JonesySorry Roel just needed to make a point. I didnt tell them it was tied up on your permanent mooring in Monte Carlo did I…….whoops……damn sorry!. :diablo:
Now, I’ll have to post a picture of your boat too…
I’ll beat you to it!. A magnificent vessel and every bit the equal of yours! 😀
JonesyWhat does how futuristic the ship looks have to do with anything Haley? Because its ‘cool’?. Yawn!. There are plenty of civillian vessels that look far more impressive than 2208.
You want to see futuristic and cool?. This is cool:
A Custom Line 112′ Super Yacht. I promise you that the good Cdr Bond would much rather do his horizontal reconnaisance aboard that vessel as opposed to a fast missile boat!.
Either way my view is that WanShan probably has this nailed down. Its simply a technology demonstrator for the hull form and, perhaps, has facilities that may allow it to act as a trials platform for antiship missiles – makes sense if your judging the hull stability to test the missiles in the same environment!.
JonesyNo problem Camaro
I have some information about the German SUT/SST4/SeaHake weapons but, I’d imagine Janes may have some legal issues to take up with me if I posted it verbatim!. These are the bits relevant to SST4 in particular though:
As development of DM1 and DM2 continued during the 1960s the German shipbuilding industry received permission to export submarines. The German philosophy is to regard torpedoes as part of the whole submarine weapons platform but at that time government policy prohibited the export of torpedoes developed for the Bundesmarine. In 1968, therefore, AEG began developing an export weapon as SST4 (Special Surface Target), a derivative of both DM1 and DM2 but designed to be compatible with other methods of launching in addition to `swim out’ notably compressed air or ram. This entered production in the 1968 and was extensively produced, especially for the many customers of the ubiquitous Type 209 submarine.
The SST4 is an anti-surface ship weapon which can operate at depths of 2 to 100 m with two-step speed/ranges reported at 23 kt/19 n miles (36 km) and 35 kt/6 n miles (11 km). As the weapon was not allowed to incorporate the latest Bundesmarine technology it has an impact fuze and a fixed seeker which means it conducts a snake pattern search. The guidance wire permits one-way transmission from the launch platform and a few return signals, but a limited two-way capability and a supplementary magnetic fuze form the basis of the Mod 1 upgrading kit.
Operational status
STN Atlas (and its predecessors) have produced 1,600 torpedoes of which some 400 are believed to have been DM1/DM2 and 300 were SST4. Production of the DM1 ceased in 1980 while that of SST4 ceased circa 1985 but SUT remains in production in both Germany and Indonesia (under licence by IPTN). Many DM2 weapons have been upgraded and it is reported 170 DM2 A1 Mod will be upgraded to DM2 A3 standard, although production of new weapons ended in 1995. Seahake is currently being marketed. The prototype DM2 A4 has begun trials with production anticipated from 2001 and deliveries to the German Navy from late 2003. It is believed that the following navies (shown in tables I and II) have purchased STN Atlas torpedoes.
Users:
Argentina – SST4 Mod1
Ecuador – SST4
Colombia – SST4 Mod0
Greece – SST4
Peru – SST4
Turkey – SST4
Venezuela – SST4
Jonesywell i think they werent thinking of sending these things off on their own in combat when they designed them.
OK so to be a useful weapons system they have to have a good little flotilla of them, something to provide targetting and something to screen them from air attack. Hmmm cost-effective when your fleet is hurting for ASW!.
sure JH7s and maybe flankers can carry the same weapons, problem being that the enemy will see them alot futher out, so it can be a challenge for the big fighterbombers to get within firing range especially if the enemy has decent CAP.
You would accept that these vessels would only be of use if given a target position from an offboard source. Given an equivalent target position a flight of strike aircraft would be able to make a low-altitude attack profile minimising its exposure. A flotilla of circa 300ton ships would be a much larger RCS target than a few strike fighters plus, if the flotilla happens to be rattling along at 30+ knots, its going to be difficult to confuse them with fishing boats as well!.
given the small size and stealth design of these new ships, i say that the chances of them getting to within a hundred or so KM (well within missile range) of an enemy fleet without being detected is fairly good.
