JonesySorry mate not ment as a jibe/ Low blow/ Flame bait etc not to the servicemen or and women and anyone else in the UK except the people who are making the dicisions and like i said it irks me to a large extent. ( maybe its a manisfestation of my dislike for his domestic policies towards students and his contempt of Ordinary British Citizen).
Matt,
Point 1 – Its great to see you back onboard here mate.
Point 2 – I wasnt clear in what I wrote. I meant that I agree with you that it really does look like the Heath Government ran a ‘very-British’ ethnic cleansing campaign and that is absolutely disgusting. All I took issue with was the slightly selective nature of the Pilger report that was initially posted.
JonesyYoure not the first to ask that question Google!.
“Canada Warship Seizes Tanker in Arabian Sea” — Reuters, Feb. 8, 2002
CANADIAN WARSHIP SEIZES TANKER IN… WAIT…CANADA HAS A WARSHIP?
Oh Right, and Switzerland Has Nuclear WeaponsArabian Sea (SatireWire.com) — Canadian television reported Friday that a Canadian warship in the Arabian Sea had seized a tanker suspected of smuggling oil from Iraq, leading many to suspect that the report was a hoax.
“You’re kidding, right? Canada has a warship?” asked U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. “Like for war?
“Does Canada know?” he added.
“Nobody was more stunned than we were,” said Kali Omari, first mate of the seized vessel. “We saw this frigate steaming toward us, and we were worried, but then we saw the maple leaf on the flag, and we thought, ‘Oh, Canadians. What the hell do they want?'”
When an officer of the HMCS Vancouver announced that the tanker was about to be boarded, the crew of the detained ship was confused, said Omari, but their confusion quickly turned to anger when they saw what the Canadians sailors were carrying.
“They were armed. With guns,” said Omari. “Canadians. With guns. And a warship. What is this world coming to?”
“They were pretty rude, too,” Omari added. “They started asking us all sorts of questions, like ‘Where did that oil come from?’ But first we wanted to know who gave them the damn warship.”
According to Canadian defense officials, the Vancouver is one of four frigates deployed in the region to assist in the U.S.-led Afghanistan conflict. The tanker was stopped, officials said, because its cargo of crude oil violated United Nations sanctions, which prohibit Iraq from selling oil unless in exchange for food and medicine.
The U.N. said the incident is already under investigation, and promised swift action against those found responsible for giving the Canadians guns. Initial findings indicate that the Vancouver crew may have been watching too many American television shows.
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Copyright © 2002, SatireWire.
It is of course in poor taste to mock the Canadians while there lads are adrift and doubtless feeling rather miserable in the North Sea. They’re big lads though and as my PO once informed me (after a unilateral left wheel on command right wheel) ‘the service is one for grown-ups, kiddies stay the other side of the gates in playschool’ 😎
JonesyThe RN operates the LR5 Submarine Rescue System (http://www.naval-technology.com/projects/lr5/index.html). It is a little bit premature to equate this incident with the Kursk though.
From this report: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/3717906.stm it seems that there was some form of electrical fire aboard that was relatively quickly contained. 3 men needing treatment for smoke inhalation are the only listed casualties and those haven’t needed to be taken off the boat.
She’s not at risk now but is on the surface and has not got propulsion. The RN’s duty TA escort and a fleet tug are enroute to render assistance though.
Seeings as she’s recently competed a year long period of sea trials this is a very strange event. Upholder was the leadship of the class and launched in 1986 so it is possible that were looking at a simple component failure after the exertions of the sea trials. Dont know of a single submarine thats not vulnerable to that kind of incident!
JonesyAmazing how accurate those ethnic cleansing jibes seem to the mark isnt it?. 😡
I distrust the Pilger article to an extent though as it seems to accentuate the fact that the islanders just got ‘dumped on the docks’ in Mauritius without mentioning the fact that the UK Govt of the day did pay the Mauritius Govt £3million (fair old sum back then) towards the cost of resettling the evictee’s!. Not that that kind of compensation for dragging them off their land in such a fashion makes it any better of course, but, for the article not to reflect the fact does damage Pilgers credibility for me.
