@neptune: the best weapon to hunt a sub from a ship is not an onboard weapon system. the best system is a shipborne helicopter (better two or more). imho asw-missile systems like asroc or medvedka and the short range rbu’s are not that useful in modern asw. they are useful in some special cases (like counterfiring on an sub which has already fired a torpedo or missile) but in general i would prefer the helis. so imho it’s wrong to say that western ships are not capable of doing asw.

imho in general there is another use for such systems. the rbu-systems have some (limited?) features in countering an attacking torpedo. some western navies are adapting their shipborne torpedos for this. for me it’s not clear why hard kill torpedo defence systems are not widely-used. are the soft-kill decoys that good?

@dd(x): as far as i know the first two leading ships are funded in 2007, so at least there will be two ships. beyond this all the plans may change. imho it is possible that the usnavy changes the plans by switching to a cheaper solution. the dd(x) are very expensive technical demonstrators but they are not worth all the money.

But what I meant was there must be a reason US chosed HMS Gotland instead of all those others SSK:s that is out there all over the world, and wants to have her for at least one more year…

the reason is simple, because they are available. as sayed before no other state would give away a ssk+crew for one or more years only to train the us-navy.

I can tell u, shes the most quite , most deadly, most sophisticated, most lethal SSK out there. And she has operational AIP, probably only Sweden has that….and has had that since 1988

the germans also convert one of their type 205 subs with an aip (fuelcell) in 1987/88. today germany has the u-212 with fuelcell aip in service, italy also (in service?). greece and the rok are building u-214 in licence with fuellcell aip and the french are stil working on mesma. so there are other subs and other aip-systems out there. so i can not see the point why the swedish subs are the most quitest, most deadliest, most .. most …

and afaik the first sub with an aip was a german one. the v80 was equipped with a walter turbine and reached more than 28 kn in 1940.

The result of this combination is that the Collins is already close to the type of submerged performance that will only become available to other conventional submarines if radical new Air Independent Propulsion (AIP) systems prove successful. Australia’s DSTO tested two forms of AIP in the mid-1990s to assess the advantage they might give the new Australian submarines. On sea trials of HMAS Collins, the combination of large battery storage and high generator capacity was shown to allow the submarine to maintain an energy cycle under patrol conditions which required it to snort (running its engines whilst submerged, by use of a snorkel) for ‘less than a few minutes’ in every 24 hours
CLICK HERE
While specifications are avalible they don’t have to be accurate. With such a small crew, many power saving measures, unique technologies its possible. AIP may be a wizzbang new feature but both the Australians and the Japanese have come to the conclusion its not suitable for blue water boats where large diesels make better sense. Both the collins and the Oyashio share simular generating and drive engine specifications. Of around 4400Kw. Collins has half the crew so given the same circumstances collins going to last longer. I would also assume the collins has a larger battery bank where extra crew may have been located.

i don’t know what they mean with “less than a few minutes” but here is my calculation:
if you use the generators for 5 min you will generate 366 kWh
( 4400 kW * (5/60) h = 366 kWh )

if we assume that you can store all this without loss in the batteries and if we assume that the electrical load on the boat is constant you will get an average power of only 15 kW.
( 366 kWh / 24 h = 15.27 kW )

a sub like a collins needs more than 15 kW even on a slow patrol speed like 3 kn. i would guess 150 kW to 250 kW for 3-5 kn.

afaik the first batch was 400 million euro per unit.

The new german Frigates F 125
Length: 143m
Beam: 18 m
Draft: 5 m
Displacement: around 5600t
Propulsion: CODLAG
1 20MW gas turbine
2 4.7MW electric motors
4 2.9MW diesel generators
3 gearboxes: 2 for each shaft and one to crossconnect the gasturbines to them.
2 shafts, driving controllable pitch propellers
Speed: 20kts on diesel only, 27-29kts max.
Range: arround 4000-5000nm
1 1MW bow thruster
Sensors:
1 Phased array radar
2 navigation radars
IFF mode S
Sonar
Laser warning
FL1800S ESM suite
Communications: Link 11, Link 16, Link 22
Countermeasures:
4 Decoy launchers
ECM
Armament:
VLS 32 cells (capability of 64 cells)
8 anti-ship missiles, either RGM-84 Harpoon or RBS 15 Mk3
1 navalized MLRS, 12 rockets with reloads
2 RAM 42 cells – surface-to-air missile launcher/CIWS
1 155 mm gun, based on the turret of the PzH 2000.
4 27 mm MLG 27 autocannon
5 12.7 mm heavy machine guns
2 12,7 mm “sMG”
Water cannons
Other equippement:
2 search lights
Submarine ROVs
4 11 m dinghies, over 40kts fast
Space for two 6.1 m container
Hangar facility: 2 MH-90 helicopters
Complement: 160 (including 50 KSK-commando,navy seals)

the source for this is? i ask because i never read something about a vls until this post.

