from my point of view Alfonso Figueroa’s posting is very subjective with the goal to show of aegis/spy1 as the superior system.
e.g. he critizie apar/smart-l only because smart-l as a rotator may mechanically fail. what will happen if a mk-99 fails during an interception?

@7seas: do you have some more information on the SeaGiraffe AMB like rpm’s, weight and range?

afaik both empar and herakles are running with 60 rpm which provides an update every second. there should be no need to stop the radar for firing the aster family.

Sir, the sonar station has detected a Torpedo…

All ahead flank speed…

1 minute later:

Sir I have located the torpedo with my binoculars… it is dead ahead and closing fast…

i’m not sure that you really know the difference.

Yet proximity fuses are in production for it and similar weapons world wide… new Russian fire control radars even offer closed loop tracking for large calibre guns from 30mm up…

maybe we should make a vote if a mk45 gun mount is a effective aaw-system or not 😉
i think if i claim that the earth is a spehre, you would claim that it is a disc, only to say the opposite.

So they’d be useless against subs too I guess as firing off depth charges on a bearing without range would be useless for torpedos and subs… but then a sub at slow speed would be a much easier target to detect and track than a torpedo…

i do not understand this. you can not shot off your depth charge rockets without any range information. this has nothing to do with subs or torpedos or how easy a sub is detectable.

Says who? Mythology suggests some vampires can only be killed when in their coffins and trying to kill them elsewhere lets them turn into smoke and return renewed in their coffins…

you should stop making such absurd answers and give us some good reasons why rbu is that effective.
i’ve shown a lot of problems with torpedo defence like torpedo detection and localisation and why a depth charge solution like the rbu ist the worst way of doing torpedo defence.
so what exactly makes the rbu-6000 a good and effective torpedo defence system? why does it seems that the russian navy will not use it on their new ships?

The Gepard (Project 11661) escort, Project 11541 escort, and Project 956 Sovremeny destroyer all have RBUs fitted.

the design of the sovremeny and the neustrachimy have an age of 20 years or more (gepard 15 years).

These two ships might not have them and many of the small so called stealthy corvettes might not have them but they are still operational and still used/developed.

the bofors depth charge launchers are also used in some navies but the major navies have phased them out many years ago.

Well Duh… so what… it has an active sonar as part of its equipment.

yes but for an active asw sonar a torpedo is a small target compared to a sub. in general an active sonar is the only way to go if you need exact target data very quick but imho you need an state of the art sonar which is not only build for sub hunting but also for torpedo defence. the us-navy knows that their sonar does not perform well in terms of torpedo detection, so they startet some programms to improve this.

RBU-6000 does not have 12 tubes because 12 is a cool number, or they thought it would look prettier with that many. Roughly anticipated position is enough and a volley of 12 rockets will be launched to land in front of the incoming contact to explode near or under the incoming target… sub or torpedo or swimmer.

you didn’t read my posting. the position you get with tma after some time (several minutes) is not exact. first you do not have this time and second a deviation of several hundred meters is absolut normal espacially for the first solution you get with tma. (the data may get better if you take your more time to collect more data). of course the accuracy depends on a lot of things (some of them i have mentioned above) but the torpedo scenaro is one of the worst.
even with 12 tubes of an rbu-6000 you can not cover an area with an radius of several hundred meters.

How do you know how sensitive the electronics on a torpedo? It is bascially a missile with an ear as a sensor…

a torpedo is not a missile. (maybe you have shkval in mind but this is not a normal torpedo)
the mk 48 adcap for example is build for an operational depth up to 800m. do you know the pressure at 800m? so i must be no expert on torpedo electronics to say that a torpedo is harder to engage than a swimmer. (and nothing else i’ve sayed).

You are the expert that is telling me that a torpedo is almost impossible to defeat… surely you would already know about Soviet Anti Torpedos and sonar target simulating torpedos that can be used to distract or decoy torpedos…

lol, garryb you are funny.
you sayed “What about the ships that don’t have RBU-12000 but do have RBU-6000 and one or more of the other systems I mentioned? They have more than just a depth charge round protecting them from torpedo attack…” and you mentioned paket-e and now you avoid answering my question with this?
so i will repeat it again:
on which ship in service paket-e is deployed? why no more of the “cheap and effective” rbu’s?

