Any chance you can delete this thread and drop it in over on the Military aircraft board Haley? 😎

They were example of how not to build vessels because of their awful of damage control to some extent the same applied to Perry’s as well which had little provisions to handle fire or damage.

Sorry Jon but that is just not right. The Type42 had design issues thats for damn sure. The US FFG-7 design poor on DC though?. Wherever did you hear that?. I cant think of a single US design that hasn’t been very strong on damage control and limitation since WWII!. Where’s Ja Worsley when you need him!. IIRC he’s served on the RAN Perry’s ask him what DC provisions and drills were like on that design!.

This is the size of the hole, and secondary damage, done to the USS Stark. There are not many 4000ton vessels that this kind of damage would not put right out of the fight no matter how good their DC or design resilience is.

withstand multiple subsonic ashm hits and remain operational as we saw with USS cole with withstood and remained operational even after 500 kgs of C4 going off by its hull.

You mean the USS Cole that came home like this:

…and had to be towed stern first to get in into position on the transporter?. She may have had some operational capability in that she could probably still shoot, but, she wasnt steaming anywhere!

Codrix,

Just a small hint. Read thoroughly through what you post before you post it!

Long post now Harry so posting frequency not going to be too high ok!

Higher speed also translates to a lower time period of exposure. Plus, are you also saying that supersonic shock waves actually attract precipitation? When it comes to passive threats wrt the sea state, all sea skimmers are vulnerable.

What were talking about here though isnt a weapon that just drops down to 20ft for the last 20k or so of the flight profile!. The article says it makes the entire 120km lo-lo transit at 2.8 and, you say, 15ft off the water. Thats 3 minutes blasting through boundary-layer air not just a few seconds. As I said we had problems with Sea Dart up to, just, the radar horizon when flying a flat trajectory at a slightly safer altitude than your proposing for Brahmos. The 909 FCR had a whole shipload of processing power behind it to flatten out multipath too (remember by 93 GWS30 had been upgraded to better cope with low-angle shots). A supersonic shockwave does not shield a missile body that much through such heavy air.

As for the seekers, even the early ARGS-35E has been proven to be effective under Sea State 6, 8 mm/hr precipitation and -+50 deg. C of ambient temperature.

OK this is the kind of detail I wanted. You say its effective under SS6 – how far under does it have to be?, against what size a target near SS6? Under what EW conditions was the target engaged at? What range did the seeker aquire target under those metoc conditions?. You see Harry its not near enough to say ‘well the seeker has advanced ECCM so therefore it WILL blast all India’s enemies from the sea’. India especially is making some fairly wild claims for this missile and the ball is very much in her court to prove it delivers. Frankly, I’ve yet to see anything convincing.

What else does Mach 2.8 offer against a slower transonic missile? Lower and a stable coefficient of Parasite Drag.

Always nice to meet another person fluent in technogibberish ‘lower and a stable coefficient of parasitic drag’- you mean a projectile flies steadier the faster it goes! :D. I dont think even I’m that bad!?.

Excuse me? Are you actually saying that an AsHM can’t perform proper signal processing, discrimination, ECCM and IFF (especially when there is extra space for PEs and the targets belonging to the low mobility and high RCS type)?

I didnt say cant. I said it would be inconceivable that the seeker could be as descriminating as that on an equal-generation subsonic weapon owing to the very restricted dwell time the seeker has to make its track determinations. Ultimately that means the weapon is more susceptible to softkill countermeasures. An irony seeings as its the factor reducing its vulnerability to CIWS that increases its vulnerability to softkill!.

I also assume that you imagine the Brahmos making AAM-like manuvers but the terminal level zig zags are not of the same scale. Still, low turn rates at Mach 2.8 themselves translate to relatively high-Gs, assumed good enough to defeat the CIWS or SAM.

