masthead would be appreciated by the engineering dept!.

Why have the strike length VLS amidships?. Why not site them between the peripheral CAMMs cells (single row of A35’s port and starboard?) on the foredeck. That way you could move the prime mover turbines amidships if not at maindeck level then perhaps a deck or two down extending up into the superstructure. Advantages would be the isolation of the primary source of vibration, ease of access for maintenance plus ease of installation and the freeing up of space below the waterline for additional bunkerage.

Otherwise rational, comprehensive, weapons and sensor fit. Good aviation capability and potential for good range and seakeeping. Overall just as likely to see the light of day as Frosty’s Command Ship or my joint C3/C2, but, certainly interesting in places!

i think there are hundreds of weapons systems spread around the world which are never used in combat situations. only because a system was never used in combat does not mean it’s not effective.

Doesnt mean its not effective but its certainly not proven. In the context of this debate that is enough for me. As I said my view here is that CIWS has a place, but, that is backup to the softkill. In otherwords you let the softkill distract, seduce and deviate as many inbounds as possible and use hardkill only any weapons that may leak through.

(fortunately) there is not much experience from real combat situtations to base modern naval warfare on but this is not only related to ciws.

Yes there is a wealth of combat experience – just none of it is relevent to CIWS as, for whatever reason, where antiship missiles have been fired CIWS has either been unavailable or, somewhat tellingly, inactive.

so there was a gap between the test scenarios and the combat situation in the falkland war. why do you think that proofing softkill-systems is more reliable than testing ciws?

THAT is the major problem…can any test serial accurately reflect every potential threat scenario that could be faced in combat. No – of course not. You therefore have to look to the systems with the widest possible set of operational parameters and, any way you cut it, that is not conventional closed-loop CIWS.

if i never test my ciws with very low flighing targets in front of land clutter i do not know how it will perform here. same to the softkills.

Not so and this is the crucial difference – softkill will work regardless of aspect, evasive maneover, speed etc as it works on the one really weak element of the inbound. The guidance section. You show a seeker what it wants to see and the seeker will fly to it and thats the bottom line.

do you think the “low acceptance among navies” is caused by missing knowledge they have? the problem is that you need a highly automated and integrated combat managment system to use your decoys effective in a fast emerging combat situation.

To be honest Radar I dont believe that there really is a “low acceptance among navies”. If you look around at the more modest naval services softkill is a repeating feature of even quite minor combattants and the developed services are all replete with every kind of decoy, jammer and obscurant. The perception is that hardkill is ‘sexier’ than softkill definitely – its obviously hard to argue that a radar-guided gatling-gun spinning round and letting rip thousands of rounds is anything other than very cool – that is little to base a ships defence on in reality though!.

this may fit to a adequate frigate but if you want to build a low cost opv you will end up with a small decoy launching console on your bridge.

Every military vessel now needs a halfway competent ESM system and fortunately they come quite cheap these days. If you have that all that is needed is a competent operator, good leadership and a small decoy launching console on your bridge!. I would, personally, be more confident going into a low-modest threat scenario equipped in that fashion than if I had no softkill but a Phalanx bolted atop the hangar.

in general i do not belief that we will see a mk8 on the c3. if we want to have a really cheap solution we will see the 30 mm on it and if we want to have a good solution we will use the 57 mm or 76 mm.

I dont believe we’ll see the C3 or C2 the way I want to either. Simply put I do not believe that many will see, or be willing to accept, the paradigm shift that needs to happen in the RN surface fleet. So i think you are right we wont see Mk8 on C3.

a mk8 isn’t that useful on the c3 and if the c1, c2 and type 45 will change over to 155 mm than it would also be no cheap solution because a lot of money has to be spend to keep all the logistic chain in service for the c3.

The money for the Mk8 logistics chain has been spent already. The rounds are stockpiled, the maintenance train established and the sparing paid for. Keeping that going, even for just the C3’s, is far and away a less costly proposal than bringing in a new mount and starting the whole process over again.

What does a 57mm or 76mm give C3 that Mk8 doesnt?. Anti-aircraft capability?. When is a C3 going to be shooting at aircraft?. The Mk8 mount on a C3 isnt to make it a warfighter….C3 isnt a warfighter. The Mk8 is to confer a coercive presence for the ships patrol taskings and could be used for limited NGS in support of its MCMW and in low-intensity scenarios. In that sense its a LOT more effective than the likely alternative – a DS30 and, IMO, actually more useful than either a 57mm or 76mm would be.

So missile fired from 26000 feet is same as fired from 70,000 feet? And it was old missile. Nothing revolutionary interms of proplusion.

MiG-31’s are often found patrolling at 70,000ft are they Star?. Would seem a rather curious posture to adopt if one was seeking to engage ‘aerial targets, including stealth ones at small altitudes and long ranges’ wouldnt you say?.

6 minutes is total burn time of new missile according to report of Vympel from 2006…but It has nothing to do with missile test fired in 1993. which is completely irrevelant to discussion of 2008.

6 minutes flight time is 6 minutes flight time and that adds up, for an E-3 at its listed maximum speed, to about 70km travel – presumably on a reciprocal course to the threat bearing. Understand the difference between a missile fired in tailchase and one fired at a closing target. The only confirmed missile flight is the test earlier mentioned that used a local designator Flanker to CEC in a longe range missile shot from a MiG-31.

of course the first two aircrafts were delivered this year with missiles. and those missiles were prevented to be shown at MAKS 2007.
Read it can intercept Small/Stealthy/long range at same time.

