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FuturePastNow posted:I'm also not seeing the utility of arming an attack sub with a periscope laser. It'd have to be very near the surface and presumably moving very slowly to use this, negating a lot of the sub's advantages. I suppose they could try to shoot down a ASW aircraft or drone but if the laser misses or malfunctions, the sub is now an easy target. Or you could sink a small boat that's not worth a torpedo, I guess, but making a $2 billion sub reveal its location to kill a $500 boat is dumb It's worth it if it's gunning for a carrier. Every carrier battlegroup has an attack sub in it. The idea is that it doesn't need to poke its mast above water for more than a few seconds before it disappears again, the mast is barely above water and has a minimized radar cross-section, and the only other vessel with the powerplant capable of supporting (a nuclear reactor) is the carrier itself. With two you just doubled your coverage area. (The question of whether it's got a worthwhile engagement range, particularly in foggy or misty conditions, I'd love to know.) You could also, concievably, do sneaky deniable things with it since lasers are notably quiet and the beam probably isn't in a frequency humans can see, if you were to sneak up to another vessel at night. (Setting oligarch yachts on fire in the mid-Atlantic would be a nice technothriller plot.) They should put them on carriers too; how else will the Ronald Reagan get its ray gun?
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Feb 10, 2020 07:58
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One of the biggest threats to submarines are helicopter equipped with torps and sonar buoys. Giving submarines a relatively safe AA defense against them is a huge upgrade in a subs survivability in a wartime situation.
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Feb 10, 2020 08:27
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Mortabis posted:This is the first thing I thought of. Reminds me of the idea floated during planning for the invasion of the Japanese Home Islands of using submarines as radar pickets against kamikazes at night. I don't know if it's a good idea, but it's an idea. Why submarines? Is the idea that if the bakas are inbound, the submarine can Dive! Dive! Dive! ?
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Feb 10, 2020 08:34
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I mean yes? A solitary destroyer escort or something is going to be in a rather uncomfortable position as a picket
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Feb 10, 2020 12:08
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Mr Luxury Yacht posted:Bombardier doesn't have even close to the stranglehold on Quebec that the Irving family has on the Maritimes. New Brunswick in particular. The Irving family owns every single newspaper in the province and during one of the more recent provincial elections, both the Liberal and Conservative candidates had been former employees of Irving.
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Feb 10, 2020 12:24
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Back Hack posted:One of the biggest threats to submarines are helicopter equipped with torps and sonar buoys. Giving submarines a relatively safe AA defense against them is a huge upgrade in a subs survivability in a wartime situation. Why don't we have more SAM equipped submarines then? I imagine whatever disadvantages prevent that from working will work against Groversub.
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Feb 10, 2020 13:07
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I really don’t think they’re planning specifically around AA picket work; it could do that, sure, but it’s very short sighted look at adding a MW class laser to anything ever. What it does do is give the sub an offensive weapon against small surface craft and shore targets that don’t necessitate a heavier, more obvious weapon, along with some really novel capabilities against targets identified out of the scope. A 500kw laser could gently caress some poo poo up in short order, up to and including surface to surface missile locations on the cost, tons of the assets on the man made reefs in the South China Sea, etc. You also have no warning a laser is burning holes in poo poo compared to a Tomahawk being fired. It also turns out that the Virginia with its 30MW reactor and photonics masts are weirdly like the most capable asset we have in terms of lasers outside of modifying the Nimitz/Ford. Current DDs and CGs with their gas turbines straight up do not have the power storage/surge generation capability for very high energy lasers to my understanding, and are close to maxed out as it is.The Zumwalts are the only thing with the potential to carry HELs outside of future revisions to the Burkes and now the Virginias. You shouldn’t even factor Ticos into your thinking, they are on the cusp of getting retired as they’re getting old as gently caress. They’re basically forced to stick around as we don’t have a real CG(X) replacement nor enough Burkes to just take over the role. That being said, a modified Burke can easily do the job; They’re nearly the same size, Ticos just have better command facilities built in and another ~24 VLS. I think a modified San Antonio possibly got nominated for the CG(X) too but idk if that went anywhere. Mazz fucked around with this message at 13:54 on Feb 10, 2020 |
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Feb 10, 2020 13:43
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It could be as simple as the fact that submarines are a useful platform for naval laser integration and testing. They're much less subject to wave action. They don't have as much salt spray everywhere. They have lots of spare power. They have lots of experience in thermal management. Essentially nothing about the test requires submarines to be the only final destination for the equipment.