Then again though seeings as the UK Gov got an £11mill discount on the Polaris system out of the Diego Garcia deal it was bloody well obliged to offer some kind of compensation!
JonesyWouldn’t photography/camera technicals come under the heading of general discussion?. I’ve certainly seen Snapper and his disciples discussing those kinds of topics over at GD!.
Admittedly you will have to wade through the dross over there to find a decent thread, but, starting a few constructive threads about something some of the inmates over there are well versed in might be theraputic for them.
You might almost be doing a public service! 🙂
JonesyNaval heli ops are finished and we`ll probably never see them again
Unfortunately I would have to agree with that assessment. From what I was told, from a guy claiming to have served in the Irish Naval Service, the LE Eithne had major problems operating a chopper for any length of time. The story he told was that the ships Avcat tanks were badly located, next to one of the machinery spaces IIRC, and they found that they got heavy condensation contamination in the fuel. After even a short time on deployment the fuel was too heavily contaminated for use so chopper ops were never all that successful!.
JonesyIn the second shot is also one of their new NUMC project ‘Cigala Fulgosi’ class OPV’s.
One thing you have to say for the Italians – they do build ’em pretty!
JonesyPlus there are the immensely powerful Impeccable and Victorious class SURTASS ships the USN operate.
picture credit: Hazegray.org
Plus the Japanese twins of those vessels – the Hibiki Class
picture credit: Japanese Govt
Technically SWATH ships as opposed to Catamarans but still multihulls and very, very powerful units at that!.
JonesyIt’s easy to distinguish between a merchant ship and an aircraft carrier. You probably don’t need SAR for this. Beam sharpening is enough (good enough for TERCOM use also)
Who told you that Crobato?. Whoever it was needs to do some scope watching!. There are loads of examples of radar misidentification under operational conditions. Two that immediately spring to mind are the FAA SHAR FRS1 that mistook a merchantman for Invincible, on its Blue Fox, during the Falklands and commited to landing on it before he realised his mistake. The other, also during the Falklands, was the RAF Nimrod crew who reported holding radar contact with the Argentine 25deMayo northwest of the islands only, on dispatch of a SHAR to recce, for it to turn out to be a lone merchant.
Now you can say that the Blue Fox, as fitted to SHAR FRS1, was a fairly basic unit, but, the Nimrod was fitted with the, excellent, Racal Searchwater set. There is nothing startlingly new about it radar just has certain limitations.
If you want to target small fry, use a smaller missile.
Interesting – how many military naval targets in the SE Asian theatre, PLAN included, aren’t ‘small fry’?.
It only needs to distinguish between large vs. small, then attack the large one.
Always amuses me that people assume that an aircraft carrier is the largest thing to be found afloat!. There are lots of vessels bigger than even US CVN’s out there Crobato.
JonesyWhat designation?
I dont think there would be a designator for a plastic model of the Xia class SSBN!?. Shame really as, by all accounts, the model is probably the superior, certainly safer, vessel to attempt to go to sea on!.
JonesyJon,
its onboard computer system is capable of identifying the target and id it from its database so there is little chance that it will lock onto merchant vessel, thats one of the reason yakhont was ran into diffculties, because russians had problems devoloping a small computer system for it.
Sorry Jon I’d need to see some very solid proof of THAT before I’d believe it!. What you are proposing there is that the seeker has an inverse synthetic apeture mode plus an image processor and can paint a target, process the image, make the distinction between a valid target and a false one and THEN set itself on the correct vector to attack a legitimate target before dropping to wavetop height all within a couple of seconds popup window on its lo-lo-lo profile. That would be even more of a technological leap than the aerodynamic feats advertised for the weapon.