To simply fire on a bearing you need to know enemy ships are present and friendly or neutral ships are not present. Hydrophones or radar or satellite might be used to detect a target and give the missile an approximate position so it knows where to start looking, but if you have the weapon mounted on an aircraft and need to check the target is a valid target you basically need to either overfly the target and check with your eyes… which is dangerous and also potentially unreliable under certain circumstances… or you can flash your radar over the target, which according to Jonesy will warn them to power up their defences and get their decoy and jamming systems ready.

i think you will agree, that identifying a target with your eyes is not an option if you want to survive. using the radar is necessary to find a target particular if the target does not emit any radar signals. but sooner or later a ship will use it’s radar and you will get a direction by esm. if you can manage to triangle the emission source you will also get a range. the type of emission will help identifying the ship or at least it will help to classify the contact as friend, foe or civilian. so it may be possible to use an ashm without using a radar before.

It is much easier to hit a target heading towards you than it is flying past or parallel to you. The closer the target the easier it is to hit. Obviously a missile chasing a decoy is a safer target to engage but in a real combat situation do you want your phalanx firing at missiles chasing decoys or do you want it scanning for more missiles that are going to hit your ship still…

decoying a ashm isn’t a exact science. if the ship uses decoys very close to the ship (which is on popular method) you can not predict if the ashm hunts the ship or the decoy, so you should fire at the ashm if possible. most ciws (phalanx as well afaik) can engage a target and stil search for other threads. they will rate all the threads by themself and engage the highest priority target first.

Quite true. One of the “defeated” AShMs managed to hit the transport ship carrying almost all of the British helicopters. As a result operations on the ground were very seriously effected. Instead of helo transport from A to B you got the priviledge to walk from A to B with all of your gear.
Most fleets rather rely on supply to keep operational.. had the war dragged on longer losing supply ships could have been fatal to the operation.

as i sayed, this is the risk if civilian ships are used in combat areas. but this does not reduce the success of the decoys. if you use undefended ships carrying important goods which are needed for mission success you better spend them an escort which is capable of shooting down ashm (or pray).
and there are stil rumors that this attack was aimed at the aircraftcarrier hermes. so maybe the hit on the atlanic conveyor was finally a “cheaper” hit.

If there was just one missile and it crossed the path of an armed vessel that vessel could certainly engage that missile. If SeaWolf had been operating properly it probably could have easily brought down the missile. (Though off the top of my head can’t remember if a seawolf armed vessel was with the ship with the helos when it was attacked).
Remember aircraft can fly at 10m above the water or lower… if a ship couldn’t engage such a target then they would be sitting ducks.

afaik even sea wolf was not that successful in shooting down very low flighing targets in the falkland war. i think they improved it after this leasons were learned, but at this time soft kill systems were the best defence against the exocet.

Not all those launchers fire decoys. Some deploy smoke screens, or IR screens in the same way smoke launchers on tanks are fixed.
Not familiar with foreign systems but Russian decoy launchers use little turrets which allow aiming.

yes and no. first of all most of the modern conventional decoy rounds are dualmode with both rf and ir decoy material. and afaik the ir parts also includes the smoke screen. of course not all of the decoys work this way and there are stil other decoys which are not included here like torpdo decoy or offboard active decoys.
so all of this launchers fire decoys in some way. but there are a lot of different ways to deploy decoys like seduction or confusion. whereas most western ships only uses one system for this (mostly srboc), the russian ships uses several different systems dedicated to different ways of deloying and using the decoys. i know three different russian systems (pk-2, pk-10 and pk-16) from which only pk-2 is trainable.

From the data which i have the output of two LM2500 is around 55 000 hp and two ukrainian turbines have the output of 48 000 hp. Perhaps this may not give much effect to the top speed, but if two engines moves the same size object (which i belive is jst too big for both in first place) with the same speed, the lower performance engine has to compensate the lack of power in somewhere, usually to wear the engine down…

i had referred to codag vs cogag, not to two different types of gas turbines.