Dont know how a Barak engagement cycle goes but the standard engagement profile for SeaWolf fires two missiles in salvo at one inbound. PK against diving Soviet heavyweight missiles was determined as being well into the .9s and they were just as supersonic as hell.

Chaff and active jamming are nothing new and neither are the counter-counter meaures to them. RBC can theoretically mimick 10x times the RCS of the host a/c but they can still be countered by AAMs with comparatively small, low power seekers and limited PEs.

Of course Harry but you are being just the slightest generalistic there. The argument could just as easily be made that ECCM techniques have been around for a good two decades and so far, from operational evidence, ECM and decoys have proven effective against active radar homers.

How can they misinterpret themselves? Under Sea State 1-2, 10-15 feet ASL does’nt seem that chimerical.

I cant disagree with that, but, what are the probabilities of conditions less than Sea State 2 in the Indian Ocean to use 10-15ft ASL?. Just to clarify that Sea State 2 means Waves less than 2ft and mean wind speeds less than 10knts!?. Last time I did some pleasure sailing on Lake Windermere the conditions were worse than that!.

In the case of the Sheffeild, it was’nt the warhead nor the explosive KE of the very modest AM39 but the still burning rocket motor which started a fire on the aluminium hulled warship which was afloat for quite a while before going down. The Stark survived. Older, smaller, less well built warships are known to have taken several Styx hits before going down.

Whats this fascination with sending ships to the bottom?. What does it matter if the target sinks or not? The effect you are aiming for is to knock the target warship out of the fight. The Sheffield’s fate was obvious and the USS Stark was left afloat but with 58 men dead and wounded and needing $142 million in make and mends. Is that not enough?.

USS Stark post single AM39 detonation

There’s simply no comparison. The Kh-35 too, flies on inertial nav before the terminal sea skimming run and it’s ARGS-35E has an effective range of 20 km. At long ranges from the target, detection of the Brahmos at high altitude (with seeker/emitter off) is less probable.

What?. At 80km from your ship you are suggesting that a 3000kg missile blasting along at Mach silly 40,000ft up is going to be a more difficult target to detect than a 500kg Uran tooling along at 600knts at 50ft or so? You can’t mean that Harry surely?.

I don’t know about that article but officially, the lo-lo run is supposed to be around half of the max 290 km range. But once again, when you’ve mentioned the 10 km difference with emphasis, it should also be noticed that the 130-135 km max range of the Uran, is also an advertised figure.

Well it was mainly the article that I was taking issue with. The difference that should be highlighted though is that subsonics exist that can do 140km at a couple of hundred ft dropping down to real wavetop height for the final 20k’s or so – this lending credibility to the claims for Uran. NOTHING exists that do Mach2.8 at 15ft ASL for 120-145km though.

No, the Su-30MKI will carry the air-launched Brahmos-A with a smaller and lighter booster. By ditching the solid fuel launch booster and adding the intial velocity of the carrier a/c, the 2.2-2.5 ton missile will acheive the same range. The 300 kg warhead remains unchanged. AAMs can still be carried.

Smaller and lighter booster that still gives an AUR weight of what 2300kg? So three of those still total 7000kg?. What does that do to the range/endurance/performance calculus for the airframe?. With 4 Urans on the airframe doesn’t the Sukhoi retain much more of its range, speed and self-escort capability? Is the Brahmos extra destructive capabilty worth the weight penalty on the Flanker?.

Three of these is a nightmare scenario.

Four Urans heading in are a nightmare scenario every bit as much though. Just because they are subsonic weapons you cant ignore them, flick the switch to turn on the CIWS and go back to your Playboy centrefold!. Remember a ‘dancer’ is much more likely to defeat softkill as the seeker has longer to sort out the target picture. Its terminal phase manoeverabilty is better – having the effect of increasing the angular deflection a tracker has to follow the target through thus tieing it up on a single target while a second or third missile closes. Not to mention the additional flexibility the launching platform has, in terms of unrefuelled action radius, so as to be able to fire from a less predictable threat axis.

the hard kill system could easily down it. Under a continous barrage, several units could be downed before an actual hit, if any, is made.