Obviously no. Pointing your noise making part of the ship at the passive noise homing torpedo is not a great idea… especially when accelerating to speed makes you deaf and blind to the incoming threat.

do you know the nixie decoy system? it’s a towed noise emitting decoy system. i think the russian have something similar. for me it does not make much sense to mask this decoy by putting your ship between decoy and torpedo. in such a case the torpedo have to pass your ship to get the torpedo.

Equally a wake homing torpedo is following your wake turning towards it and sailing past it would be a good countermeasure as your new larger wake will wash over the old wake and may confuse the torpedo into thinking you are a different target.

maybe i should use your tail about vampires here? ok i will not do this. wake homers are a very special type of torpedos. maybe you can confuse them with special maneuvers, maybe not. afaik there is no decoy system for wake homers and some of them also uses acoustic seekers as a second data source.
btw. earlier you wanted to silence your noise sources by stopping your ship and now you want to do some high speed maneuvers to confuse wake homers? how do you know if a torpedo is a passiv homer or a wake homer?
for me start running away seems to be the more general tactic if you do not know what is behind your ship.

So now you are saying the RBUs are reliable?

maybe i should have added a “more” 😉
but in fact i do not challenge the reliable of the rbu-system in mechanical or electrical terms. i’m sure if you say the rbu-system where to shot at, all the rockets will explode in this area as intended. the problem is that getting exact target data for an incoming torpedo is not that easy. so the system itself may be reliable but it may be not that effective.

No, I wrote it big because you seem not to notice it when I repeat it over and over in normal sized type.

so maybe i have to start writing all this big? ok forget it. 😉

IN SERVICE IT IS A DUAL ROLE WEAPON. Whether it is actually effective or not will be revealed if it is used for real.

yes and on paper the mk45 127mm gun mount is a multi role gun with anti air capacity but would you like to counter an aircraft or an ashm with this?
if you want to sell weapons today your system must be a stealthy, multi role, rapid responce system ready for all the new threads like asym. warfare and so on. it’s like making a tv-spot. but this doesn’t change anything in the real world. the rbu is an old asw system which the industrie want to market as an multi role system. but it is not an effective system in the 21th century.

But no… the west is only now thinking about anti torpedo defence so it couldn’t possibly be true that the Soviets have anything already in service for quite some time that might offer a partial solution to the problem… I mean how could the west waste billions on this if they could simply follow the Soviet path and use something simple and cheap and multipurpose.

the western navies (and especially the us-navy) are thinking about torpedo defence for a couple of years now and their trials have shown up a lot of problems e.g. with detection, classification and localisation. all these counts to every navy on the world. so yes until now i think that the russian have the same problems. some of these problems may be smaller if you uses anti torpedo torpedos instead of depth charges. i think the russian also know this and they also know that their rbu’s are not that effective any more.

So a Ohio class sub needs to ping a sonar contact to be able to track its position… Interesting idea… b0ll0cks, but interesting.

so you still do not know what target motion analysis (tma) is and how it works. please take you some minutes and check this.

Again more assumptions from you…

yes because i want to show you that this is only my opinion. but until you can give us some objective sources your statements are your opinion too. the difference is only that i made it clear that this is my statement.

The hand held grenade launchers are manually aimed… how would you perform such an operation with a RBU?

entering bearing and range manually or getting it from an optical tracker if all the subsystems are connected to each other maybe? i’m not a diver but imho(!) you do not need to get 20kg high explosives very near to a diver to stop him.

So you make the leap in logic that the RBU-6000 is only effective in shallow waters against torpedos that the PAKET-E/NK (which is a purpose designed 324mm anti torpedo weapon ironically enough), not to mention the MG-74ME and the BERILLY-E self propelled sonar countermeasures systems or the AKHILLES self propelled target submarine simulating sonar weapon can’t be used in deep water. (The latter three can be used to 250m, 250m, and 400m respectively).

i didn’t made any leap, but we are still talking about the rbu’s. and it’s amusing that you countered the limited depth of the rbu against torpedos (max. 10m) with the shallow waters around russia. for me this is a big disadvantage.
btw on how many ships is the paket-e is in service?

