In monsoon rain or heavy sea many ships will have radar operating just to avoid collisions. Also radar emissions from the launch platform detecting the target in the first place will have alerted the target that it is a potential target. Any attempt to jam the incoming missile will make many Soviet and Russian missiles switch to a home on jam mode. The MMW radar frequencies of the Kh-35 are also rather difficult to jam and very difficult to detect the emitter (as shown on land with the MMW radar guided hellfires and longbow system).

i don’t know if a slow rotating lpi navigation radar can be used as a good target for a seeker (if they realy use it continuously). offboard jammers where developed to counter home on jam but they are stil not used in many navies.
do you mean the args-35 as mmw seeker as kh-35 mmw seeker? afaik it uses i/j band which is more microwave than millimeter-wave. most ashm seeker uses i/j band so the ram rf seeker will be optimised on this bands (decoys and ew-system also).

With its mmw radar guidance plus cm wave radar guidance the Kashtan should be able to engage targets with both guns and missiles.

of course but without the eo-sonsores it will be less accurate.

So you are fitting a weapon system on a boat… even though it is cheap and simple and basic for one specific purpose… the engagement on calm sea of small boats in daylight in fine weather?

a single barrel gun mount with eo sensors will also make a good job if the weather isn’t that fine. hitting a speedboat should be no problem with systems like mausers mlg27.

1 mile is 1.6km and one nautical mile is slightly further out which could be 1.8km.

as i sayed.

As we have already established gun systems are not ideal for supersonic targets. For such targets obviously a missile is better, but a manouvering subsonic target is not exactly an impossible target for a gun. The Shilka in 23mm was able to engage and destroy a large number of planes in combat. Some estimates suggest as many as 100 planes have been shot down by the system… and that is in real combat… not tests. The Phalanx has a similar rate of fire (both aound 4,000 rpm) but the guidance for the Phalanx is rather more capable… the shilka doesn’t track its own shells to improve accuracy.

i’m not a expert in land warfare. 100 planes sounds impressive. was it in the yom kippur war? in which other wars shilka where used? are the kills confirmed and on which planes? but at all most ashm are a lot smaller than planes and how many kills shilka does on head on situations? (didn’t the pilots make high turns to avoid missile hits but making it easier for the aa-guns to hit them, i think i have read something about that) and at least it is a similar example to seawolf hits or stingers on planes. it’s not clear how these kills can be transfered to the ashm scenario.

The guns could take on the subsonic targets and the missiles the supersonic targets. They compliment each other.

if guns and missiles are not mount on a single turret because you have to point them to the targets.

But that ignores the missiles on Kashtan. The current model can track multiple incoming targets with its MM wave and CM wave radars. The missiles are not radar guided however and are guided to their targets by a radio signal much like the late model GRISON missiles. The system can already be linked to the POSITIV-ME1 3D shipborne radar that can simultaneously track up to 50 sea skimming targets and hand off targets to the various systems (Kashtan/Klinok/Palma/AK-603 etc.

even phalanx can linked to the c3i to make a target priority list but the ships systems can’t do target illumination for kashtan or phalanx. afaik there is no way to engage two targets with kasthan at once. it can shot 2 missiles to one target but i’ve never read that it can shot 2 or more missiles to 2 or more targets.

It would be easier and cheaper to issue the crew with Stingers and 50 cal rifles… the question is would it be effective?

stinger won’t be that effectiv but a lot of 50cal guns are set up on ships all over the world facing asym. warfare (even on ships equipped with two phalanx in a 360° setup). maybe one reason are non shoting areas of the phalanx nearby the ship. small automated 12,7mm like the mount from oto melara would be a great completion if they are mounted high and with less non shot areas.