‘Easily’ is a very subjective term. I’ve seen Sea Wolf ‘easily’ down a supersonic inbound target. Maybe it wasnt changing its course by a couple of degrees or whatever these evasive manoevres are but the missile hit point of aim smack on!

Quote:
Naval chaff is used to form clouds which are sown and then reseeded by additional rockets/choppers in relative motion to the advance speed of a ship

Sounds like something that’d take more than a minute.

Not really. Even the current NATO ‘standard’ Mk36 chaff round will burst 2.5 seconds after launch and have fully formed its 10,000 sq.m RCS cloud within 30 seconds – that from just a single rocket. That is also just for reactive chaffing as well. Deception tactics depend on the tactical environment, but, are the subject of several quite thick texts and lots can be done to misdirect an opponent whilst he’s still in the targetting phase.

That’s yet to be proven and just how many missiles would constitute that saturation attack? 8? 10? 16? Like you said, they are not only vulnerable to the first layer but also to the second and third, even 2-3 hits are no guarantee. The Brahmos is a cleaner and more efficient operation and even works out cheaper when you compare the cost of the larger number of missiles required.

This is the whole point though Harry – hardkill defences against supersonic skimmers exist now. Against an opponent with carrier AEW your delivery platform is unlikely to get to 150km to launch a Brahmos lo-profile any more than a subsonic shooter would do to deliver its weapons. Against a frigate navy with an AEGIS/PAAMS AAW capability an individual Brahmos’ supersonic capabilities are no defence against ESSM or Aster15 type weapons – so saturation fire would be necessary to overwhelm the individual ships no different than for a subsonic weapon to be effective. Lastly against a more modest frigate navy without advanced AAW why would you need Brahmos at all when its defensive ability would be unlikely to defeat even saturation attacks with legacy AShMs?.

Even the early Harpoon upgrades with that ‘pop up’ maneuver during the terminal stages, are supposed to be effective.

The ‘Harpoon Hop’ isnt an evasive manoever. Neither was it an upgrade. The Harpoon was originally designed to allow US marpat aircraft to attack Soviet SSG’s/SSGNs on the surface whilst they were preparing their cruise missile shots. A straight in attack profile, it was realised, woud probably see the missile flying clean over the target. The hop was therefore programmed in so that the missile would hit the sub on such an angle as to do some damage.

Depends on the sea state conditions with which the flight profile varies. *Any*sea-skimming missile faces a threat from the same.

Yes Harry, I think I said that myself. I also said that a supersonic missile suffers much more acutely with this when flying at SUCH a low altitude simply due the higher speed. The RN used Sea Dart in a secondary surface to surface role (M2 ramjet low trajectory etc!) and we had lots of troubles with missile aerodynamics, seeker multipath (off the waves obviously) and even salt-encrustation on the intake and dipoles when trying to fire the weapon on a flat trajectory. In the end, last I knew of it in late 93, we were using a ballistic trajectory for the SSM role.

Regarding high reaction times of processing and servos, this is absolutely nothing new. Would you refuse to believe that the small Python-4/5 acheives 40+ G manuevers, with mere control surfaces, while at the same time, performing clutter rejection, CCM, profile discrimination, edge detection and tracking?

Not at all – I am perfectly willing to accept that a 100kg, solid rocket propelled, advanced IIR seeker missile is capable of the manoevres and the scene interpretation you list. I dont see quite how that correlates with a 3000kg ramjet active-radar weapon being able to discriminate between chaff, floating decoys, jamming returns, sea-returns, legitimate targets and non-combattant shipping whilst travelling at mach 2-point-daft and pulling “high-G” manoevres all over the sky!. One sounds quite plausible and the other doesnt!.