Small size definitely yes, but, they dont look so stealthy to me. Compare one to Visby and you might see what I mean.
think of it as a part of a much bigger combat force. u have a couple dosen of these little FACs racing towards the enemy fleet, who will most likely be pre-ocupied with the JH7s and Su30s coming a couple hundred or a thousand KMs away.
Sounds clever but thats not the way a ships combat team work. Air and surface plots are the responsibility of seperate warfare teams on an individual ship and the responsibility, usually, of seperate ships in a task force. You will have an AAWCS (AAW Command Ship), ASWCS (ASW Command Ship) and, if the situation warrants, an SWCS (Surface Warfare Command Ship) designated by the Task Force commander prior to theatre entry. Obviously surface and ASW are usually less intensive disciplines than AAW, by virtue of the fact that the platforms are a bit more sedate in their approach!, so ASWCS and SWCS responsibilities can often be combined on a single ship. If you have the fleet assets though….!.
the planes’ radar range if far in excess of their missiles (especially the Su30), meaning they can provide target info for the FAC without having to close to missile range. this means that if u time it right, u can have the fighters providing target info for the FACs from 1000km out!
IF the fighters and missile boats can crossload targetting information that is!. Is there a Chinese equivalent to LINK16 in operation? How widespread and how capable are the nodes?. Do the coordination facilities exist to mount such a time critical assault?. If not how far away are they? Have PLANAF aircrews trained with the current PLAN FAC(M) fleet or are these skills that need to be developed?. Many questions Wolf!.
even if the plan goes pear shaped its no big deal. not sure how effective big AShMs designed to killed huges destroyers will be against these tiny fast moving targets who will no doubt also be employing jammers as well as the AK as a CIWS.
Even current antiship missiles have taken out missile boats, not seen any jamming arrays on this unit but a decent chaff system could work well if co-ordinated with a well practiced evasive manoeuver plan. Fleet evasive manoeuvers with frigate-sized vessels can be entertaining – doing it with upwards of a dozen high speed units like these would be very exciting with live missiles inbound. If the missile boats are on a reciprocal bearing from the inbounds performing evasives then the AK mount and the director are masked so theyre relying on softkill.
even if the missiles are effective, taking out a couple dosen of these ships will most likely deplete the AShM load of a sizeable fleet given the small number of AShMs carried on most modern warships.
Bit harsh on the crews of these, alleged, wunder-FACs though isnt it!?. Why not just use the existing or, even better, older less valuable FACs if all you want is a fleet of missile soakers!. Better still use strike aircraft that are less likely to suffer!.
imagine u are the commander of a naval task force getting ready to face off with a dozen or so PLAN destroyers a few hundred km away. suddenly ur radar operator spots a hundred or so of these FACs a hundred or so KMs away and speeding at u, then a couple dozen Su30s and JH7s show up on long range radar, at the same time ur sonar operator says he thinks he heard a kilo a couple dozen miles out…
First off, as commander, I’m trying to stop the ASWCS staff laughing at the poor Kilo trying to get an accoustic fix on anything with 100 FAC’s charging up at him!. Then I’m on the vocom requesting a new guide dog for a surface picture plotter that didnt notice 100 high speed vessels until they got to 100km when he was holding a handful of destroyers at 2 or 3 hundred – he would presumably have to have a quite nasty selective blindness to let that slip! Then I’m on going to tear the arms off the Fleet Air Ops officer for not potting a lot of those FACs when tasked to do so by the Surface Warfare team (who really would have noticed them if they could spot a DDG at 300km!). Lastly, following the performance of the Surface Warfare team, I’m going to check that the AAWCS has coordinated the CAP fighters in the outer zone, DLI (Alert) fighters are launching and the SAM traps in the MEZ are deploying along the threat axis for the plotted air threat.
lets just say these FACs are a very cost effective force multiplier.
Or lets say that the are very pretty for missile soakers!
JonesyWorst car I’ve driven in ages was the new poxy-little-engine basic-model Ford Fiesta heap I was presented with as a hire-car at Ronaldsway Airport a couple of months back.