If the design doesn’t have enough room for systems to defend itself then there is something wrong with the design. Such defencive systems should be considered from the start… not added afterwards.

as i sayed before installing such systems isn’t that easy. look at the frigate sized ships which were planed to use kashtan from start up. afaik there is no one with 2 kashtan in a 360° setup. building a ship requiers a lot of compromises because aaw is not the only aspect in ship design. asw, asuw, non war operations, flight operations, safety, cost effective…. are some others. don’t forget that not only deck space counts, the space below the deck is also well used, so installing deck penetrating systems isn’t that easy.
it’s hard to belive that constructors of currently in serve ships didn’t does the best they can. there are a lot of ships with phalanx, goalkeeper, or ram in a 360° set up so it seems to be more difficulte to set up kashtan.

Against your average run of the mill current harpoon type or even those super stealthy types this is something a missile with autonomous guidance can’t do.

no it can’t but a command uplink for ram would take it to the right basket. and as far as i know there are ambitions to upgrade ram with this.

And being a passive system when will it determine the target is not 1cm above sea level and turn away? Considering its speed how long will it have to decide that the jamming signal is not a real target sitting on the sea surface… what if the missile really does bounce its search radar signal off the sea and use trigonometry to determine the range to the ship from the radar signals bouncing off the waves and reflecting off the ship back to the missile?
Or the signal might just be used to provoke an electronic response from the target which might be used for targetting…

indirect radar detection by ashm with all of the problems like multipath, sea conditions, …? maybe we should stop talking about non existing ashm? and ram would detect the false early if there is no ir signature on the sea.

With an active jammer there is more of a problem, but integrating the Phalanx into the ships C3I systems should enable accurate enough tracking info to engage… I doubt a missile could carry a jammer powerful enough to defeat the main radar on a reasonable sized vessel.

afaik jamming the ranging of a radar is not that problem (decreasing accuraty a little will be enough) than disabling it by a jammer. but phalanx needs accurate range information from the target. maybe this can be provided by other tracking radars but with a rotating main search radar it would be tricky. and the ships c3i can also be used to improve ram if it gets a uplink.

In the freezing seas of the north atlantic the heat generated by a turbofan engine would make it a fairly obvious target at very long range. In hotter climates or in certain weather conditions where the sea is warm and perhaps the rain exceptionally heavy the performance of IR systems is greatly degraded and radar becomes the king… however incoming radar guided missiles don’t necessarily continuously emit. A ship isn’t like a small fighter plane. It is a large relatively slow moving target that can’t climb or dive.

yes but if the ashm turns their radar off it would be a lot easier to defeat by softkill systems like decoys and jammers. it won’t be a good idea to switch of the seeker in the terminal phase (especially if the ashm maneuvers) and afaik today no ashm does this. but of course very bad ir-conditions in conjunction with a non emitting seeker is the worst case for current ram (in which the ashm first has to find the ship). but if the conditions are that bad the guns will lose their eo systems as well so they will be less accurate.

They fitted manually aimed single barrel 20-30mm guns
[…]
I doubt there is an airforce in the world that could take on a Russian frigate with iron bombs in low level attacks. Equally any speed boat with bad intent had better be fully equipped with life jackets…

as i have sayed i won’t take away all the guns on the ships but i see the primary role for ciws in defeating aircrafts and ashm. there is no question that a single barrel 20mm will be a good system to engage a speed boat but how many ashm will you hit with it?

Even taking the worst case… with the 20mm shells of Phalanx, the effective range of 1,800m – 600m doesn’t mean that the gun doesn’t start firing till the target is 1,800m away… it means that the shells start reliably hitting the target at that range and course or aiming corrections can be used to keep them hitting the target till it gets to 600m away.

maybe they do so (maybe not. jane’s says “firing usually begins at 1nm” but maybe they are wrong), but if you do so, you have to predict the position of the ashm 2 or more seconds in advantage. so it seems to be nothing than a waste of shells if the ashm is not that cooperative and flighs straight forward.