So it’s agreed that active radar seekers don’t translate to the death of the missile?

Not immediately anyway!. An ARH does provide a sporting warning to the target ship that bad news is on the way though.

Either way, surface warships are very large RCS targets, especially with constantly tracking high power emitters.

…and offboard decoys try very hard to look like small, RF silent, floats instead of the large RCS active RF target that theyre meant to be mimicking!. Its also possible to ‘meddle’ with a ships RCS to make a seeker misinterpret its aspect and position.

Plus if the Moskit (a relatively more draggy airframe) itself was capable of terminal altitudes of 23 feet or less…

Well 23ft makes a lot more sense to me than 10ft. The true sea-level speeds I’ve seen listed for Moskit are closer to 1.8 dropping down into the region of 1.4 with manoeuvres. So lower absolute speed, coupled with a marginally higher flight envelope and a seeker package backed up by LIGHT BULB datalink control from the launching vessel makes the weapon a very different proposition than Brahmos.

The Sea Eagle is advertised with a very advanced warhead aimed to cripple the largest surface warships? Have you actually seen it work?

Seen the seeker – not the warhead from Sea Eagle. I take your point though.

Have you ever witnessed a CIWS destroying an incoming missile?

Do firepower demonstration videos count?. If so then I’ve seen Goalkeeper, Phalanx and SeaWolf intercepting targets.

The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. The said features are design parameters confirmed by DRDO and quoted by Dr.Sivathanu Pillai and Dr.HA Yefremov, the respective heads. You seem to treat superior performance as impossible. When they emphasise speed, warhead, low RCS and range, they talk about the salient features but not every single feature.

Neither of the gentlemen you mention, nor the DRDO, nor the Russians have a strong reason to correct any ‘misinterpretations’ that may leak out into the public domain have they?. Take the M2.8 at altitude and at sea-level differential as an example. All I suggest is that this is SUCH a leap in capability, even for the Russians, that a conservative person with an engineering background would like to see a lot more than the advertising before blindly swallowing it!.

Did’nt we already discuss this? How would 4 subsonic Kh-35s be better than 3 Brahmos-A? As it is, multiple rounds of the former would be needed to cause any meaningful damage as opposed to a single Brahmos round, which is more likely to actually reach ground zero.

We discussed the fact that a single Brahmos will do more damage than a single subskimmer. We also discussed the fact that a single subskimmer has, in at least two instances with even the very modest AM39, rendered circa 4000ton target vessels combat ineffective. We’ve also noted that, using Brahmos’s low-altitude attack profile, the difference in release range between it and a subsonic weapon like Kh-35 is marginal – in fact using the figures in the article (which is what we are discussing) Brahmos has to be released 10km nearer to target than Uran!.

Another thing is that the Brahmos is very ideal for it’s intended airborne platforms due to their size and weight class – 3 Brahmos on the Su-30MKI, 6 on the Tu-142, ? on the Il-38, without imposing serious weight and aerodynamic penalties.

Now I’ve never claimed to be an aviation expert, but, from what I’ve read the maximum external load for a Su-30MKI is 8000kgs. 3 x 3000kg missiles makes 9000kgs by my calculation?. I did see an article in Flight Int. that said a modified Su-30MKI had tested a 3 Brahmos configuration. So rather than use four 500kg Kh-35’s and have lots of payload left for additional fuel and self-protection AAM’s on, presumably, a standard airframe India has actually had to modify an Su-30 to get the right configuration. That effort and expense netting what precise advantage?. A higher amount of damage per single hit? Is that worth the time and expense?.

I’m aware and totally agree on the passive approach but once the missile is tracked (inevitable and the control surfaces are fairly large), it can get shot down by SAM or CIWS. While the first layer could be penetrated, the second layer also has to be. With the slow subsonic speed, there’s sufficient time to prep.