Running at full speed means that you will have no idea where the torpedo is. If you don’t outrun it you will have no idea when it will hit you… and it will likely hit your propeller/rudder area leaving you a sitting duck for anything that comes next.

i think we already made clear that the incoming direction of a torpedo is independent from the damage it will cause.
but you are right that if you speed up your ship you will loose sonar performance, especially backwards. because of this the western navies want’s to use special towed sonar systems for torpedo defence.

The M1 Garand did what it was supposed to. It was still replaced when something better came along. (M14 was an M1 with a 20 round box mag, but even that was replaced in turn by the M16).

and how many systems were replaced because they were never effective or became ineffective against newer threads? ww2 depth charges were used against subs with good results but nobody uses them today because your chance to hit a modern sub with it is zero. i think rbu was a effective weapon system back in the 50th/60th but time changes. so i’m sorry but the m1 story tells us nothing.

You brought up the 324mm Torpedos. If you don’t know whether they come with the capacity to engage ships and subs then how can you suggest they are like the RBU? I don’t know whether they can engage ships or not. It doesn’t matter whether they were the best or the worst weapons on board.

no i brought it up because they are a anti submarine weapon. some 324mm torpedos today or in the future will have some anti torpedo capacity. but only because that there is a 324mm torpedo tube you can not claim in general that _all_ ships with 324mm torpedo tubes can kill an incoming torpedo because to do so you need much more than only the 324mm tubes. you need the right torpedo, the sensors, the software, ….
to get it back: a rbu-launcher on a ship does not mean that it can hard kill a torpedo in general.

You are not listening. To hit a sub is much harder than to hit a torpedo. Subs are much bigger but also much quieter. Harder to find, harder to track, rarely come right up to your ship for you to fire weapons at. Torpedos are noisy. They tend to run relatively shallow and relatively straight. It is easier to decoy the brain of a torpedo than the “brain” of a sub. The existing sonar technology of the 1960s was more able to track torpedos than subs. The rockets fired will have been upgraded over time, particularly the diverting rockets, but the mine and depth charge rockets are not AESA modules. They are easy to load and use.

so if hitting a torpedo is much easier than hitting a sub how would you explain all the problems which are shown around with sstd and the follow on projects? you are still underrate the challenge to detect, classify, locate, attack and finally kill a torpedo. passive sonar may be a nice tool for detecting an incoming torpedo but it is not a tool for locating it because a tma needs some time which you have if you hunt a sub. but if you need to hit an incoming torpedo you do not have this time. so you need to go active for locating the torpedo. but for active sonar a torpedo is a very small target.

State of the art sonars would only be needed to track subs. Torpedos make noise… lots of noise.

if (and only if) torpedos are that noisy (but they are not if they do not run on high speeds) the noise would only lead to an detection with the passiv sonar. this means you only get a bearing but no range, no targetcourse, no targetspeed, no targetdepth. how would you calculate a firing solution only with a bearing information (which is not that accurate)?

No. The RBU-12000 is a dedicated anti torpedo/sub/swimmer with most emphasis on anti torpedo use. The RBU-6000 (which has a reload time of 15 seconds) would most likely be used on subs but has anti torpedo capability.

lol. first show me a source for the 15sec reloading time please (and not the reaction time). and second rbu-12000 and rbu-6000 has not the same calibre so how would you get the 300mm rockets from the rbu-12000 into the 212mm rbu-6000? as you sayed there is a rocket for the rbu-6000 which acts as a depth charge and can be used against torpedos down to 10m but there is no mine rocket like the 111sz. btw. if the 10m is true maybe the sub commander will programm the torpedo to run at 20 or 30m? maybe at 100m until close to the target?

Makes you wonder how subs of WWII were depth charged… I mean a sub is generally much quieter than a torpedo… and a single turn of the wheel and they follow a completely different track. If it was so hard to depth charge a torpedo then a sub would be near impossible to depth charge.

wwii depth charges? and this argument tells us what? if it’s harder to hit a sub with depth charges than a torpedo why nobody did this in wwii?