So what were the conditions of the test? If the ship was destroyed then I would assume it was unmanned and not trying to protect itself. If that were the case how would SEA RAM do better?

you missed the point. it was an example on how ashm can be used today. and afaik there are timeholes for streaming attacks on gun based systems.
milparade to kashtan:
“This allows Kashtan’s artillery system with a total rate of fire of 10,000 rnd/min to automatically engage 5 to 6 antiship missiles (before the unit of fire is consumed) flying in one direction at an interval of 3 to 4 seconds (to compare, Goalkeeper can engage targets flying at an interval of 6 or more seconds);“
for phalanx afaik the value is round about 5sec. this values may increase if the ashm came from slightly different directions.
with ram on the other hand you can engage a second target right after you fired a missile on the first one or starting two missiles in fast cycle to the first target and than engaging the second. afaik both (engaging multiple targets and firing two missiles in fast cycle to one target) have been tested with ram. this is why i would also prefer a missile system with fire and forget capability. if it has a f&f mode with clos or other uplink backup even better but in such a scenario f&f should be the best mode.

So Kashtan at the front, and a couple of AK-630Ms on each side of the rear with the medium range missile as the Klintok which gives you 360 degree coverage launched from the middle of the vessel. You end up with only Klintok engaging rear targets with missiles, but guns pointing forward and aft and Grisons pointing to the forward hemisphere. The other option of course is to mount the rear Kashtan as pictured at the bottom of this post…

and do you think this can be done easilier or not than putting 2x 21 round ram launcher and maybe 2 or 3 lightwight single barrel 20mm on the ship? and don’t forget all the additional sensors for this arrangement. the rams and the lightweight gun mounts doesn’t need that because for the rams a normal warship will have the necessary data already and the guns will have their eo-sensors on mount. your arrangement raises a lot of problems which you didn’t have with the other solution. dual missile/gun mounts can be very nice systems but you have to make compromises either in ship design or in the abilities of the mounting (for example putting only 4 missiles on a gun without reloading facility).

Or redesign the heli pad to allow the Kahstan to be fitted between the rear of the helipad and the stern of the ship…

which of course leads to other problems like losing the room for a sonar.
of course it may be possible to put 2 kashtans on a ship and ensure 360° coverage but you must agree that it is a lot easier to set up smaller non deck penetrating ciws.

The missile will always have a better hit rate, but hit rate isn’t always everything. With AShMs however the flinch effect tracer rounds is zero as there is no human guidance so it is hits that count.. which is why manual single barrel cannon give way to radar and EO guided gatlings or multi barrel cannon.

… which leads to missile mountings like ram/sea-ram or bigger things like kashtan. if you agreed with the better hit rate of missiles and if you also say it’s the hit that count you should be consequential to take a missile system if there is no room for a gun/missile mount or if the additional gun will decrease the hit rate of the missiles. if there is enough room and if the ability of the missiles are not reduced i would take the combined gun/missile mount (as i have sayed more than once).

With a human in the loop however the performance is much better than an autonomous system.

of course every system can be decoyed (and the bullets from the phalanx which fired at the chaffs hit another friendly ship afaik) but putting a man in the loop to prevent this (at least the rsik can only be reduced), causes other problems. a supersonic ashm passes the effective range of phalanx in about 2 sec, so it’s highly advisable to use a autonom and full automatical ciws (which was also the idea of phalanx). of course such systems have backup modes for manually or semi automatic control but both modes have little chances against maneuvring ashm.

Assuming the jamming signal is directed at the ship directly rather than, say bounced off the sea…

yes but because of the ir seeker and the altimeter the ram won’t hit the sea.

The natural spread of shells will make minor miscalculations irrelevant…
It was my understanding that the IR channel of Phalanx was to address the multipath returns of the radar signal from the sea surface for very low flying targets.

the phalanx track radar has a worser accuraty than the barrel dispersion (2-3mrad vs. 0.8 mrad). but they put the ir on it to improve angular data and multipath reduction, so you are right with this.but the track radar has two additional tasks which can’t be done by ir. first it has to pick up the ashm for the ir-sensor and it has to measure the distance to the ashm because there is no way doing this with ir. the distance is very important for predicting the position of the ashm at the time the bullets enter the area and for flight time calculation. so it’s not clear that the ir-seeker will increase jamming resistence of phalanx in all scenarios.

