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Post by simon darkshade on Feb 4, 2021 14:33:08 GMT
Ships have certainly moved away from aesthetically pleasing designs over the last several decades, but even being not-unpleasant on the eye doesn't make up for the various downsides and opportunity costs. The arsenal ship does not provide a capability that isn't already in the fleet.
Yes but does it provide a capacity at a markedly lower cost?
I know I'm taking a different stance than I had above but wondering if it would make a good '2nd class capital ship' at a much lower price to supplement such ships or for less powerful nations possibly replace large CVs altogether. Yes they need a lot of missiles but buying in bulk would reduce the cost per missile greatly and if their replacing very costly a/c, pilots and support services for those then you could have an efficient unit for a much lower cost.
Especially since one of the other big cost savings for many planned arsenal ships is that they can be operated with pretty small crews, definitely less than a large carrier.
For the US for instance I think they operate is it 12 large CVN currently. What if you replaced 3 of them, when their retired, with say 9-12 arsenal ships? You could probably save a lot of money on both construction and operating costs. This would give 1-2 such ships supporting a CVN based force or possibly operating without them in lower intensity situations.
There is a lot of concern that the USN has a huge investment in its CVNs but also that their increasingly vulnerable. You often see in future conflict scenarios quite a number of those being targeted and often either sunk or disabled by an opponent's 1st strike which while the USN's sub forces would be largely unaffected would considerable reduce the capacity of its surface fleet. Would it be better having arsenal ships in support for such a scenario.
Steve, I'll just break your argument up into a few separate points to provide for the best reply. 1.) At the end of the day, it does not. As said last year, there is already an inability to fill all the VLS cells afloat. That is the only thing that an arsenal ship brings to the party - 512 cells, or the equivalent of 5 Burkes. However, those 5 Burkes bring additional radars, helicopters, ASW, forward presence, flexibility and the capacity to be in several different places in the world at once. They are multi-purpose surface combatants, capable of defence just as much as offence. 2.) There are only a handful of nations in the full size carrier game - the USA, Britain, China, Russia, France and India. Of the next rank of navies (Canada, Australia, Italy), there is no need, no requirement and certainly no funding for a great big cruise missile ship. Indeed, none of those states operate Tomahawks. The arsenal ship only made sense for the USN, as no other navy outside of China has enough missiles to even come close to filling one. Furthermore, as I'll expand upon below, carriers bring a lot more to the game. 3.) Crew sizes would be smaller, but that carries with it costs of their own. 4.) The USN doesn't have enough operational carriers at the moment to afford getting rid of them for a less flexible, one-trick pony platform. They have 11 nominally active carriers, with USS George Washington and USS John C. Stennis currently in deep overhaul and USS George H.W. Bush in refit. This supports 5 carrier groups on deployment and USS Gerald R. Ford on working up operations. The replacement of a quarter of that fleet with arsenal ships would not represent a major saving on cost (the postulated price of said ships having risen significantly since the idle speculation of the 1990s. There may be savings on operating costs, but the price of carrier operations buys a lot. Carrier aircraft can do more than merely be bomb trucks. They can perform presence missions, air-to-air missions, interception and above all provide a commander with flexibility. There is the example from 2003 where an Australian SAS unit subdued a larger Iraqi force without combat through getting an F-14 to perform a number of low level supersonic passes directly over them. That is not something a Tomahawk can do. If a situation is too low intensity to need a carrier, it isn't going to need hundreds of Tomahawks. 5.) I haven't read that from any reputable sources. Carrier battle groups have a fair few tricks up their sleeves in terms of operating against land based opponents and the Chinese missile threat is greatly overstated, usually by the Chinese. In such a situation, the conflict would likely go nuclear rather quickly, rendering the presence of a few hundred extra Tomahawks rather superfluous. Even if it stays conventional, we come back to my point from last year - the USN doesn't have enough missiles to fill all of its current afloat cells, let alone needing more. If every VLS cell afloat was filled, then there might, might be a time to talk about new surface vessels. However, I'd greatly prefer multipurpose vessels, such as new AAW/ABM cruisers in such a scenario, not arsenal ships. If the purse was really opened, then there would be a lot more gained by fielding extra carrier air squadrons than simply a big missile boat. |
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lordroel
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Post by lordroel on Feb 5, 2021 4:10:49 GMT
Image I, 1995 depiction of an arsenal ship This is the first image that I've seen of the Arsenal Ship concept that I actually like, probably because it reminds me of something that would be in a Gerry Anderson production Here are 2 more pictures of a Arsenal Ship i found.   |
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oscssw
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Post by oscssw on Feb 5, 2021 16:03:53 GMT
The arguement is Arsenal ship as a "cheap" replacement for the CVN because the ChiComms are now capable of taking out the the CSG right? Only someone who has no actual real worl experience with a CSG would try to make the case an arsenal ship is in any practical way superior to the CSG. The reason the CSG has survived and more major naval powers are invested large amounts of valuable funds and trained sailor is because of their great utility along all stages of conflict.