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Feb 10, 2020 13:57
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If they don't name this groversub scinfaxi or hrimfaxi or alicorn we have failed as a people
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Feb 10, 2020 13:59
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Kesper North posted:They should put them on carriers too; how else will the Ronald Reagan get its ray gun? If the gun (now there’s an outmoded term) crew doesn’t paint “Ronnie’s Raygun” on the side of the lens housing, they’re doing it wrong.
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Feb 10, 2020 15:02
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I'm reading Midnight at Chernobyl, which I should have read before watching the TV show. Anyway I'm at the part where they're bombing the reactor with sand and lead and whatnot. It sounds like the nightmare of nightmares for the helicopter pilots...you can't get too close to the hole lest they suffer a hot air lift failure or whatever its called, plus, you know, the radiation. I'm wondering why they didn't use fixed wing planes for this? Surely they could have rigged up some sort of air droppable lead/sand/boron bomb, and let it go from greater speed/altitude, and still hit the hole? Probably with a lot more stuff? Was that ever considered, or is there something I'm missing?
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Feb 10, 2020 15:04
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Im sure if youre bombing with literal tons of lead and sand with fixed wing aircraft its going to get dispersed as gently caress and also what if you miss and smack it into a new area and make everything worse somehow?
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Feb 10, 2020 15:08
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Also speed: round trip time is gonna be much better on helicopters loading 2km away from the target. And expediency, you don't have that much time to build an improvised aerodrome real close and modify a bunch of fixed wing assets.
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Feb 10, 2020 15:48
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bewbies posted:Surely they could have rigged up some sort of air droppable lead/sand/boron bomb, and let it go from greater speed/altitude, and still hit the hole? Probably with a lot more stuff? Was that ever considered, or is there something I'm missing? Something that immediately stands out is how dangerous it can be to use fixed-wing for this purpose - akin to using planes for firefighting, occasionally pilots get target-fixation and fail to pull up in time. I can't imagine a plane slamming into the side of the reactor would help much!
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Feb 10, 2020 16:24
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FuturePastNow posted:I'm also not seeing the utility of arming an attack sub with a periscope laser. It'd have to be very near the surface and presumably moving very slowly to use this, negating a lot of the sub's advantages. I suppose they could try to shoot down a ASW aircraft or drone but if the laser misses or malfunctions, the sub is now an easy target. Or you could sink a small boat that's not worth a torpedo, I guess, but making a $2 billion sub reveal its location to kill a $500 boat is dumb Or you could park one off the coast of North Korea to zap a launch-phase ICBM and it would be more difficult to spot than the loving 747 we designed for that task. Or something similar for shadowing adversary boomers.
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Feb 10, 2020 18:27
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Anybody got a pickup and room in their garage? An RAF base is offering their gate-guard Victor for free to a loving home. One of the coolest looking cold war jets imo, has that British post war Buck Rogers look turned up to 11.
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Feb 10, 2020 19:11
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https://twitter.com/defense_news/status/1226937556941582336 Too bad you're actually getting MORE B-1s and A-10s https://twitter.com/ValerieInsinna/status/1226939044510261250 It's not up to them though is it? zoux fucked around with this message at 19:41 on Feb 10, 2020 |
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Feb 10, 2020 19:38
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large hands posted:Anybody got a pickup and room in their garage? An RAF base is offering their gate-guard Victor for free to a loving home. One of the coolest looking cold war jets imo, has that British post war Buck Rogers look turned up to 11. ...how much is shipping and handling for a Victor-sized item? (Be still my gentle heart  )
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Feb 10, 2020 19:39
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Stravag posted:If they don't name this groversub scinfaxi or hrimfaxi or alicorn we have failed as a people Go dance with the angels!