Todays AShM is a harpoon like weapon and Phalanx is fine for such targets.
The Phalanx is also useful against target that have low IR signatures…

if you can ensure that you will not fight against enemies armed with supersonic ashm maybe but ram will do well at harpoons too. and the ir-signature has to be very low to counter the ram seeker (and the target should not emitte rf, which can be found by the rf seeker). maybe uav-s could achieve this but a ashm?

There are a limited number of systems you can fit on a ship… if you choose SEA-RAM then unless it is a big ship then it is quite likely the only other SAM carried is a system in the SHTIL or STANDARD range. In other words the CIWS SEA-RAM replaces the short range systems like the Naval equivelent of Tor.

acctually most ships with ram only have sea-sparrow/essm as first layer or uses ram as the only aaw system.

Seawolf wasn’t the amazing wonder weapon that was expected either and the end result of that conflict was an increase of cheap light cannon and gun mount positions on British ships… including GPMG positions.

there is no wonder weapon in the real world but seawolf hits and that counts. and mainly they mounted single barrel 20-30mm on the ships but they won’t hit a ashm with it. as i sayed earlier, i would also use additional cheap guns for usage others than engaging a ashm but for such usage i don’t need a gatling.

I disagree. A lump of metal and HE weighing 1/3rd of a kilo travelling at almost 1km/s is a very effective way of dealing with many different types of flying targets.

the hit effect of a bullet can be improved but there is still a range problem in terms of targeting. the muzzle velocity of maybe 1km/s will decrease with flight time (the reason why the effective range of guns are so limited).

If SEA RAM can engage a speed boat loaded with explosives then it might be a useful system. The fact that the AEGIS class cruiser involved in the airbus incident was having trouble hitting speed boats (they called them boghammers) with 127mm guns suggests that smaller calibre guns are needed too… putting on 40-57mm type guns is a bit of a waste if you already have 20-30mm CIWS…

acctually ram can engage speedboats and other surface targets (there was a block 1 has upgrade for enabling this) but for a speedboat i would also prefer a gun. i will come to this point at the end.

Was that a test of the ships defences of a test of penguin missiles?

a test of the penguin of course, the ship was destroyed by the ashm.

And that is the problem. You are trying to pick the so called “best”. Except you are ignoring the fact that any system has strengths and weaknesses in different roles.

i thought i had made this point clear because i don’t like this too. maybe i can clear this now. if i would search for a “best” ciws, i would do this only in terms of the capability shooting down airtargets mainly sub and supersonic ashm. in this terms ram is my choice.
but lets explain my point of view.
a ciws can be used to engage a lot of different targets from shooting over the bow, mine clearing, swimmers, speedboats and other surface targets to helicopters, aircrafts and various ashm. but most of these targets can be engaged with a cheap manually or automated single barrel gun mount from 12,7 to 30 or 35mm (there is no need for 40 or 57mm). airtargets and especially ashm on the other hand are the most time critcal targets on this list because of their speed. so my choice is using the ciws primary for airdefence, selecting the “best” system for this threat. but of course we can’t ignore the other targets so we will put additional guns on the ship.

and why not using a single gun/missile mount? imho this is a bit tricky. if there would be such a mount with my personally prefered components it would be a nice system but there are other issues. the kasthan (only to take it as a example) can’t be installed on most of the ships positions where today phalanx/goalkeeper/ram is installed. kasthan needs deck penetration and weights round about 12t (21 round ram launcher 5t) so you have to make a compromise between usage and ship integration. if you take a look at the german f-123 and f-124 (which are in fact well armed in terms of aaw-selfdefence) you have 2 x 21 rams with 360° coverage. maybe you could replace the front launcher with something similar to kashtan but the aft launcher is set up on top of the hangar. for asym. warfare 2 27mm automated gun mounts are used. best installation of kashtan i saw so far (on frigate/destroyer sized ships) is both sides of the hangar but you will lose the second heli and they can’t fire in bow direction. of course you may use a gun mount with only 4 or 6 missiles but this will cut of a lot from the missile ability compared to a missile only launcher.