Furthermore, if you think the CV is defenseless against the Chi Comm anti ship missiles how long would your arsenal ship last? IMO, really stealthy attack subs manned by US/RN standards of crews is a much bigger worry and the ChiComms are nowhere near that standard in boats or crews.
Here is what I think is a very realistic article on why the Chicomms propaganda campaign about taking out a CSG is just that. Propaganda.
Please take the time to read and think about what Thompson is saying. I have and agree with him.
Why China Can't Target U.S. Aircraft Carriers (in Forbes) August 9 2019
Loren Thompson Senior Contributor
Aerospace & Defense
Critics of U.S. aircraft carriers have been arguing for decades that the survival of the world’s biggest warships will increasingly be at risk in an era of long-range, precision-guided anti-ship missiles. In recent years, China has typically been identified as the military power most likely to drive U.S. carriers from the sea.
But the U.S. Navy seems much less worried about carrier attacks than observers who lack military credentials and clearances. In fact, the outgoing Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral John Richardson, told an audience earlier this year that “we’re less vulnerable now than we have been since and including World War II.”
One reason the Navy is not alarmed is that it has invested heavily in new technologies aimed at bolstering the defenses of carrier strike groups. It also has changed its tactics for operating near China. But the biggest reason for confidence about the future resides in the difficulties China would face in trying to find and track U.S. carriers.
Large-deck, nuclear-powered aircraft carriers of the type the U.S. Navy operates seem like they would be easy to target. They are over a thousand feet long, they are 25 decks high, and they are made of steel that reflects radar signals. They have distinctive optical, infrared and radio-frequency signatures.
So what can be so hard about targeting them, using the extensive arsenal of anti-ship missiles that China has accumulated? Well for starters, there are the huge distances within which carriers operating in the Western Pacific can hide. The South China Sea alone measures 1.4 million square miles, and is only one of four marginal seas from which carrier air wings could launch attacks against China.
If a carrier is conducting sea control operations—keeping the sea lanes open to key allies such as Japan—it will likely be beyond the first island chain that parallels the Chinese coast, and thus able to hide in the vastness of the Western Pacific. It is hard to find anything in millions of square miles of open ocean, and in the case of U.S. carriers the target will be moving constantly.
Nuclear power makes that possible. U.S. carriers essentially have unlimited range. If China’s military actually sights a carrier, it will not be where it was seen by the time weapons arrive. At 35 miles per hour, the carriers can be anywhere in an area measuring over 700 square miles within 30 minutes. That area grows to over 6,000 square miles after 90 minutes, which is the more likely time elapsed between detecting a carrier and launching a missile from the Chinese mainland.
But let’s back up for a moment and consider the multiple hurdles that Chinese attackers would need to overcome to successfully target a carrier. First, they would have to find the carrier; then they would have to fix its location; then they would have to establish a continuous track of its movements; then they would have to actually target the carrier with specific weapons; then they would have to penetrate the carrier’s multi-layered defenses to reach the target; and finally they would need to assess whether the resulting damage was sufficient to disable the carrier.
The Navy refers to this process as a “kill chain,” and the metaphor is instructive. Because each step must be accomplished sequentially, if any “link” in the chain fails the whole process breaks down. The Navy and its partners in the joint force have plans for disrupting potential attackers at each step in the process.
Consider the initial steps of finding and fixing the carrier’s location. China has several options. First, it could use “over-the-horizon” radar located on land. These powerful radars monitor vast swaths of ocean by bouncing their radar signals off the ionosphere. The energy will reflect downward, and once it reaches the surface generate indications of anomalies that return to the original site of transmission via the same path.