So there is no advantage to pointing your stern at the torpedo either… something a wake homing torpedo would love BTW.

you still didn’t get it. it isn’t the bow or stern which makes the difference, it’s the chance to go at full speed maybe to outrun the torpedo but at least to get some extra minutes for thread analyses and reattacking.

But if the ship is an anti sub ship that would be derelection of duty. Simply fire a PAKET-E/NK and then hunt the sub down.

so all the ships with a rbu on the bow are anti sub ships?
btw even a asw ship should keep a sub at distance and use it’s helicopters to hunt the sub. a sub which already launched a torpedo at your ship has clearly an advantage. it knows you, your position and it keeps you busy with the torpedo but all you know is that there is a sub somewhere (most likely somewhere in the direction of the incoming torpedo). if you can hit the first torpedo most likely there will be a second one incoming. maybe it is better to let the helicopters deal with the sub.

Mines… not depth charges. Does an army need to be able to track enemy soldiers so precisely as to be able to place a mine directly in the path of an incoming soldier?

mines which are only available for rbu-12000.
if you do not know the target course and the distance you will not know where to place the mines. to get mines in someones path you have to know the path first.

Time to readiness is 15 secs… must be very quick.

time to readiness is not the realoding time.

With no guarantee that the small noise is an active noise jammer and the Kirov is the launcher of the jammer.

there is no guarantee at war. in general it would be the better way to stay on the first target because the torpedo was launched at this one and the sub commander should know which target to engage. anything else would make the torpedo easy to decoy.

Granits hunt in packs and will analyse the targets in a group so that one target is not hit by all missiles, and that priority targets like flatdecks don’t escape unscathed.

granit maybe, 95% of the other ashm not, but even granit works this way at the terminal phase. i only want to show you how decoys work on seekers which already have locked on a target.

hahaha… it is not hitting the torpedo that most ships are interested in. 🙂

but most likly the first sign that there is a sub will be an incoming torpedo.

You are proving my point. Do you think those torpedo tubes are for use to hunt subs or are they for self defence?

no i don’t think so. your statement indicated that all the rbu’s on non asw ships must be for torpedo defence. but most of them are for self defence against submarines.

(if for self defence if those 324mm torpedos could also be used against surface ships then is it possible they might use them against ships as well as subs?)

no because if only one type of 324mm torpedos has this feature then we can’t assume that all the ships in the world with 324mm torpedo tubes can do this because not all of them are using the same torpedo. same counts to cms and sensors for using this weapon.

The RBU was designed for use agaisnt Subs and torpedos and swimmers.
I think the RBUs on the Russian vessels are for use as defence from both subs and torpedos and enemy swimmers.

that’s wrong. development of the first rbu-systems started more than 50 years ago and at this time nobody thought about torpedo defence. so in generall this systems are anti submarine weapons but some of the modern ones can also be used for torpedo defence and if needed for swimmer defence. but you needs more than a rbu launcher to defend a ship against a torpedo. your sonar must be able to detect the torpedo, the cms must be able to calculate a firing solution and to handle all this in a very short period of time. so it’s a lot generalized to say all the ships with rbu’s can do hard kill torpedo defence fine.

If you have time to point your tail at an incoming torpedo you have time to point your bow at it too. An over the shoulder shot by turning 40 degrees off directly away from the incoming torpedo would allow bow mounted rockets to be fired at the approaching torpedo and still allow the ship to present a bow on target for impact…

you missed the point. it’s not the time you need to turn the ship. it’s the time you will get if you start running away from the torpedo which makes the difference. i can not see the point why pointing the bow towards a torpedo should be prefered.

If you have an anti torpedo weapon system on your bow then perhaps western practises (which were evolved without anti torpedo systems on the bow) might not be the best option…

but if your rbu has the primary role to defend the ship against torpedos than maybe putting it on the bow might be not the best solution. e.g. on the kuznetsov the rbu-12000 has the main role torpedo defence and so the logical conclusion was to put it on the stern. if the primary role is asw than you might put it on the bow but this leads to disadvantages in torpedo defence.