another advantage of seperate ciws mounts for aaw and for guns is that you could place lightweight gun mounts as high as possible because today it seems to be a problem to engage small boats and other surface targets which are very close to the ship. low gun installations are limited by the own ship and you can’t set up heavy mounts very high because of topweight problems.

so my choice is taking 2x21round ram launchers getting 360° coverage and fill the asym. warfare gap with 2 or more lightweight single barrel gun mounts.

continuous adjustment doesnt need continuous fire. if your bullets are hitting point A while the target is at point B, you dont improve the chances of hitting the target by spraying the space in between point A and B.

imho that is not true, to do a continuous adjustment it would be the best to have a continuous measurment of the hit area which is only possible with a continuous firing. you have to remember that the closed-loop-control of a phalanx has a deadtime (the time, which the bullets need to reach point a) so you must wait for every burst to reach the hit area. if the first burst misssed you fire the second which maybe will also miss the target. with a continuous stream of bullets you can correct the position of the gun barrels earlier because you have a continuous update of your hit area. imho there is only one situation in which bursts will lead to the same results than continuous firing, if the ashm cruises on a straight line. in this case (and in a perfect world) the second burst will lead to a hit on the missile. but normally a continuous stream of bullets will lead to an earlier hit than bursts but maybe you will run out of shells before you hit, so bursts are a compromise between shell usage and response time.

another very important charateristic of the gun is that its accuracy improves with decreases in distance, whereas for a missile, the reverse is ture, as the missile’s computer has less time to calculate the vectors and issue orders for the control surfaces. this means that if you wait till the first ram misses before you fire the second one, the chances of the second one hitting the target will be less then that of the first ram.

yes and no. yes the guns are more effective at shorter ranges because the deadtime of the close-loop-control falls (and because of other aspects like the bullets speed falls with further flight time). but no with missiles this is not that easy. the best chance of a missile to hit a target is somewhere in the middle of the max. range because of their flight agility. the time of calculation is not that problem with modern microcontrollers. so the second ram would have the best chance to hit, maybe the third would have less.

home on jam only works for radar seeks im afraid.

the ram has a passiv rf seeker so if it’s programmed to the jammer it won’t be a problem.

besides, the point is very simlpy. bigger sensor = better resolution, which gives you a better chance to tell the real target from the decoys.

your point of view. imho the range is also a issue. for phalanx you have to measure the position of the ashm very exact, a small tolerance in the angle will lead to a miss but if the missile has a small deviation in measurement it’s no problem because if the seeker comes close to the ashm the deviation is no problem.

the newer phalanx with IR and radar sensors are even better as you are using two sets of target data that you can cross reference to eleminate fakes even more efficiently. either way, bigger is better, there is just no denying that.

as i sayed 😉
and yes if the phalanx can do realtime sensor fusion between ir and radar it will improve the accuraty and jamming resistance but afaik today ir is only an alternative mode to radar (primary for surface attack)

what are you talking about? …

if the missile dispends chaff and the phalanx fires on the chaff (only one or two bursts) there is no time for retargeting because in this time the ashm will move trough your last line of defence and hit the ship, game over.

so, instead of fousing on the threats that can actually hurt you, you would rather be able to more efficiently counter the threats you could already deal with quite comfortably? come on.