China has at least two huge radars that can do this, but their utility is modest. First, they must operate at long wavelengths that generate relatively little information in order to bounce off the ionosphere rather than passing through it. Second, at each bounce to and from the target, much energy is lost. Third, the resulting picture of surveilled areas is of such low resolution that the radar cannot establish a target track even if it detects a carrier. Finally, the radar itself is a large, fixed object subject to preemption at the onset of war.
The second option China has is reconnaissance satellites. It has orbited dozens, some resembling the electronic listening satellites the U.S. Navy uses to monitor oceans, others employing optical sensors and “synthetic aperture” radar. But to obtain targeting-quality information, the satellites must be placed in low-earth orbit (about 660 miles above the Earth’s surface). At that elevation they are traveling at a rate of roughly 16,000 miles per hour—which means they quickly disappear over the horizon, not to return for more than an hour.
The Navy figures that in order to continuously surveil ocean areas near China, Beijing would need to establish three parallel north-south tracks in low-earth orbit, and populate each of those tracks with dozens of satellites spaced to assure continuous coverage. China is nowhere near having such a constellation, and even if it did, connecting all the overhead nodes with an earth-bound command and control system to dispatch weapons against a carrier would be hugely difficult.
The third find-and-fix option China has would be manned or unmanned radar planes. But U.S. carrier strike groups maintain a dense defensive perimeter in the air around their locations that includes interceptor aircraft, networked surface-to-air missiles, surveillance planes and airborne jammers. No Chinese aircraft is likely to get close enough to a carrier to establish a sustained target track. The same applies to Chinese surface vessels and submarines, which are even more vulnerable to preemption by the strike group than airborne assets.
So the vital early steps of simply finding and fixing the carriers would not be easy. Connecting the assets required for those tasks with the other systems used in later stages of the kill chain would be challenging, especially given the brief timelines available in which to engage the continuously moving target. Any weapons dispatched against the intended target would need to negotiate multiple layers of active and passive defenses, including electronic countermeasures and, in the future, beam weapons.
Some observers have stressed the danger posed by China’s recent deployment of anti-ship ballistic missiles with maneuvering warheads. The Navy takes the threat seriously, and in response has moved most of its missile-defense warships to the Pacific. As a practical matter, though, these weapons make little difference to the balance of power if China cannot first find, fix, track and target a carrier. The longer the range of an anti-ship missile, the more updates it needs in flight to successfully engage a moving target. So without timely off-board sensor data and an agile command and control system, the weapon will be largely useless.
This generalization applies whether the attacking weapon is purely ballistic or a hypersonic glide vehicle. If the location of the target vessel is not known in a timely and fairly precise fashion, then the munition is unlikely to strike its target.
The bottom line is that China is nowhere near overcoming the hurdles required for successful attacks against U.S. aircraft carriers. Whether those carriers are engaged in projecting air power ashore or maintaining control of sea lanes, Beijing will be hard-pressed to impede their operation in wartime. And it’s a safe bet that whatever assets China may have for executing such a mission on the first day of war will be quickly reduced by the combined efforts of the U.S. joint force, whether they be deployed on land, at sea, or in orbit.
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oscssw
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Post by oscssw on Feb 5, 2021 16:30:20 GMT
It could be argued the USN has a smaller version of the Arsenal Ship. The four Ohio class conversions to SSGNs have 154 Tomahawk missiles. Florida has fired her cruise missiles in combat, against Libya. Regards,
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Post by american2006 on Feb 8, 2021 13:15:26 GMT
The arguement is Arsenal ship as a "cheap" replacement for the CVN because the ChiComms are now capable of taking out the the CSG right? Only someone who has no actual real worl experience with a CSG would try to make the case an arsenal ship is in any practical way superior to the CSG. The reason the CSG has survived and more major naval powers are invested large amounts of valuable funds and trained sailor is because of their great utility along all stages of conflict.
Furthermore, if you think the CV is defenseless against the Chi Comm anti ship missiles how long would your arsenal ship last? IMO, really stealthy attack subs manned by US/RN standards of crews is a much bigger worry and the ChiComms are nowhere near that standard in boats or crews.
Here is what I think is a very realistic article on why the Chicomms propaganda campaign about taking out a CSG is just that. Propaganda.