It had a steering wheel modelled on that of a Leyland bus, these wierd rotating handles placed where the eleccy-window switches should have been, the manual version of central locking where you have to lean across the car and grab for the fiddly little button to let a passenger in and a sunroof that demanded you perform a ridiculous lassooing action before it would do anything for you.
I was raced up hill once, whilst driving it, by a geriatric jogging person. Unfortunatley the Fiesta lost out but I nearly had him when he stopped to use his inhaler!. 😮
Best car I’ve ever driven, simple, my Lexus IS200. Tremendous car.
JonesyWell seeings as the original starship Enterprise is, in reality, a small toy ship with utterly no practical value I think you could be on to something there, Haley.
What is the bloody point of this thing?. A couple of heavy antiship missiles that it has nowhere near the sensor fit to operate, to full potential, and a 30mm single-barreled gun which offers, what, a marginal capability against small surface targets and slow-mover air targets?
What is the value of this vessel that a couple of JH-7 or Su-30 with a few C-803’s or Kh-31’s couldn’t achieve better?.
JonesyDoesnt sound good you have to admit, but, I’m a network engineer and I give my Win2k laptop a bloody hard time and I’ve never had a minutes problem with the OS!.
Also you have to remember the combat system is hardly going to be cross patched to the internet for lots of little mischevious trolls to try and have a crack at it. Also I’ve seen a network intrusion detection system by Cisco Systems that can nail down virus infection in a Windows network on day-zero!. I’ve seen how secure these networks can be made if the investment is there to do the job properly.
As a last resort, provided that they dont cut corners with the hardware, I dont see it as an impossible task to dump the Win2k system and upload a new UNIX-based application on Alenia Marconi’s tab should the original system prove unreliable.
So not good, definitely, but not the end of the world by any reach!.
JonesyNot necessarily the case though is it Sauron.
As we are seeing in Iraq removing the regime militarily is the easy part when you have such a strategic overmatch. The hard part is maintaining the peace, ensuring security and rebuilding the confidence of the populace. The US has had a hand in this in Afghanistan certainly but the credit goes round a lot further than just them.
JonesyHyper,
What can the PLAN do against Seawolf and the Virginia Class SSNs? Not only that, but against ultra-quiet SSKs. What sorta Equipment do they exactly need to detect them and how do they act against them?
Two acronyms to answer this one – SURTASS and SOSUS. As we investigated on the ‘surface warfare’ thread a few months back China’s major handicaps in ASW are in primary detection and localisation queueing. The Yellow Sea and East China Sea are shallow enough to allow for quite liberal seeding of a fixed-hydrophone SOSUS type system (although the processing stations would need A LOT of computing power to filter flow noise). A SURTASS-type long-array towed sonar would be pretty good to gap fill and expand the envelope throughout the South China Sea, Phillipine Sea and out into the Pacific.
To exploit this detection capability you have to look at flexible assets. Small unit subchasers dont work against SSN’s. The SSN will always be able to escape faster than a 300ton ship can chase and prosecute attacks. SSK’s are basically mobile, intelligent, minefields and they can be sited to catch an SSN but its a largely static defence and any SSN skipper worth his ticket would have plotted out likely ambush points before he slipped his moorings!
By flexible assets were, really, looking at four key weapons systems:
– First, and most important, competent SSNs of their own. This complicates the tactical picture for an attacking SSN immeasurably. Simply because a threat can be posed to an attacking SSN anywhere on the transit to theatre and you have the ability to threaten lines of supply and engage in aggressive sea denial.
– Second. Competetive ASW aircraft in numbers. The quickdraw asset to chase down SOSUS or SURTASS contacts at range or outside surface patrol zones. These aircraft need to be high-endurance and fitted with multi-channel sonobuoy processing capability in addition to a decent radar, competent ESM and a good EO/IR system!.
– Third. Choppers in numbers. The type is only important from the perspective of payload/range and endurance. Obviously a modern low maintenance airframe would be a bonus from a mission uptime standpoint. The most important component of the helicopter would be an advanced dipping sonar of the HELRAS or FLASH type as well as carriage capacity for a couple of decent LWTs.