maybe you misunderstood this. this is a question why all of the navies with “slow” subsonic ashm with limited range have not build in a decoy spreading jammer on their ashm if it’s that easy. of course a ciws should be prepared to counter all available weapons. and ram is prepared 😉

as for AShMs with thousand km ranges, well iirc, there was at least one old russian AShM with a range of 1,000km+ (cant remember the name, but its not likely to help even if i did as i read about it a chinese source, maybe someone else can help me out). but whether or not there is such an AShM in service is beside the point. note that i said ‘missiles’, there are cruise missiles that have ranges in the thousands of KM.

i do not know about such a ashm but maybe someone could enlight me. and with a cruise missile you can’t attack a ship because you will need a seeker. if you want’s to know how many range such a seeker eats you should take a look on the old tasm tomahawk specs.

did you miss the parts of my post when i said things like ‘stripping down the jamming pod’; ‘modifications’; ‘re-designing a missile body to incorportate the jammer’ etc?

also, when did i say anything about having to stuff everything into a harpon sell? i though the perametre of ‘missiles with ranges between 200 to several thousand Kms and warheads in the hundreds of kilos’ would have ruled out things like harpoon.

if a missile the size of tomahawk can have ranges in the thousands of KM and still pack a massive warhead, i think its well within the relms of possibility to make a missile of similar size that has a jammer in it with a range of 200km+.

as for all the other points, well thats just development issues. it might not be easy or cheap to make such a missile, but it sure as hell is possible. and if defenses get good enough, then sooner or later someone will make something like it.

maybe i missed the parts but wasn’t it you how sayed it would be to expensive to put expensive electronic in a seeker which is destroyed by every shot? but you would develop jammers smaller (and more expensive then the ones for aircrafts) and put them onto ashm? of course such a ashm maybe possible but there is no reason why a ram seeker can’t be improved to counter this threat.
maybe the current ram-versions will get problems with this type of ashm but systems like phalanx have problems facing current threats like supersonic ashm without jammers/decoys. i can’t follow your argument. guns are not the best for shoting down todays ashm but there is a theoretically chance that there will be threats in future where the gun is the best choice? ok lets talk about this threats if they exists and maybe i would choose the gun then.
only to give you a opposite example to your decoy spreading, activ jamming supersonic ashm and to show you the absurdity of a diskussion about future ashm which maybe will never exists. how about changing the warhead of a ashm? if the ashm releases a lot of super/hyersonic bullets/penetrators/fragments at maybe 500 or 1000m before the ship, the ship won’t be sunk but there will be significant damage to the superstructure, the sensors,.. ->mission kill. how can a gun counter a weapon which is invincible at the very last km? is there such a ashm? no! is it possible? maybe.

personally i think it’s more important to make a ashm softkill resistance because a expensive ashm isn’t worth the money if it can easly be defended by offboard decoys and jammers. the improvment for hardkill resistance will be more like be more stealthy for the smaller ashm and be faster for the big ones and of course maneuvering for both. in both cases a good ciws is important.

and another remark: of course everybody talks about the big russian supersonic ashm but at a objective view there are some disadvantages of these ashm. because of there size they could be replaced by subsonic ashm at a rate of 3 or 4 to 1 and they are detected easilier because of the bigger rcs, ir-signature and a higher flight level. and last but not least a lot of ships are to small for big ashm but some of these ships are fast and small. personally i won’t underrate the danger of a well timed saturation attack of subsonic ashm, programmed to a similare impact time. in such a scenario a 21 round ram launcher would also do better services than a phalanx.

i said this repeatedly before – the job of the CIWS is not meant to be the first line of defence. its the last ditch effort to save your ship when all else fails.
[…]
with modern warships, you are trying to kill the AShM tens if not up to a hundred km out, you only resort to the CIWS when all your previous attempts at shooting the thing down with missiles have failed.
[…]
another part of the argument against ram is that if the opposition have come up with a way of defeating missile based defenses and have penetrated two or three lays of missiles already, do you really want your last line of defense to be yet another missile?
[…]
as if an AShM manages to get under your gaurd without you noticing (which can easily happen in real life combat), your longer ranged weapons will likely not be as effective as the gun at closer range.