Please take the time to read and think about what Thompson is saying. I have and agree with him. Why China Can't Target U.S. Aircraft Carriers (in Forbes) August 9 2019Loren Thompson Senior Contributor Aerospace & Defense Critics of U.S. aircraft carriers have been arguing for decades that the survival of the world’s biggest warships will increasingly be at risk in an era of long-range, precision-guided anti-ship missiles. In recent years, China has typically been identified as the military power most likely to drive U.S. carriers from the sea. But the U.S. Navy seems much less worried about carrier attacks than observers who lack military credentials and clearances. In fact, the outgoing Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral John Richardson, told an audience earlier this year that “we’re less vulnerable now than we have been since and including World War II.” One reason the Navy is not alarmed is that it has invested heavily in new technologies aimed at bolstering the defenses of carrier strike groups. It also has changed its tactics for operating near China. But the biggest reason for confidence about the future resides in the difficulties China would face in trying to find and track U.S. carriers. Large-deck, nuclear-powered aircraft carriers of the type the U.S. Navy operates seem like they would be easy to target. They are over a thousand feet long, they are 25 decks high, and they are made of steel that reflects radar signals. They have distinctive optical, infrared and radio-frequency signatures. So what can be so hard about targeting them, using the extensive arsenal of anti-ship missiles that China has accumulated? Well for starters, there are the huge distances within which carriers operating in the Western Pacific can hide. The South China Sea alone measures 1.4 million square miles, and is only one of four marginal seas from which carrier air wings could launch attacks against China. If a carrier is conducting sea control operations—keeping the sea lanes open to key allies such as Japan—it will likely be beyond the first island chain that parallels the Chinese coast, and thus able to hide in the vastness of the Western Pacific. It is hard to find anything in millions of square miles of open ocean, and in the case of U.S. carriers the target will be moving constantly. Nuclear power makes that possible. U.S. carriers essentially have unlimited range. If China’s military actually sights a carrier, it will not be where it was seen by the time weapons arrive. At 35 miles per hour, the carriers can be anywhere in an area measuring over 700 square miles within 30 minutes. That area grows to over 6,000 square miles after 90 minutes, which is the more likely time elapsed between detecting a carrier and launching a missile from the Chinese mainland. But let’s back up for a moment and consider the multiple hurdles that Chinese attackers would need to overcome to successfully target a carrier. First, they would have to find the carrier; then they would have to fix its location; then they would have to establish a continuous track of its movements; then they would have to actually target the carrier with specific weapons; then they would have to penetrate the carrier’s multi-layered defenses to reach the target; and finally they would need to assess whether the resulting damage was sufficient to disable the carrier. The Navy refers to this process as a “kill chain,” and the metaphor is instructive. Because each step must be accomplished sequentially, if any “link” in the chain fails the whole process breaks down. The Navy and its partners in the joint force have plans for disrupting potential attackers at each step in the process. Consider the initial steps of finding and fixing the carrier’s location. China has several options. First, it could use “over-the-horizon” radar located on land. These powerful radars monitor vast swaths of ocean by bouncing their radar signals off the ionosphere. The energy will reflect downward, and once it reaches the surface generate indications of anomalies that return to the original site of transmission via the same path. China has at least two huge radars that can do this, but their utility is modest. First, they must operate at long wavelengths that generate relatively little information in order to bounce off the ionosphere rather than passing through it. Second, at each bounce to and from the target, much energy is lost. Third, the resulting picture of surveilled areas is of such low resolution that the radar cannot establish a target track even if it detects a carrier. Finally, the radar itself is a large, fixed object subject to preemption at the onset of war. The second option China has is reconnaissance satellites. It has orbited dozens, some resembling the electronic listening satellites the U.S. Navy uses to monitor oceans, others employing optical sensors and “synthetic aperture” radar. But to obtain targeting-quality information, the satellites must be placed in low-earth orbit (about 660 miles above the Earth’s surface). At that elevation they are traveling at a rate of roughly 16,000 miles per hour—which means they quickly disappear over the horizon, not to return for more than an hour. The Navy figures that in order to continuously surveil ocean areas near China, Beijing would need to establish three parallel north-south tracks in low-earth orbit, and populate each of those tracks with dozens of satellites spaced to assure continuous coverage. China is nowhere near having such a constellation, and even if it did, connecting all the overhead nodes with an earth-bound command and control system to dispatch weapons against a carrier would be hugely difficult. The third find-and-fix option China has would be manned or unmanned radar planes. But U.S. carrier strike groups maintain a dense defensive perimeter in the air around their locations that includes interceptor