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Feb 10, 2020 19:51
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Godholio posted:Or you could park one off the coast of North Korea to zap a launch-phase ICBM and it would be more difficult to spot than the loving 747 we designed for that task. Ah yes, all those coastal ICBM batteries will be rendered null!!
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Feb 10, 2020 19:55
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bewbies posted:I'm reading Midnight at Chernobyl, which I should have read before watching the TV show. When you read about how ineffective many of the Chernobyl tactics ended up being, I think panic was more or less the order of the day. When I read Midnight at Chernobyl last year I quoted 2-3 parts in the danger chem thread. quote:The [helicopter] crews flew from dawn to dusk every day and at night returned to their airfield in Chernigov to decontaminate their machines, discard their uniforms, and scrub radioactive dust from their bodies in a sauna. But it proved almost impossible to entirely remove the radiation from the helicopters, and when they returned each morning to begin a new mission, the airmen found the grass beneath their parked aircraft had turned yellow overnight. quote:At around 3:00 p.m., Colonel Boris Nesterov, deputy commander of the Air Forces of the Kiev Military District, a helicopter pilot with twenty years’ experience who had served in Syria and seen combat in the mountains of northern Afghanistan, saw his target come into view ahead. Bringing the powerful Mi-8 transport in from the west at an altitude of two hundred meters, he prepared to cut his speed as he closed in on the red-and-white-striped vent stack of Unit Four. Behind him in the cargo compartment, the flight engineer had already slid open the side door and clipped his harness to the airframe; the pile of ten sandbags stood ready at his feet.
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Feb 10, 2020 20:01
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Nebakenezzer posted:When you read about how ineffective many of the Chernobyl tactics ended up being, I think panic was more or less the order of the day. What happened to those crews down the line? I know that "painful death" seems the likely outcome, but the three Chernobyl divers lived well into the 21st century.
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Feb 10, 2020 20:25
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Maybe it would be wrong to expect the water they were wading through to be heavily contaminated. After all, fire fighting water that contacted the core itself probably vaporized rather than flowing down into the sumps.
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Feb 10, 2020 20:46
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They were dropping loads of 10 sandbags individually by hand? I know we were talking about fixed wing earlier, but surely it would have been faster to roll even a single pallet of 50+ bags off the loading ramp of a cargo plane than make 5 trips by helicopter.
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Feb 10, 2020 20:57
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Arglebargle III posted:Maybe it would be wrong to expect the water they were wading through to be heavily contaminated. After all, fire fighting water that contacted the core itself probably vaporized rather than flowing down into the sumps. Not to mention water is used for neutron shielding1 Although is bad at gamma radiation shielding 
CarForumPoster fucked around with this message at 21:14 on Feb 10, 2020 |
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Feb 10, 2020 21:07
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It ain't the water it's the particulate. I also wanna know what happened to the graphite roof shovel seal team.
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Feb 10, 2020 21:29
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Lasers on subs makes me wonder if it would be a good idea to bring back nuclear cruisers just for more laser power. edit: typo Mortabis fucked around with this message at 21:57 on Feb 10, 2020 |
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Feb 10, 2020 21:35
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NightGyr posted:Why don't we have more SAM equipped submarines then? I imagine whatever disadvantages prevent that from working will work against Groversub. Lasers don't give away your position the way launching a missile does.