so in this case the ciws isn’t the first line of defence? and why should i assume that phalanx will get a ashm which stayed undetected before it enters phalanx gun range (not to talk about the shortest effectiv range of ram which is round about 500m, so within the phalanx range)?

it’s a bit unfair but seawolf which is combat proved in real world, is a missile system and the only combat action i can remember to phalanx was a engagement of decoys which were launched by a nearby friendly ship (and of course uss stark but there was no action for phalanx but i won’t count that as a phalanx fault).

as i said before, if ram is so good, keep it. increase its range and use it to replace essm, but not the gun. the ram is just like a shorter ranged verson of the essm. using it in place of a gun creates redundency problems while taking away from the real close quart capacity.

for example, as you previously said, if there are essms en route to intercepting an incoming missile when the missile gets within ram range, you would shoot off a ram or two anyways. which i agree with. but the problem with that is that if you start doing that, you might run out of rams when you need them the most.

if you wait till the essms misses until you fire, well then the longer reach of the ram does count for all that much.
[…]
having a pure missile last line of defense makes little sense, if all you are trying to do is push the engagement out, then why not add more essm cells and fire off two missiles to meet every threat in stead of one? that’ll surely greatly increase your intercept potential and will likely give you a hell of alot more missiles then your ram launcher.

sorry but i (still) can’t imagine a scenario where i run out of 21 ram’s (per launcher) and in which (for example) a phalanx+4 rams will do better service.
i don’t want to replace either essm or ram because both have advantages. maybe for you both are only missile systems with no redundency but in fact these are completely different systems (for example in terms of ship controlled semiactiv radar seeker vs. fire and forget rf/ir seeker). so if essm fails there is no good reason why ram will fail too.

its all fine to say that shooting down the missile at 200m will still cause damage to the ship, but does that mean you should stop trying after it gets within 200m? after all, shooting down the missile 50m from the ship is still a hell of alot better then having the thing hit the ship square on. dont you think?

of course but if i can get the ashm 10, 8, 4 or even 2km before it hits the ship and without any damage to the ship i will do this and a gun system can’t provide this range. ram on the other hand can be used as near as 500m, leaving only a small gap.

so why didnt you fire off two or three essms in the first place? the sea-ram overlaps with other defensive systems. if sea-ram is so good, add another rocket stage and have it replace the essm, or use its seeker in place of that of the essm.

redundency on a warship is good, but redundency at the cost of other abilities is not good.

the sea-ram’s supposed reliability will likely be its downfall. if there is a hostile missile incoming, do you fire off one ram or two or three? if the test results are to be fully trusted, two is overkill and three is just a waste. but what happens if the ram misses? got enough time to lob another ram at the incoming missile? depends. and thats the problem. do you want to loose a state-of-the-art warship because you were trying to save on a missile?

however, go with the overkill idea and that 11 or 21 missiles suddenly doesnt sound like all that much does it?

of course we can develop a lot (a ram with in flight course uplink and a dual mode seeker ir and active radar would be nice) but i think the main issue is what is available today. and i can’t see the problem with the limited numbers of missiles, the shells in a gun are also limited. a small numerical example. lets say ram has a real kill ratio of 0,75 so you can shot down 8 ashm with searam or 15 with the mk49. if you put 4 of these missiles on a phalanx, the missiles will take 3 ashm, so you have to shot down 5 or 12 ashm with the gun? so you will run out of shells very soon.
the problem with a “overkill” is also not only missile based. with a gun you can fire short bursts waiting to see them hit or fail and fire again or you can fire a stream of bullets until the ashm is destroyed. but because of the very limited range of guns there would be not enough room to try often.

of course we are not taking possibile future developments into consideration. how difficult do you think it will be for people to start putting flares and chaff and jammers onto their missiles and programming them to use them? that’ll screw up your perfect score sheet really nice.