aircraft, networked surface-to-air missiles, surveillance planes and airborne jammers. No Chinese aircraft is likely to get close enough to a carrier to establish a sustained target track. The same applies to Chinese surface vessels and submarines, which are even more vulnerable to preemption by the strike group than airborne assets. So the vital early steps of simply finding and fixing the carriers would not be easy. Connecting the assets required for those tasks with the other systems used in later stages of the kill chain would be challenging, especially given the brief timelines available in which to engage the continuously moving target. Any weapons dispatched against the intended target would need to negotiate multiple layers of active and passive defenses, including electronic countermeasures and, in the future, beam weapons. Some observers have stressed the danger posed by China’s recent deployment of anti-ship ballistic missiles with maneuvering warheads. The Navy takes the threat seriously, and in response has moved most of its missile-defense warships to the Pacific. As a practical matter, though, these weapons make little difference to the balance of power if China cannot first find, fix, track and target a carrier. The longer the range of an anti-ship missile, the more updates it needs in flight to successfully engage a moving target. So without timely off-board sensor data and an agile command and control system, the weapon will be largely useless. This generalization applies whether the attacking weapon is purely ballistic or a hypersonic glide vehicle. If the location of the target vessel is not known in a timely and fairly precise fashion, then the munition is unlikely to strike its target. The bottom line is that China is nowhere near overcoming the hurdles required for successful attacks against U.S. aircraft carriers. Whether those carriers are engaged in projecting air power ashore or maintaining control of sea lanes, Beijing will be hard-pressed to impede their operation in wartime. And it’s a safe bet that whatever assets China may have for executing such a mission on the first day of war will be quickly reduced by the combined efforts of the U.S. joint force, whether they be deployed on land, at sea, or in orbit. Why would China want to attack an American aircraft carrier given the result (MAD)? |
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Post by simon darkshade on Feb 9, 2021 2:17:33 GMT
MAD doesn’t apply to China; they don’t have enough firepower.
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stevep
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Post by stevep on Feb 9, 2021 9:41:50 GMT
The arguement is Arsenal ship as a "cheap" replacement for the CVN because the ChiComms are now capable of taking out the the CSG right? Only someone who has no actual real worl experience with a CSG would try to make the case an arsenal ship is in any practical way superior to the CSG. The reason the CSG has survived and more major naval powers are invested large amounts of valuable funds and trained sailor is because of their great utility along all stages of conflict.
Furthermore, if you think the CV is defenseless against the Chi Comm anti ship missiles how long would your arsenal ship last? IMO, really stealthy attack subs manned by US/RN standards of crews is a much bigger worry and the ChiComms are nowhere near that standard in boats or crews.
Here is what I think is a very realistic article on why the Chicomms propaganda campaign about taking out a CSG is just that. Propaganda.
Please take the time to read and think about what Thompson is saying. I have and agree with him. Why China Can't Target U.S. Aircraft Carriers (in Forbes) August 9 2019Loren Thompson Senior Contributor Aerospace & Defense Critics of U.S. aircraft carriers have been arguing for decades that the survival of the world’s biggest warships will increasingly be at risk in an era of long-range, precision-guided anti-ship missiles. In recent years, China has typically been identified as the military power most likely to drive U.S. carriers from the sea. But the U.S. Navy seems much less worried about carrier attacks than observers who lack military credentials and clearances. In fact, the outgoing Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral John Richardson, told an audience earlier this year that “we’re less vulnerable now than we have been since and including World War II.” One reason the Navy is not alarmed is that it has invested heavily in new technologies aimed at bolstering the defenses of carrier strike groups. It also has changed its tactics for operating near China. But the biggest reason for confidence about the future resides in the difficulties China would face in trying to find and track U.S. carriers. Large-deck, nuclear-powered aircraft carriers of the type the U.S. Navy operates seem like they would be easy to target. They are over a thousand feet long, they are 25 decks high, and they are made of steel that reflects radar signals. They have distinctive optical, infrared and radio-frequency signatures. So what can be so hard about targeting them, using the extensive arsenal of anti-ship missiles that China has accumulated? Well for starters, there are the huge distances within which carriers operating in the Western Pacific can hide. The South China Sea alone measures 1.4 million square miles, and is only one of four marginal seas from which carrier air wings could launch attacks against China. If a carrier is conducting sea control operations—keeping the sea lanes open to key allies such as Japan—it will likely be beyond the first island chain that parallels the Chinese coast, and thus able to hide in the vastness of the Western Pacific. It is hard to find anything in millions of square miles of open ocean, and in the case of U.S. carriers the target will be moving constantly. Nuclear power makes