Washan, from your list you can easily see that the ships with over 6000 tons and having the GODAG arragent lack in speed to compare with similar size ships with GOGAG or GOGOG arragment.

i think it is a bit more complicated than this. of course 2 gas turbines of type x and 2 less powerful diesels will provide a smaller topspeed than 4 gas turbines of the type x. but in general it is possible to achieve equal total power output on both codag and cogag. if the diesels have less power you have to choose gas turbines with more power or you have to take an additional gas turbine. if i look through the ship list on most of the ships there is room for improvment. some are using codog instead of codag, so they should be compared to cogog and with equal gas turbines they will achieve equal top speeds. f-124 on the other hand is only using a single gas turbine for high speed.

and top speed is only a single point. most navies reduce their requirements on top speed to 26-29kn instead of 30kn+. every kn more top speed needs a lot more power output. compared to typical mission profiles 28 or 29 kn is a lot more effectiv than 30kn+. of course this depends also on the primary role of the navy (the us-navy for example needs 30kn+ for escorting their cvn’s) but most navies are trying to reduce the fuel consumption for transit.

Every missile gets target and range info fed into it before launch. It seems however according to Jonesy that when a Moskit gets target data it reveals to the target an attack is in progress, but the NSM can simply be fired on a bearing and left to its own devices. I guess Telepathy is a prerequisite to using NSM.

i do not understand this. afaik nearly every ashm can be used in an bearing only mode. you should be sure that target is in range before firing of your ashm but you do not necessary need the accurate range to the target. no telepathy is needed 😉

But the real point is that for decoys and jammers to work the first time they have to have warning of the attack… if they have warning of the attack then it is rather more likely that a subsonic missile will be shot down either by missile or CIWS gun… they are designed to hit subsonic low flying targets… a subsonic AShM is their meat and potatoes.

if it’s that simple nobody would use subsonic ashm any more. of course ciws would shot down some ashm but it’s better to shot down a ashm which had already locked on a decoy than shoting down a ashm which had locked on your warship because if you miss it you will lose your warship in the second case. success of ciws even on subsonic ashm is limited and a lot smaller than 100% success rate. i know all the peacetime tests but in war hit rate will drop a lot. and there are a lot of other points why decoys are a good completion to ciws like stream attacks, masked ciws (a lot of ships have no 360° coverage of their ciws), readiness of the ciws, reaction time and unclear situation. especially the last point is important because you do not need exact target data to start decoys. you can start them if the esm gets a unidentified radar seeker emission and if its a false alarm nearly nothing is lost. but for using ciws and pdms you have to get exact target data first and there is a real risk to shot down a target which is something else than a ashm. last point is mainly not a fault of a ciws but a human error. well trained operators should not do such a misstake but nobody is perfect. this shows a big advantage of decoys, because all the hard kill weapons must be first enabled and released. this takes time and in littoral areas it may be not that easy. using decoys is a lot easier because consequences on missfired decoys are a lot smaller than on sams.
and nobody says that decoys do not work on supersonic ashm. 😉

The fact that if a subsonic missile is jammed or decoyed that it might come around and attack something else suggests that there are multiple targets there and none have operational anti aircraft defences operating. In the Falklands there were cases where warships successfully decoyed exocets, but of course the exocet didn’t relock onto those military vessels because if they decoyed them once they could decoy them again. The result was civilian transport ships were hit instead. In fact this can be even more devastating to an operation depending upon what the cargo of the ship hit was.

if you use civilian ships for military operations it’s your risk because they are sitting ducks. but in fact this example shows that decoys are effective. they didn’t shot down the ashm but the ashm did also not hit the ship. if the ashm had locked on right to the civilian there would be also no chance to shot it down because of no ciws. so this is not a main point for me. of course if the ashm attacks a decoy it may attack another ship later but first of all the chance to avoid a hit is increased much. and the ship which deployed the decoys may also use there aaw systems to shot at the ashm.
i think ew and especially decoys/launchers should be more integrated to the cms and they should be more flexible. i can not understand why so many ships are stil using fixed barrel decoy launchers. of course they have different azimuth and elevation but a trainable launcher would give more flexibility for deploying the decoys. if the launching is automated by the cms, it would be also possible that the cms makes a thread analyse using a lot of different data like attacking system, own position, course, speed, wind, weather, friendly units, own aaw systems, …. before launching the decoys. so the effect of the decoys may be maximized and the risk that the ship hits a friendly unit would be reduced. the cms should also suggest a new course for the own (and maybe via ncw for friendly) ships. some of these points are already established but imho there is a lot of room for improvements.

overall im sure that more ashm have been decoyed successful without hitting another warship than ashm have been shot down. this shows that decoys are one major point for defending a ship.