you can argue that countermeasures will affect the gun as well, but the gun has a bigger sensor that will have a better chance of picking out the real target compared to the small and expandable seeker in th sea-ram.

as you sayed, such a system will affect the guns as well and a bigger sensor won’t guaranty a sucess. the sensor of a missile can be a bit more inaccurate because the seeker will come very close to the target. if the radar from the phalanx missed the ashm only a bit, the bullets will miss because there is no in flight update. maybe such a ashm would be a problem for all defence systems but maybe this ashm are more difficulte to build then you think or maybe there is no or only a minor effect to the defence because today there is no such a ashm (but a lot of ciws).

Fire and forget doesn’t allow inflight retargeting. Using SA-19 missiles means there is no expensive seeker in the bit that explodes so you can make them very cheaply and expend lots during practise…

yes but i’m not sure that sa-n-11 has a retargeting ability and at a max. range of 10km there is not so much room for retargeting. but with fire and forget missiles the system is not limited by the illuminators. they can engage mulitiple targets nearly at the same time. i don’t know if a ram is more expensive than a sa-n-11 because the seeker won’t be the biggest item on the cost sheet and the comand uplink will also cost some money.
and yes kasthan is in service since 1989 (ram 1992) but how many real life trials they have done? i don’t know but i know the numbers for ram and if it’s true that the min. altitude for guns and missiles of kasthan is 5m (kbp page) the capability of this system is limited (maybe a sensor problem?).
by the way a lot of ships with kasthan also uses vertical launched sa-n-9 which are also very similar compared to the sa-n-11.

@wanshan: ram can’t be launched vertically but vl-mica and some guns sounds nice.

if there is a way to combine at least 11 rams and a gun in a single mount without decreasing the kill ratio of the missiles ok, you will get my vote but if not i will take a missile only mount.
imho guns are to limited in range so i won’t to lose missiles for a gun. the best chance to hit a ashm with phalanx is below 500m. if the ashm travels with mach 2 it would be hard for the ship to get no damage even if the ashm is destroyed at this range. for the millenium gun the max. effective range against ashm is 1500m which is also not that big. but if there is no in flight course correction and you want to shot at 2000m you have to predict the ashm course for the next 2,3sec. even if you measure the current course of the ashm very accurate, how would you do the prediction if the ashm maneuvers. the ashm can change the course so that the predicted detonation of the bullet is (e.g.) 150m away from the real ashm course. so you have to wait until the ashm is very close but this leads to the damage problem by the wreckage.

@sens: for the technical term the height of the target and the height of the radar is equal important but there is no way to increase the flight level of an enemy ashm so the own radar has to be mounted as high as posssible.

in my opinion there is no good gun based ciws. of course they have advantages but how important is the ability using a ciws for a warning shot? you can use nearly everything for that, a manned maschine gun, automated maschine gun, a medium caliber gun or the ships main gun. of course a bulled for a gun is cheaper than a missile but if a ciws starts firing, the ship is in real danger. the ship is only seconds away from a ashm hit (which will at least be a mission kill). so i won’t take a cheap solution, i will take the best solution.

a ciws should
– have a high effectiv range (more space for a second salvo, preventing the ashm wreckage hiting the ship)
– have a fire and forget mode (so there is no “channels of fire” limit)
– of course have a high kill probability
– have a short reaction time

the range is imho the greatest disadvantage of gun based ciws. today there is no guided bullet and with unguided bullets you have to predict the position of the ashm for the next x seconds befor you fire the bullet. maybe this is not as difficult if the ashm travels straightforward but today a ashm maneuvers unpredictable so the x has to be small enough so the ashm can’t escape the hit or the blast.

so today my choice would be 2 21 round ram launchers. in future maybe a vls like vl-mica would be preferable but today ram is the best choise (imho).
and if i need a weapon for asymetric warfare or a warning shot i would buy some additional automated guns with 12,7-30mm. they are small and cheap so why using a ciws for this?