that possible. U.S. carriers essentially have unlimited range. If China’s military actually sights a carrier, it will not be where it was seen by the time weapons arrive. At 35 miles per hour, the carriers can be anywhere in an area measuring over 700 square miles within 30 minutes. That area grows to over 6,000 square miles after 90 minutes, which is the more likely time elapsed between detecting a carrier and launching a missile from the Chinese mainland. But let’s back up for a moment and consider the multiple hurdles that Chinese attackers would need to overcome to successfully target a carrier. First, they would have to find the carrier; then they would have to fix its location; then they would have to establish a continuous track of its movements; then they would have to actually target the carrier with specific weapons; then they would have to penetrate the carrier’s multi-layered defenses to reach the target; and finally they would need to assess whether the resulting damage was sufficient to disable the carrier. The Navy refers to this process as a “kill chain,” and the metaphor is instructive. Because each step must be accomplished sequentially, if any “link” in the chain fails the whole process breaks down. The Navy and its partners in the joint force have plans for disrupting potential attackers at each step in the process. Consider the initial steps of finding and fixing the carrier’s location. China has several options. First, it could use “over-the-horizon” radar located on land. These powerful radars monitor vast swaths of ocean by bouncing their radar signals off the ionosphere. The energy will reflect downward, and once it reaches the surface generate indications of anomalies that return to the original site of transmission via the same path. China has at least two huge radars that can do this, but their utility is modest. First, they must operate at long wavelengths that generate relatively little information in order to bounce off the ionosphere rather than passing through it. Second, at each bounce to and from the target, much energy is lost. Third, the resulting picture of surveilled areas is of such low resolution that the radar cannot establish a target track even if it detects a carrier. Finally, the radar itself is a large, fixed object subject to preemption at the onset of war. The second option China has is reconnaissance satellites. It has orbited dozens, some resembling the electronic listening satellites the U.S. Navy uses to monitor oceans, others employing optical sensors and “synthetic aperture” radar. But to obtain targeting-quality information, the satellites must be placed in low-earth orbit (about 660 miles above the Earth’s surface). At that elevation they are traveling at a rate of roughly 16,000 miles per hour—which means they quickly disappear over the horizon, not to return for more than an hour. The Navy figures that in order to continuously surveil ocean areas near China, Beijing would need to establish three parallel north-south tracks in low-earth orbit, and populate each of those tracks with dozens of satellites spaced to assure continuous coverage. China is nowhere near having such a constellation, and even if it did, connecting all the overhead nodes with an earth-bound command and control system to dispatch weapons against a carrier would be hugely difficult. The third find-and-fix option China has would be manned or unmanned radar planes. But U.S. carrier strike groups maintain a dense defensive perimeter in the air around their locations that includes interceptor aircraft, networked surface-to-air missiles, surveillance planes and airborne jammers. No Chinese aircraft is likely to get close enough to a carrier to establish a sustained target track. The same applies to Chinese surface vessels and submarines, which are even more vulnerable to preemption by the strike group than airborne assets. So the vital early steps of simply finding and fixing the carriers would not be easy. Connecting the assets required for those tasks with the other systems used in later stages of the kill chain would be challenging, especially given the brief timelines available in which to engage the continuously moving target. Any weapons dispatched against the intended target would need to negotiate multiple layers of active and passive defenses, including electronic countermeasures and, in the future, beam weapons. Some observers have stressed the danger posed by China’s recent deployment of anti-ship ballistic missiles with maneuvering warheads. The Navy takes the threat seriously, and in response has moved most of its missile-defense warships to the Pacific. As a practical matter, though, these weapons make little difference to the balance of power if China cannot first find, fix, track and target a carrier. The longer the range of an anti-ship missile, the more updates it needs in flight to successfully engage a moving target. So without timely off-board sensor data and an agile command and control system, the weapon will be largely useless. This generalization applies whether the attacking weapon is purely ballistic or a hypersonic glide vehicle. If the location of the target vessel is not known in a timely and fairly precise fashion, then the munition is unlikely to strike its target. The bottom line is that China is nowhere near overcoming the hurdles required for successful attacks against U.S. aircraft carriers. Whether those carriers are engaged in projecting air power ashore or maintaining control of sea lanes, Beijing will be hard-pressed to impede their operation in wartime. And it’s a safe bet that whatever assets China may have for executing such a mission on the first day of war will be quickly reduced by the combined efforts of the U.S. joint force, whether they be deployed on land, at sea, or in orbit. Why would China want to attack an American aircraft carrier given the result (MAD)?
