Re: How Do You Sink A Carrier?
It was the first time around. The IR guidance in the kill vehicle had to be altered to track a much colder target than a ballistic missile. Your criticism is tantamount to saying the entire R&D process must be replicated for every configuration change of a weapon. The difficult and time consuming work is now complete. Subsequent changes would be easily accomplished in the field based on this successful experience.
No, my criticism was strictly in relation to what another poster said about the ease of Aegis BMD's capability to engage satellites, and I replied with the facts. It was neither cheap nor quick. And is either too expensive to maintain or interferes in some way with the normal functioning of Aegis or Aegis BMD.
Regarding the ability of Aegis to operate alone or in tandem with other radars, it can function as a stand alone system, but has the capability to hand off missiles to land based THAAD, and likewise Aegis can guide a THAAD round.
And all this means what? Zilch. What that shootdown demonstrated was that SM-3 could shoot down a satellite with all those extra eyes helping out. It has done absolutely nothing to demonstrate that it could do so by itself. Guiding THAAD rounds and handing off this and that is nothing but a whole lot of smoke attempting to conceal the fact that this missile has not been tested as a stand-alone system against a satellite, something it was (as is hopefully obvious by now) NOT designed to do.
Carriage munitions have a skin that is jettisoned. The loss of the aerodynamic skin caused the bus to tumble violently, and the torque of this tumbling causes the cluster munitions to be scattered randomly.
Sorry, but you're just wrong. There is no tumbling of any kind. Google should have been your friend here, and it still can be: "cluster munitions".
For unguided munitons, they are scattered in a pattern over the ground and explode. These are blast fragmentation munitions that are good only against soft, unarmored targets and personnel.
Seriously, if you can't remember very recent posts on the subject, why are you even responding to them? I specifically laid out two types of payloads for the ASBM. One of them was a non-penetrating submunition that's designed to kill planes, people, radars, etc. It is unguided only insofar as the submunition itself is unguided. The ASBM itself provides guidance to a pre-determined point prior to calculated impact and releases its payload to maximize the chances of a hit via shotgun effect. These submunitions can be fused for time-delay or impact and therefore no chutes or any other form of orientation is needed.
For guided submunitions, a parachute or balute must deploy to orient the submuniton's seeker nose down so it can locate targets. These are not penetrator munitions either as Wolvie suggests these ASBM's will carry, but take advantage of the thinner armor typically found on the tops of most armored vehicles to burn through the skin of the vehicle. These are not penetrator rounds in the sense of a long rod penetrator. None of the existing carriage submunitions would do serious damage to a carrier or take it out of the fight.
It seems straw men become you.
I challenge Wolvie or you to show a way to operate a carriage munition in the Mach 14-20 regime when current carriage munitions all operate at a fraction of this speed. No nation operates a carriage munition at such speeds.
No nation operates an ASBM either. No nation operates a aerial laser weapon either. This "challenge" is about as ludicrous as the challenge to break the sound barrier. As I said before, just because you personally have no idea how it could be done doesn't have any correlation at all to whether it could actually be done. You challenging me as an amateur military enthuisiast to design a Mach 20 cluster munition is frankly stupid. OTOH I don't see any physical or mechanical limitations to the development of such a system just because you personally are going ape over it. I also don't see how the fact that no nation has had to design such a weapon before as some kind of evidence that it could not be done, easily even. Your blatant logical fallacy amazes me.
Second, I challenge you to show a way to orient a penetrator round nose down at the speeds you propose after being scattered randomly from a carriage round. The penetrator will tumble rather than fall nose down at the speeds you suggest possible.
No tumbling. Seriously, Google next time before it gets more embarassing. Try using the "images" option. It's exactly as I've described for an ASBM submunitions dispenser. The bomb rotates as the panels are ejected. The centrifugal force caused by the rotation disperses the submunitions outward.
Also, do a simple experiment. Get yourself a throwing dart and throw it up as hard as you can, any way you want. I don't even have to be there to tell you which end of the dart will land on your head. All jokes aside, a penetrator released by an ASBM will actually be much more directly pointed at the target than this dart. Any penetrator with an initial heading not in the direction of the ASBM will quickly be corrected by the same aerodynamic and gravitational mechanisms that corrects the throwing dart on its way down towards your head. Fins designed to impart spin will add even greater aerodynamic stability to the penetrator.
What you contend is possible sounds nice but no one has done any of the things you think will happen with this notional ASBM. So far, it's nothing but a complete flight of fancy.
What do you think this is? A technical discussion between engineers with blueprints in their hands? We don't even know if there is such a thing as an ASBM. We have just been speculating about what its potential payloads could be, should such a thing exist.
Carrier strike groups operate under EMCON to maneuver without being detected. That does not mean the radars are shut off, or that the ESM is shut off, only that there are no emissions. Radars are operated in a passive mode which gives some sense of azimuth but no range. This does not give away the presence of the CSG. ESM, which is also passive, will tell you if there are threat sensors out there, and will definitely tell you if there is fire control or guidance radar locked on you. At that point the CSG would light off it's radars and/or ECM. This is done as quickly as the order is given and the necessary switches operated. It's never an either or situation, EMCON can be secured and radars and ECM lit off instantly under an attack. Likewise, a CSG operating under EMCON would go active for certain attacks. The main purpose is to allow the CSG to maneuver without being detected until the time of an attack. Why is this difficult for you to understand?
Oh, right. So the CSG will by sheer luck not be illuminated by enemy radar "until the time of an attack". Is that what you're counting on? Because turning on ECM to try and spoof enemy AEW/C, OTH or radarsats any time prior to that will mean no EMCON and much greater chance of being detected. This is clearly a case of you trying to have your cake and eat it too. You definitely don't have that kind of fortune. Not on this board at any rate.
However it's not about How to sink a Carrier.