It is quite a simple equation though Harry. It is very, very much easier to defeat a missile you know is coming. That goes for primary or secondary air defence layers. If the first indication the target ship gets is when the inbound crosses the radar horizon (about 16nm from an 80ft masthead sensor) even if travelling at a mere 600knts the reaction time is about 96 seconds to impact from initial detection. 96 seconds to defeat weapons that, in the case of the Kongsberg weapon, are immune to RF jamming or chaff, immune to floating IR centroid decoys or flares and can be programmed to follow independant deception courses to target or dogleg around to attack targets from multiple axis simultaneously. 16 NSMs coming in on two threat axis simultaneously would overwhelm most ships sufficient to get at least 4 or 6 missiles striking home and, given the Su-30MKI load carrying capability, you could probably put eight NSM’s on MER’s under its wings and have little over the airframe loading of a single Brahmos round!.

Finally, regarding future prospects, while IIR seekers can be developed for the Brahmos (and they are, in modular packages), turning the NSM into a supersonic AsHM is a different matter.

Fair point but there is no IIR seeker for Yakhont/Brahmos yet and no guarantee that they will be successful.

…there’s more space inside for PEs and an enormous amount of chaff would also be needed to divert attention off the warship. Some airborne jammers are fairly high power too. Operation against Sea clutter is an area that was worked on for decades.

Naval chaff deployment is almost an art form all by itself. Chaff isnt dispensed by a warship the same as it is by an aircraft. Naval chaff is used to form clouds which are sown and then reseeded by additional rockets/choppers in relative motion to the advance speed of a ship. It can be used as a barrier countermeasure or for seduction by being dispensed subtlely off the parent ships course track. This, used in conjunction with active decoys and jamming, can be a very powerful defence against ARH seekers. Of course it doesnt look as sexy as hardkill so most people seem to downplay its place in a ships inventory!?.

AAMs also need to differentiate from ground clutter in look-down against low altitude targets.

…and that is a simple task for an AAM and is an attack mode that returns as high a pk as a coaltitude or lookup launch?. See the point?
We are’nt talking about mere overwhelming but evading interception by the CIWS and SAM. ECCM and clutter rejection are hardly new ventures and have been greatly advanced. Even superior algorithms can provide marginal improvements, especially when we talk of a distinct and juicy target like a warship. In a sea skimming profile, the seeker need not be looking all the way down either.

Your an exponent of Russian weaponry but dont see the advantage, in this case, of simple numbers over an overkill technical solution?!. Forgive me if I enjoy the irony of that for a while!. Simply I do not see the need for the supersonic attack profile when simple saturation attack will do an equivalent job more efficiently.

Jon,

They used the Sea Petrel rocket with signal augmenters to simulate the Soviet heavy aeroballistic weapons. Could I swear to the fact that those rockets attained precisely Mach2.8 – no I couldnt. We were told that they exceeded M2 though.

I think in this case that the differential between intercepting a Petrel rocket on a depressed ballistic arc at M2 and a Brahmos flying straight and level at 2.8 is relatively minor one. Fact remains, Jon, that a straight and level flight profile at 40,000 even at 2100 plus mph is not an unattainable target by any stetch of the imagination. Not even to a 30 year old system like GWS30.

Harry,

But then again, you’re not referring to Brahmos specific flight performances are you?

No I suppose not. I’d seriously doubt any missile system that boasted 2100mph at 10ft ASL over oceanic conditions for any kind of flight duration.

Simply put the reaction times of radar altimeters, actuators and control logic have to be razor-sharp to keep the things out of the water at high subsonic speeds – multiplying that speed by a factor of three means that a single spurious event – a large-ish wave or slight fault in a servo – will likely see the weapon in kit form in the oggin!.

Mach 2.8 is the constant velocity throughout the flight.

Just what I thought. M2.8 at altitude reducing down by aerodynamic drag when it hits sea-level. I know you haven’t said that, but, I’ve seen nothing that says M2.8 at sea-level anywhere. Moskit isnt a Mach2 jobby at sea level either despite what you read from popular sources.