Nothing in that article about missiles. It also doesnt say ‘intercept’ it says “The upgraded aircraft can detect aerial targets, including stealth ones at small altitudes and long ranges”.

So Star you accept that the 300km shot was head on and not tailchase now do you?.

So, if our targetted AWACS where, perhaps, to turn and try to put as much distance between it and the Zaslon ‘illuminating’ it you’d accept that a 300km ranged missile might just fall a little bit short?!.

F-22 cannot save AWACS when MIG-31 itself can destroy hypersonic vehicles and small missiles. And second F-22 are limited in quantities either they will be in Pacific or EU but highly doubt both places at same time. MIG-31 are at both places.

Very true….but how many 600km missiles are there?! :rolleyes:.

this could be done by increasing the mtbf of the system or by making it fault tolerant by reducing/eliminating the single points of failure or by duplicating the ciws systems.

Most chaff expend launchers are simple tubes fixed to fire in a given arc to deploy loads appropriately. I think you are gravely miscalculating the difference in complexity and reliability of the two systems. Duplicating systems, in the Soviet/Russian model, is the way around this of course. It is ultimately a poor solution though. The purpose of a warship is not to carry self-defence weapons – it is to deploy combat systems to meet the threat it is targetted at. In the context of the discussion here its whether a circa £80mn austere patrol hull absolutely needs a CIWS mount. A question to which the answer is fairly straightforward.

the corollary would be not to put a radar on a ship because it’s mtbf is much higher than the mtbf of a binocular.

It is worth the observation that binoculars on a ship tend to see much more use than radar!. You make a good point, but, it does have the flaw in that the binoculars cannot do what radar does. That does not apply to the softkill/hardkill debate – softkill is proven to be able to defeat AShM. In fact, I believe, no CIWS or PDMS has ever destroyed an inbound warshot AShM and the nearest that we have come to seeing hardkill work, in operational environments, is the Sea Dart shootdown of that Iraqi Styx.

the right way is to improve all the systems constantly to have as much of them available if we need them. and if i take a look on how widely spread ciws are today there can’t be a huge reliability problem. and they are well tested against both drones and real ashm.

If you’ll forgive the flippancy SeaWolf was ‘well tested against drones’ as well as targets it was never expected to perform against. Its trials reports glowed based on the missiles performance. Those trials meant precisely nothing a few years later when failures started costing lives.

60 seconds also makes a minute. a srboc for example has to be loaded round by round. with 6 barrels on a single mount one minute per mount would be a good time. on the other hand there are fast reload systems for phalanx which make it possible to reload it in less than 5 minutes.

You slide a round cannister into a launch tube – it takes no longer than loading a mortar!. Even loading 6 takes less than a minute and then, once the loader has cleared, the mount is ready to go. Phalanx you have to open the feed system, load in a belt of however many hundred rounds, verify the feed, close the system and then get clear.

re-initialising should also be possible in “next to no time” because usually the ciws is integrated to the ships combat managment system which will provide initial target information and engagement order.

You’ve still got to take the radar from standby back to radiate and then let it track form…more time taken. Comparitively, by this point, the decoy launcher has probably already fired its next salvo and is reloading, if necessary. Remember that, whilst an offboard decoy (unless its a float) may have a short lifespan the seeker window on an inbound is also equally short.

..but in a streaming attack it can handle 3 or even 5 ashm until it runs out of ammunition (gun based). in this case the decoy launchers will run empty first.

Depends on the installation surely. Terma’s DL-12T system (as fitted in the Thetis boats) mounts up to 24 tubes fully compatible with standard 130mm decoy rounds. A usual pattern ‘per engagement’ would be 4-6 rounds with sufficient time between salvo’s to reload the tubes if necessary.

there are two major issues here:
– only because their softkill worked, it does not mean that a hardkill systems would not perform equal or even better. there was no adequate ciws 1973.
– a match result between a and b which occured 35 years ago does not necessarily means that another match today between a+ and b+ will result the same way.

The simple fact is Radar that softkill has worked and worked well where it has been deployed. Radar seekers on missiles have not undergone much of a revolution since the Russians dispensed with spin-scan on the P-15!. An AM-39 seeker is still largely recognisable on a missile completed today as one that flew under the wing of a Super Etendard 26 years ago. Yes faster and better DSP’s and processing algorythms have improved clutter-rejection and ECCM, but, the soft-kill techniques have benefitted from the same improvments. Chaff and the AOR’s available today, like BAE Siren, in combined pattern can mess up passive/active seekers a treat and not just one or two at a time.

“With all these different IR and RF grenades and rockets for short-, medium- and long-range deployment for confusion, distraction, or seduction in combination with jamming devices, hard kill, ship maneuvers, etc., the use and the understanding of countermeasures is too complex……Low acceptance among navies for shipboard countermeasures is not so much due to a perception of overall low effectiveness of the technology, but from insufficient predictability in action.”

You must see what is written above Radar?. All he says is that softkill is a complex topic and that the general perception is that soft-kill is difficult to quantify in effects terms. Just because there is a ‘perception’ that soft-kill is not as straight forward as hard-kill does not make it less effective – it just means that you have to know something about the techniques to quantify it.