That assumes that the US would go to a nuclear exchange in a conventional war. Which would be a huge political move plus a limited strike leaves the US open to retaliation, unless its a total counter-force strike and they hit everything. Even if they smashed the vast bulk of China into the stone age if they lose several cities that would hurt a lot as well as the fall-out, both radioactive and political.
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Post by TheRomanSlayer on Feb 10, 2021 5:23:55 GMT
Wouldn't there also be an equivalent of anti-arsenal ship missiles that would be developed on a similar scale to the anti-carrier missiles?
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stevep
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Post by stevep on Feb 10, 2021 10:41:48 GMT
Wouldn't there also be an equivalent of anti-arsenal ship missiles that would be developed on a similar scale to the anti-carrier missiles?
If arsenal ships were in operation and serving alongside CV then they would be targeted as well definitely. I think the argument being put forward for them is that their cheaper and hence you could have more of them. Plus possibly as a smaller target they might be targeted less successfully and I don't know if any professionals we have can tell me but would a smaller ship make their point defence more effective? Of course being smaller any hit on one of them is probably going to be likely to do more destructive damage. 1-3 hits on a CVN say while probably a mission kill may not sink it, albeit it would probably be under repair for a bloody long while depending on where they hit but are more likely to sink an arsenal ship.
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Post by simon darkshade on Feb 10, 2021 14:21:58 GMT
The notion that they would be cheaper isn't something that is definitively verifiable. The cost of a Block III Burke DDG is ~ $2 billion, an LPD is $2 billion and that of a carrier is ~ $13 billion. For 500 odd assorted cruise missiles, there wouldn't be much change out of $1 billion. In rough terms, for the ship, propulsion and other fittings and radars, figure about $4.5 billion, on top of design would cost $1.5 billion. Half the cost of a CVN isn't a good trade off, when the same price gets you 3 DDGs with 96 missiles each and a lot more flexibility. A carrier has a lot more crew, enabling a lot more damage control. A missile barge does not and has more of a chance of going off like Guy Fawke's Night if it cops a heavy missile hit. Loading it with defences costs more money, more power and needs radars and/or nearby radar control from other combat vessels. The mathematics don't add up in favour of an arsenal ship. There needs to be something else that is new and not duplicated on other platforms that it brings to the fleet that can't be fielded otherwise. The only thing I can think of is an adaption of the Army's proposed Strategic Cannon or a similarly long ranged rail gun. That would need a lot of power and some form of defence. Hmmm. If you are going to be building a combat vessel at least twice as large as a cruiser with long range guns and a whole lot of long range missiles, I wonder what it could be called?  In all seriousness, if one is going to build something over 50,000t, in the words I remember from an acerbic chap from Navweaps, there better be aircraft on it. |
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oscssw
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Post by oscssw on Feb 10, 2021 17:17:17 GMT
. . .Hmmm. If you are going to be building a combat vessel at least twice as large as a cruiser with long range guns and a whole lot of long range missiles, I wonder what it could be called? . A 21st Century Battleship BBGN-1. How about naming her Dreadnought? 
BBGN-1 would be 40 to 55 K Tons displacement
BBGN-1 should have nuclear power plant. Same as the CVN Fords. This plant would provide huge amount of electrical power for rail Guns, sensors, laser weapons and high speed. High speed; capable of keeping up with, and hopefully even outpacing super carriers which should be easily doable if given similar propulsion power while being tens of thousands of tons lighter. At BBGN-1 would be capable of preforming high speed combat maneuvers to materially degrade ChiComm BM targeting and against modern anti ship torpedoes.