Uh? Destroyers have a typical RCS of 3000 sq.m. In addition, it’s not just the power o/p of the radar but it’s antenna (dia and gain) and signal processing power as well. With a diameter of 670 mm, it can accomodate a fairly large seeker.

Uh? At what aspect do we have our 3000 sq.m RCS? Is it the same bows-on and broad aspect. Nope. There is A LOT more to the process of target selection than it being just a function of antenna diameter and seeker output. The main part of it, coupled to the processing power you state, is the seeker dwell. Track forming and rejection does take a finite amount of time however clever your ECCM algorythms.

Less aerodynamic airframes such as the Moskit have been doing it for years. The Brahmos has been tested for it’s attack profile. ‘Disbelief’ is your own perspective.

Hmmm Moskit doesn’t do ‘M2.8’ in the terminal phase. Neither does it do wild ‘High G’ manoevres. A 10g pull-up and roll is about its limit and that comes at the price of sacrificing terminal velocity.

Have you seen any instrumented footage of a Brahmos missile racing along the wavetops at M3 or, sorry, 2.8 or performing high-g manoevres?. If not then isnt ‘belief’ just your perspective? 😉 . Like I said when I see it I’ll believe it – until then I remember all the Moskit hype and how that weapon turned out to be a little less than advertised and much closer to the known technological limits of the players involved.

Do you actually expect the missile designer to disregard the CIWS and hard kill systems? They may not be needed everytime but offer a high degree of guarantee. This is exactly why the high speed and high-G terminal maneuvers are needed for penetration. In the case of the ever-so-hyped NSM, nothing can be done to prevent it from getting shot down by the CIWS.

Of course I dont and the best way to ensure a strike on target in the face of modern CIWS is simply to overload it. This is universally appreciated. Look at what Indian73 wrote about putting 12 missiles down a single threat bearing to overload an APAR or SPY-1/SPG equipped ship. What I’m saying is that each of those Su-30’s carrying 4 Kh-35’s or Sea Eagles would be every bit as capable of saturating the target defences as if they were carrying Brahmos. The aircraft would probably be able to stage out quite a bit farther not carrying 9 tonnes of antiship missiles into the bargain!.

The thing that you dont get with NSM, that gives it such a clear advantage over Brahmos, is that it is entirely passive. Yes its subsonic, yes its small, and yes it wont make anywhere near as big a ‘bang’ as Brahmos, BUT, its small enough to be truly low-observable in RCS and IR terms plus it doesnt alert the target by broadcasting its arrival to every vessel with a decent ESM kit. Remember HMS Sheffield they didnt know a missile was on the way and they got hit for it. Every other time an Exocet was used in that action the target ship knew the inbound was on the way and decoyed successfully.

With NSM the target vessel need never know a missile was on the way to defend against. That is a real advantage.

That area could most certainly be addressed by superior signal processing and what you’ve mentioned is a very small percentage of the flight time. Older seekers like the ARGS-54E have proven abilities to select/discrimate targets while under supersonic flight, even in large groups. Heck, even modern active radar AAMs have it.

You are not comparing an active radar seeker from an AAM to an AShM are you? Just because an AAM ARH can hit an aircraft in the middle of a few chaff clouds and some, fairly, low-powered jamming does not mean that individual ship targets can be picked out of a cluttered sea-picture in the face of heavy offboard decoying and jamming!.

The areas of ECCM and target discrimination are far easier to work with and address compared to addressing vulnerability against interception.

You have that 100% backwards Harry. Overwhelming target defenses is a function of getting more weapons on target that the defensive systems can cope with. Picking out hostile surface targets in a clutter environment amidst decoys and jamming is a very, very different matter.

.