I know of another seeker that has limited ISAR capability and there are several UAV’s that can carry a SAR/ISAR system, but, none of those have to try and function on a mach2.8 air vehicle under the conditions and constraints that this would have to perform in!.
Technically, Jon, what you are suggesting is a missile that would be so advanced over Harpoon, Exocet or even Moskit as to be like the difference between a P-51 and an F-22!
JonesyThat’s why MRAs and MPAs got the SAR and ISAR modes on their main radars. Not just to see a blip but to actually see the shape of the ship and match it up with the library. Of course the fidelity of the SAR/ISAR image depends on the radar and accompanying system but the capability does exist to discretize contacts to a large, albeit crude, degree.
Right you are Victor but you should phrase that as MRA/MPA’s are ‘getting’ SAR and ISAR processor equipped radars. Really the operational deployment of these systems is only a recent development within the last 5 years or so and, from the top of my head, only the AIP’d P-3’s have it deployed with any kind of track record. The Nimrod MRA4’s will have the Searchwater 2000MR with SAR/ISAR and obviously the Sea Dragon fits a new system entirely to the Il-38 but both are still very much in the works as far as I can tell!
Even when everything is fully operational SAR, like you said – dependent on the system, still requires the carrying platform the close with the target to get decent resolution. Isnt the Indian requirement for a system that provides a confirmed detection at 150km? Sounds reasonable in any case. Either way those IN MAY’s are going to be bloody busy over those waters and it makes that Heron UAV purchase start to look inspired – those will make a large difference!
The gradual but steady move towards stand-off weapons wouldn’t be occuring if there wasn’t a concurrent move towards greater sensor capability at being able to discretize targets at stand-off ranges.
Dont kid yourself Victor long-range standoff weapons have been around for decades. The difference is that now the limitations of those systems in terms of targetting have been shown for what they always were and, with more widespread proliferation of that type of weapon, that defecit is having to be addressed.
JonesyPLA
Indian forces are using the Brahmos fully potential. Air, land and sea based. But how much can the target do to avoid destruction?
Simple. Avoid open water clear of neutral traffic!. Wherever possible merge your group in with commercial shipping lanes, run on nav radars only and passive sensors only, chart a course through/near an island chain (should one be handy).
No-one, in the era of CNN warfare, is likely to shoot a 300km active-radar homer into an area where the seeker may inadvertently lockup a neutral merchant, or worse, without a clear idea of what they were shooting at – hopefully!. Making that process more difficult for the missile shooter is likely to forestall his missile release until he can seperate the wolf from the sheep and, if the surface commander is smart, he can make life very exciting for the platform trying for the positive ID.
There are also a lot of deceptive measures that a surface group commander can take to throw surveillance systems off. The famous example of this was when a small RN taskforce comprised of a County class destroyer and three frigates managed to sneak up on the USS Coral Sea, in the Arabian gulf (somewhat ironically), and her battlegroup to a sufficient range to simulate the release 4 MM38’s into the carrier!.
In fairness to the Indian missile system though these measures are equally effective against any force attacking with virtually any active radar homing missile.
JonesyHopefully Garry, Harry or Vympel will jump in on this one but it was my understanding that the Brahmos missile is an ‘Indianised’ version of the Yakhont missile. Yakhont being fully developed previously by the Russians and accepted into service, by them, in its original configuration?.
The deal signed was 50/50 for the development of the Indian version and further development of the basic airframe i.e for precision land attack etc. The Indians getting a nice deal in missile technology out of the arrangement and the Russians getting an additional source of R&D investment and Indian assistance in opening potential new markets and promotion.
I think it would be very much appreciated if someone could clarify this?!.
JonesyHand painted as far as I know. Primer coat of good old ‘red lead’ and a top coat of grey over it. Make and mends and away with the bosuns chair and all that!. Bloody glad I missed out on it! 😀
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