it takes everyone awhile to accept that this discussion is PURELY ACADEMIC doesn’t it? hehe… this thing is explicitly and unabashedly unrealistic, and we’re just doing it for interest’s sake. the rest of the world isn’t taken into consideration at all! not the world economy, not Wal-Mart, not india. and the F**king treehuggers don’t count also, so no talk about the environmental effects of sunken ships or oil spills or dead fishes unless they affect sonar performance or something.
well crobato, the point here isn’t to just sink chinese ships and make sure SK and Jap ships are unscathed. the intention basically is to see how chinese maritime trade can be crippled with the small RN SSN fleet. sinking ships isn’t the only way to do that, you just have to prevent the ships from offloading at ports. and there are lots of ways to carry that out without having to eyeball a merchantman’s flag with your periscope. that i must admit is quite risky for an SSN…
to add on to Severodinsk’s idea, imagine a few tomahawks hitting a place crawling with pipes full of highly flammable susbstances. if the port doesn’t just blow up to kingdom come, most of it will at least be on fire, and we all know fires in places filled with crude oil are enormously difficult to put out. iraqi oil well fires take weeks to put out! so a few tomahawks will disable a port for weeks, and the blown-up and sunken hulks of tankers will block up the place and be really hard to remove. in fact blowing up a few big ships at strategically important points in port approaches may be just as effective as roaming the south china sea sinking tankers. the big sunken hulks will be even harder to clear than minefields, and probably will restrict port access to all except small shallow draft vessels. i have to say i know little about maritime stuff like this tho, so you pros pls critique as u like!
Sign In