– Fourth. Helicopter optimised ASW escorts. Simply for deployment and operation of the above. Optimum solution would be a circa 7k ton DDH capable of embarking and supporting three or four NH90-sized choppers, fitted with a active low-frequency towed array, armament sufficient for self-protection and CODLAG propulsion to minimise ownship accoustic signature. Netcentric master capability would be useful to allow for a pair of DDH units to act as centrepieces for ASW hunting-groups built up with lighter GP escorts.
Significant dollar values for all that to be sure and we’ve not even addressed to C3I backend and satcomms infrastructure that would be required to integrate it all into one coherent ASW plan. Those are the components I’d want to shore-up my coastline and maritime interests from the kind of advanced SSN/SSK intervention you mentioned.
JonesyHyper,
Yep Sevs quite right that second photo appears to show the back end of a pair of Yuting Class LSTs. The stern doors in the shot are the rear roll-on/roll-off ramps. Its a bit clearer in the shot below:
Picture credit: Global Security.org
JonesyDoes anyone know how much we paid for these subs? I hope the savings were substantial compared to purchasing new subs from France such as Agosta’s.
The original contract value for all four vessels was £226million payable in an 8 year, no interest, lease-to-buy deal. They cost us over £900million to build. As earlier stated they have had and, tragically, are still having initial teething problems on a unit to unit basis but those problems aren’t really unusual. Ask any Aussie about the Collins boats and they paid a lot more than £56million per boat for theirs!.
An appraisal that balances out what some of the sensationalist media likes to churn out: http://www.cda-cdai.ca/symposia/2000/mckinley.htm
JonesyHas to be life in other parts of the universe. The correct mixture of chemicals, solar energy, planetary mass and all the rest of the factors that brought about life here cant be unique when you look at the number of sol size and intensity type stars that are dotted about.
As to UFO’s visiting this planet I’m afraid I don’t believe a bit of it!. These craft, allegedly, are making clandestine landings here and discrete observations of us?. Why then is the almost universal feature of these extraterrestrial craft great big flashing lights all over the hulls? We dont put two dozen high power multicolour strobe lights all over our recon aircraft before sending them on a mission do we?.
JonesyA terrible shock considering early reports and the, apparent, low-intensity nature of the emergency.
There will have to be a thorough inquest now as to why such a fatally injured man wasn’t lifted off the boat days ago in line with standard procedure. Injured sailors, that close to a friendly coastline, should not die under any circumstances whatsoever. 😡
Respects to those still on patrol.
JonesyWeapons are the Mark48 mod4 HWTs IIRC. Last I heard they didnt have ADCAP though there were rumours the US was planning to sell them some. The boat can embark 18 weapons.
To operate these they are transferring the old SFCS Mk 1 FCS from their retired Oberon Class boats, something I believe they’ve found real problems in achieving. I dont think the sensor fit is much changed from that in RN service with the Type2040 bow active/passive array, a 2007 flank array and a 2019 intercept sonar. They have replaced the older 2026 towed array with the Hermes (Ultra) MUSL system. Very comprehensive fitout.
JonesyThe Canadians have operated British designed subs for decades and they are real professionals. The waters they routinely sail in are ROUGH and that environment produces some very good sailors. Their indigenously designed vessels – the Annapolis, Tribal and Halifax classes – are all well known for their excellent seakeeping qualities. They know a thing or two about boats then!.
Now it is being proposed that after a year of post-refit shakedown and sea trials the Canadians didnt notice that the boat was chronically mechnically unsound?. Please!. The Canadians accepted the boat officially into their fleet after the trials then embarked on transit to Nova Scotia. Guess what – you dont do that with a mechanically unsound vessel!.
Regarding the other vessels of the class I’ve read some of the defects listed in the media and they are things like split periscope shaft seals and signal ejector valve seals!. Wear and tear items that do fail and are the sort of things that are checked under routine operational maintenance schedules as opposed to being done alongside in the yard.
The 4 subs are not crap by a long way. They are just suffering the effects of having been laid up for too long without proper reserve maintenance – which was because they were not being held in operational reserve!. Let the Canadians run them operationally for a while and work out the remaining bugs and you’ll find that they’ve got 4 first rate SSK’s – perfectly suited for their environment and operational patterns – for a couple of hundred mill. Bargain!.
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