Except you are ignoring how the rkptz-1e system works. The first launch will be the 11SO diverting rockets that will attempt to divert the incoming torpedo. These would be more effective if the launching ship were making no noise so the launch vessel would go to all stop and then fire the diverting rockets to max range but not at the torpedo, but sideways to divert the torpedo away from the vessel. The second line of defence is 111SZ mine rocket that are fired in a pattern between the incoming torpedo and the launching ship. The last line of defence are the 111SG depth charge rockets used to destroy the incoming torpedo. The Mines have proximity fuses so a direct hit is not necessary and they can be command detonated as the torpedo passes to damage it if possible. The depth charge rockets can be used down to 100m from the launcher and will detonate at a preset depth (usually slightly below the incoming torpedos depth, though a direct hit would trigger an impact fuse).

i know the system but this doesn’t change anything to my arguments. the main point is: you need time to deploy all your nice gimmicks. you will increase the chance of an hardkill significantly if you are able to shot a second or third time but if you stop your ship you will get less than 2 min for these 3km in which you can deloy mines and/or depth charges. i don’t know the reload time of the rbu’s but with 10 tubes reloaded one at a time i would assume at least 1 min. and stopping the ship makes you a sitting duck. there is a sub somewhere in the direction of the torpedo so this is another good reason to turn away from the torpedo. this is the best way to get out of torpedo range and/or to force the sub to a high speed which make it easier to detect. by stopping the ship and hoping that the decoy may lead the torpedo away you loose a lot of options. and i don’t think that modern torpedos like the mk48 adcap would target a noise source 1 or more km away from the original target if this target stops. they have also an active seeker and can be controlled by wire from the submarine.

Umm… RBUs are pretty much fitted to every vessel in the Russian/Soviet fleet. Do you think they were all anti sub ships?
The weapon system known in the west as RBU-12000 is the RKPTZ-1 “Ship Torpedo Defence Rocket System”. Think the name kinda spells it all out.
The RBU has a range of over 4km so having at one end of a ship or another is irrelevant.
BTW If the ship is hunting subs which direction do you think the torpedoes will be coming from?

324mm toredo tubes are pretty much fitted to everey vessel in western navies. do you think they were all anti sub ships?
the range of the system is not the point. you can’t should backwards with a system which is mounted on the bow. but heading away from an incoming torpedo is recommendable. of course a torpedo can come from any direction but as soon as a ship knows that there is a torpedo it should turn away from it. by turning away the ship will have a lot more time to use it’s hard and softkill systems. and maybe it can outrun the torpedo (if it’s shot over a greater distance)
the range of the rkptz-1e is 3km (http://www.roe.ru). so if a ship is heading with 30kn towards a torpedo which is running with 50kn than the ship can use it’s defence system only for 1.2 min but if the ship is heading away from the torpedo this time increases to 4.9 min. so in best case the ship will have 3.7 min more time which can be used for a second and maybe a third engagement. does anybody know the reloading time of this systems?

Radar, I haven’t missed that major point at all. Why do you think I mentioned the decrease in helicopters in European Navies. Larger types of helicopters don’t make up for the numbers. You need a lot of bearings to rapidly pinpoint a submarine. Active sonobuoys make up a part of that decrease, but not all of it as you only have a limited number of them. Numbers are the most important part of ASW hunting, that is also why the Russian built so many hydrofoil boats equipped with dipping sonars. That was not because they wanted a 600-ship Navy… With their defensive strategy and problem with the heavy and bulky Kamov helicopters the small boats could do the job pretty well inshore.

you are right with the size of the helicopters but it wasn’t me who sayed this. imho the eh-101 is a very impressive helicopter but it is to large for frigate and destroyer sized ships. personally i would prefer the nh-90. it should be no problem to use two nh-90 on a modern 5000t ship.
did russia build so many hydrofoil ships for asw purpose? i know about the project 11451 but afaik there where only two of them. they also had some hydrofoils for the border patrol with dipping sonar but afaik they are all out of service.