Re: How Do You Sink A Carrier?
While i'm not sure about the efficiency of the whole anti carrier battlecruiser concept, i'll go along with it here offer a few design guidelines which are, in my opinion, essential, for the concept to even have a chance of working.
In no particular order of importance, the guidelines are:
1. Be content with just denying the carrier the opportunity to sea access and denying it the opportunity to complete its mission. Just being out there in the open seas and preventing the carrier to move to a certain place can be victorious enough.
2. Use the fact that carrier, due to its hull shape requirement and all the processes going on on its deck, can not have a significantly lower RCS. You, on the other hand - can afford to make a fairly stealthy ship, regardless of its dimensions. While carrier's escort ships may feature low RCS, carrier will always be visible on radar from more or less maximum distance of a decent AEW platform. That doesn't solve the fact the battlecruiser group will almost surely be attacked by carrier's planes before the carrier is detected but i'll address the ramifications of that in my following points.
3. be FAST. Carrier by definition, due to its aircraft wing as the main weapons delivery platform, is much more flexible than you, and has a potentially much longer reach. If you are not faster than the carrier group, what will happen is that the CG will just dance circles around you and prick you with their longer reach, slowly, if needed, till they wear you out. (or in a quick punch, if you're weak enough) While trumping the speed of the carrier itself may be very hard, it might be enough to trump the speed of its escort ships. Without them, no captain would dare to send his carrier anywhere. Trouble, of course, is - when the enemy (CG owners) realize your fleet is faster, they will surely design an answer - bigger (even if that means fewer of them) escort ships that can match the speed of the carrier. As far as speed at sea goes, it seems that bigger has more potential to be faster. So in that race the winner is one with stronger economy which can offer more bigger vessels.
4. AEW assets of your own. They're absolutely essential. Have a platform which will be used for both monitoring the skies for incoming planes and monitoring seas for potential CG units. Save for building a carrier of your own, you are unfortunently unable to have aircraft for such a role. That's a big drawback but luckily - something like V-22 based AEW can help. While not perfect, it surely beats a helicopter based AEW. For illustration purposes, V22 has flight ceiling at some 7900 m, which would in normal circumstances provide for a 350-370 km max radar range for ship detection. Speed is also a bit slower than E2 but it's acceptable. Flight endurance would probably clock in at some 3.5-4 hours - not that good but better than a helo. It is also large, meaning it needs a large landing pad and a large hangar if we are to house 3 of them on our cruiser, which is in my opinion the minimum we need for a single cruiser. (in a two cruiser formation 2 such AEWs per ship would be enough)
5a. AA protection. Have a long, long, long reach SAM. Since, unlike the carrier, you have no fighter protection - those are the only protection you will have for your AEWs. That also means you will not be able to venture out with your AEWs too far away from the cruiser. (with that pitiful flight endurance maybe it's for the better) Something like navalized s-400 would be required. Again, there's a great likelyhood that enemy designers will then start using very long range AAMs to deal with your AEWs. Honestly, i see that as perhaps the biggest hurdle to the whole cruiser concept as longer range SAMS (500-600 or more km of range) would be huge and heavy and, realistically, E2 will always spot our V22 first, before our V22 can spot the E2. There's also the top limit of SAM range, as we can't shoot anything that goes over the range of our v22 based radar.
5b. A good idea would probably be making specialized v22 like planes with long range AAMs but not only would that require even more cruisers (as AEW space in hangars would be eaten by AAM carrying planes) but the large, cumbersone and slow V22 would be harder to evade a missile than the fighters attacking it would be able to evade missiles fired at them. Alternatively, one could house something like f-35b on our cruiser but only only would they be at a disadvantage to carrier's f35c (remember, our f-35b would have to take off vertically - reducing its payload and range even further than it is reduced compared to C version) but there'd be less of them, probably greatly outnumbered. Yes, one could add a deck with skyjump ramp for f-35b to use their full potential but that goes against the whole 'lets use a battlecruiser against carrier instead of carrier against carrier' assumption and goes to prove that carrier, indeed, may be the best platform to battle another carrier in the open ocean.
6. Cost. If we stay with SAMs for selfdefence, we can keep our carrier smaller, mostly due to less hangar room and less personnel. Also it'd make it cheaper. Another big selling point is to keep the crew number low. Unlike the 3-5 thousand crew on the carrier, our cruiser could have much much smaller crew. That, in my opinion is the biggest positive thing in the whole concept. Unlike the carrier, which is MASSIVELY expensive not just to build but, more importantly, to operate - due to its planes, the maintenance and thousands of people on salary - for the same money one could have several battlecruisers operating against every enemy carrier. Using cruisers, we are already at a design advantage, as our platform was designed as efficient as possible for the role of killing a carrier. The carrier on the other hand, going against us has to have a 'baggage' of cost and equipment that is not needed for killing surface vessels. Though, realistically, it would not take a lot of time for the commanders to make the carriers optimized against surface vessels and ignoring most of the ground attack and landing support missions.
7. Battlegroups? Like the carrier has its battlegrooup, it is essential that the cruiser has its. At minimum, it should have nuclear submarines with it, like a carrier does - so it can defend from the possible submarine attack in a more efficient manner. As that is not enough, cruiser should have helicopters dedicated for ASW. Now, we could use smaller ships for that, or, which may be better in light of the need for long speed and long range needed for our entire fleet - we should house those helicopters on the cruisers itself. That automatically means we need more cruisers but it's never a bad thing that we have more targets for the enemy. Plus we can afford it with the lower cost of our fleet. Downside is that, whereas we could've been okay with just a small helo pad for the rotation of AEWs in the air - here we would need a larger helopad allowing near simultaneous operations of, lets say, a AEW taking off and an ASW helo landing. Also, potentially very useful, though kinda going against the battlecruiser concept, is a sub designed to carry large, vertically launched antiship missiles. A mix of cruiser based and sub based missile platforms could, in my opinion provide for best chances for success.
8. anti carrier weapons. In some distant future i'm sure electromagnetic guns will come here as the weapon of choice, but until then i would say missiles have the edge over any kind of guns, be they even something like the guns and ammo considered for the zumwalt class. Anyhow, the missile must have as long range as possible - so the carrier has less time and space to make a response. If we combine the 350 radar range from our V22, with the fact the v22 itself would probably be around 100 km in front of our ship (not more, due to limitation of our SAM umbrella) To that we need to add a safety margin, in case the target is in position to start running away at greatest speed. All in all - its a requirement for a missile with 450-500 km range. I believe that a brahmos class missile (pure ramjet) with a large enough rocket booster is quite capable of achieving that while keeping the total length to some 10 meters and total weight to under 5 tons. Also, though missile could be somewhat smaller if we fire it at 45 deg angle, the under deck space such an accomodation would require is too costly. Not to mention the commonality of the VLS with super long range SAMs would also be quite beneficial. If missile travelled at 3000 km/h (comparable to brahmos) over a distance of 500 km - it would require 12 mins to reach its target. Not enough time for target to sail too far away, either for missile's seeker or for whole missile to reach it. But I wouldn't dare using slower and/or longer ranged missiles than that.
Well, that's that. I'm sure i forgot important stuff but what can you do. A cruiser battlegroup of some 3 battlecruisers and 2 SSGNs could be operated for the price of one usual sized nimitz class carrier group. Roughly speaking, of course. Just how would the conflict in an open ocean go and who'd win - we'll, im not sure, i guess we'll have to wait till someone builds this and tries it out.