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Feb 10, 2020 23:56
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https://twitter.com/valerieinsinna/status/1226977063313330189?s=21
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Feb 11, 2020 00:21
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I am way behind the times and am just now reading about the DD(X)/Zumwalt fiasco and lol they don't have any ammunition for the guns because each round was going to cost as much as a Tomahawk?! Is there any effort being made to make conventional ammunition for the Advanced Gun System, or is that just throwing good money after bad since I'm not sure how useful shore bombardment really is? I guess a shell is probably harder to shoot down than a missile, but don't the Israeli's or someone have stuff for shooting down mortars etc? Do they have any actually useful armament or are they just floating piles of sensors that are hard to detect? I guess a sneaky spy ship is sort of useful, but they seem mighty expensive for just being a toothless sneaky ship. I read that the LRLAP was theoretically accurate to within ~150 ft at ~80 nautical miles which seems pretty impressive (and it ought to be at $1,000,000/rd!), but how accurate is modern artillery generally? I was always very impressed reading about WW1 Dreadnought actions where they seem to be able to hit a pretty skinny ship at 20,000+ yards with stereoscopic manual rangefinders, so presumably this has improved considerably.
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Feb 11, 2020 00:57
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I’m probably wrong but the Zumwalts seem like a platform that got done dirty by appropriations to make it seem not only ludicrously expensive but also toothless.
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Feb 11, 2020 01:05
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The ammo doesn't actually cost anywhere close to as much as a tomahawk, that's just the government's maliciously bad accounting at work.
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Feb 11, 2020 01:53
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I'd be curious to see some economy of scale numbers. The F-22 and B-2 are pretty glaring examples of how the cost of something that's supposed to be bought in high numbers ends up as a boutique purchase. I can only imagine when you're expecting orders in the thousands/hundreds of thousands/millions over time and it gets cut to basically Initial Testing + 50 or whatever.
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Feb 11, 2020 02:49
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It seems to me that $250m to make six artillery cannons able to fire conventional unguided ammo is also prime evidence that the contract for development of the guns was written by the contractor and DoD signed on the dotted line without reading the damned thing. I know LRLAP projectiles are extremely long, which probably means that the breech of the gun and the ammo handling system is not instantly compatible with standard 155mm ammunition, but I fail to see how that could possibly cost anything close to a quarter billion dollars to adapt.
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Feb 11, 2020 03:12
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McNally posted:Lasers don't give away your position the way launching a missile does. What? Unless you’re operating in a vacuum, there’s a big, radiant line connecting your position to the target’s. Maybe you can get away with it if you have got pulsed LASERs and they have nothing better than lookouts with binoculars, but it’s not exactly stealth technology.
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Feb 11, 2020 03:16
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Platystemon posted:What? The lasers you would use to heat things up would be infra-red lasers invisible to the human eye.
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Feb 11, 2020 03:20
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Platystemon posted:What? Excalibur's kind of a mofo with a fast plane. Take it slow in a vectored thrust equipped plane and turn 90° when the projected beam path appears on your radar. IIRC, three of the aces face you head on and you gotta chase down the SR-71 and EA-6B.
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Feb 11, 2020 03:25
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Godholio posted:I'd be curious to see some economy of scale numbers. The F-22 and B-2 are pretty glaring examples of how the cost of something that's supposed to be bought in high numbers ends up as a boutique purchase. I can only imagine when you're expecting orders in the thousands/hundreds of thousands/millions over time and it gets cut to basically Initial Testing + 50 or whatever. The trouble here is sunk costs. Even if you don't get the economies of scale, if you've already sunk a bunch of money to develop the projectiles and the guns, the cost per round is whatever the marginal cost is, not that plus the amortized money you've already spent.
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Feb 11, 2020 04:15
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Platystemon posted:What? This is completely not true, as evidenced by the whole bunch of loving lasers the military has been using for years. Mortabis posted:The trouble here is sunk costs. Even if you don't get the economies of scale, if you've already sunk a bunch of money to develop the projectiles and the guns, the cost per round is whatever the marginal cost is, not that plus the amortized money you've already spent. That depends on what you're calling the cost. Yes, that's a lame excuse, but it's also the way things work. I'd like to see both.
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Feb 11, 2020 04:24
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bewbies posted:I'm reading Midnight at Chernobyl, which I should have read before watching the TV show. I'm surprised that they didn't rig up some sort of big conveyor elevator. 
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Feb 11, 2020 04:30
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