Sounds a bit like a Brahmos sales pitch that one doesnt it! :rolleyes:

Sea-Skiming profile: To avoide anti-missile defence Brahmos remains at an altitude of 10-15 from launch to impact. Range achieved is about 120kms.

Mach 2 @ 45ftASL for 120km. Sounds a lot like the alleged poor-relation Moskit to me!.

Maximum range profile: 290kms distance is achieved in lo/hi/lo flight profile. On launch it climbs to 14000-15000m for cruise phase. 40 kms away from the target it decends to sea skimming altitude.

A weapon, at 40,000ft, 40kms from target is inside the lethal envelope of even a GWS30 Sea Dart missile!. Against a competetive AAW escort that means only the lo-lo-lo profile is an option. That means the launching platform is going to have to close to 120km for release. A range almost identical to that of an air-launched Harpoon or Sea Eagle. This would seemingly debunk the theory that Brahmos will allow for greater security for IN/IAF assets by allowing them long-range standoff attacks against high-threat targets.

In case os of sea skimming profile missile starts radar search and achieve lock-on upon “popping up” from under the radar range which is about 25 kms.

Apart from the small point that the launching platform, just 120kms away, has a better than even chance of having been detected on its attack profile preparing to release the missile. The defending vessel(s) should be fully prepared for the inbound therefore and, if they are alert and under defence watch conditions, would probably already have countermeasures deployed.

In the lo/hi/lo profile it performs a first short radar search at a range of 50 km to verify target position and then reverts to inertial navigation in radar silence for the descent phase to sea skimming attack run before switching the radar on again at closer range

So any target ship equipped with a 150km range air-search set or better will see a high-altitude mach2 inbound on its scope that emits active seeker pulses at 50km then drops off the scope at 40km. Theyre going to be deploying countermeasures as soon as it lights up its seeker! Even at M2.0 the missile is still a minute away when it drops down to sea-skimming profile. Not long enough to get out of a seeker FoV, but, very much long enough to deploy decoys and warm up jammers and hardkill systems.

There is no provision of in-flight data updates via data link from launch or airborne platform. Its estimated that Brahmos can perform both active or passive homing modes. passive modes like anti-radiation or home-on-jam.

So there is no target-update capability on this weapon like the earlier Moskit has through its datalink. Also the weapon is potentially vulnerable to offboard radar jamming decoys. Interesting.

On shore attack mode the seeker can detect large structures or DRDO has developed navigation and flight control computers to guide missile to precision impact against fixed targets (capability already tested).

So DRDO has developed an INS (‘flight control computers’???) so accurate that the missile, in land-attack role, requires no terminal seeker assistance for a “precision” strike?. Wow! :rolleyes:

This is all assuming that everything has to be done in the exactly way the Burke & Congo are set up.

China could be using vacumn tube technology. How do you know it’s not active but passive?

Why would you assume there isnt very specific technical reasons why SPY-1 ships are the way they are???.

SPY-1 is a PPAR. SPY-1 has SIGNIFICANT power requirements and require very significant installations to support each array. This forces a superstructure mounting and not the optimal masthead mounting that a real active array like APAR/MESAR can take.

Very simply put the air defence threat facing these warships is exactly the same as that which has driven warship design in other navies. The need to counter saturation subskimmers and the occaisional supersonic inbound. To do this most of the rest of us have arrived at the idea that sticking a lighter array, when technology allows it, on the masthead pushes back the radar horizon and allows your MFR to develop a track as early as possible in the engagement cycle – this allowing for a greater engagement window as a natural byproduct.

Now, unless the miracles of Chinese technology has allowed them to repeal several fairly solid laws of physics, the arrays on the new PLAN DDG are too low to be able to replicate the radar-horizon trick a masthead can do. The point becomes therefore IF these arrays ARE APAR’s the Chinese are spectacularly stupid for siting them where they have on the ship. Your call!?

We’ll call it a PAR for now

Fair enough – call it what you will! 😀 .Its still a passive scanned array!.