BBGN-1 would be designed to go in harm's way. I'd suggest scaled up Modern Main Battle Tank armor and active protection system would be perfect. A hard kill anti torpedo weapon is a real necessity for BBGN-1 to succeed. The German SeaSpider
shows some promise. “The full ‘sensor to shooter’ functional chain of a hardkill surface ship torpedo defense system with torpedo detection, classification and localization (TDCL) and the SeaSpider anti-torpedo-torpedo (ATT) has successfully been demonstrated on a surface ship,” the company claimed in a statement in 2018.
BBGN-1 Rail guns should fire 6-10 RPM, and projectiles would be inexpensive and easy to store. A ship the size of BBG-1, with high energy production capacity, could support gun battery of four "guns". This battery should be capable of launching tungsten rods at targets 200 miles away, with the ability to wreak utter destruction based on kinetic energy alone.
BBGN-1 would mount 500 VLS cells ( same proposed for the arsenal ship) they would give her long-range strike land attack and ASUW hitting power that could far exceed the Kirovs, while also providing an effective air defense and ballistic missile defense battery.
Well that's my thoughts on what 50K ton surface warship should be called and what it would need to make it practical.
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lordroel
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Post by lordroel on Feb 10, 2021 17:30:38 GMT
. . .Hmmm. If you are going to be building a combat vessel at least twice as large as a cruiser with long range guns and a whole lot of long range missiles, I wonder what it could be called? . A 21st Century Battleship BBGN-1. How about naming her Dreadnought?
BBGN-1 would be 40 to 55 K Tons displacement
BBGN-1 should have nuclear power plant. Same as the CVN Fords. This plant would provide huge amount of electrical power for rail Guns, sensors, laser weapons and high speed. High speed; capable of keeping up with, and hopefully even outpacing super carriers which should be easily doable if given similar propulsion power while being tens of thousands of tons lighter. At BBGN-1 would be capable of preforming high speed combat maneuvers to materially degrade ChiComm BM targeting and against modern anti ship torpedoes.
BBGN-1 would be designed to go in harm's way. I'd suggest scaled up Modern Main Battle Tank armor and active protection system would be perfect. A hard kill anti torpedo weapon is a real necessity for BBGN-1 to succeed. The German SeaSpider
shows some promise. “The full ‘sensor to shooter’ functional chain of a hardkill surface ship torpedo defense system with torpedo detection, classification and localization (TDCL) and the SeaSpider anti-torpedo-torpedo (ATT) has successfully been demonstrated on a surface ship,” the company claimed in a statement in 2018.
BBGN-1 Rail guns should fire 6-10 RPM, and projectiles would be inexpensive and easy to store. A ship the size of BBG-1, with high energy production capacity, could support gun battery of four "guns". This battery should be capable of launching tungsten rods at targets 200 miles away, with the ability to wreak utter destruction based on kinetic energy alone.
BBGN-1 would mount 500 VLS cells ( same proposed for the arsenal ship) they would give her long-range strike land attack and ASUW hitting power that could far exceed the Kirovs, while also providing an effective air defense and ballistic missile defense battery.
Well that's my thoughts on what 50K ton surface warship should be called and what it would need to make it practical.
For a US Navy ship. |
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Post by simon darkshade on Feb 10, 2021 17:52:00 GMT
Senior Chief,
In this, you’re a man after my own heart. I thought of something broadly like that back in 2002-2003, even down to the idea of anti-torpedo torpedoes. I’d go for rail guns, but it will be interesting to see what the US Army long range bugger turns out like. With a lot of VLS cells, there is the capacity to mix and match the load out, but I’d go so far as to field some ABMs with a performance even hotter than the current SM-6 in the largest cells. The cost of such a platform would be big, so you’d want to make sure that it covers many roles.
Offensively and defensively, she would need to offer a performance greater than the carrier; it was the carrier’s offensive reach that really killed the old battleship.
I’m not too sure what the armour would look like in design terms nor it’s best location, as the threat is different from the heavy naval gun of old.
An interesting thought experiment, but I don’t think you’d get much change out of $12 billion for BBGN-1 and the USN would want at least four of them to cover two consistently deployed in the Atlantic, Pacific and the Med/Middle East.
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oscssw
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Post by oscssw on Feb 10, 2021 18:03:38 GMT
A 21st Century Battleship BBGN-1. How about naming her Dreadnought?
For a US Navy ship.  |
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lordroel
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Post by lordroel on Feb 10, 2021 18:11:48 GMT
But the name Michigan was already taken from 1977 onward when USS Michigan (SSGN-727) was being build and latter commissioned into service. |
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