Thread: Carrier killers (an article from JED online)

Cool. A Tico, Burke, Perry and possibly even a Wasp would be doomed if hit by such a missle. But a CVN? Well probably a gaping hole in her flight deck and about 500 dead, but I doubt it will sink, unless, you have a case where there are armed aircraft on deck, or where the missle reaches the magazine.

Originally Posted by sparten

Cool. A Tico, Burke, Perry and possibly even a Wasp would be doomed if hit by such a missle. But a CVN? Well probably a gaping hole in her flight deck and about 500 dead, but I doubt it will sink, unless, you have a case where there are armed aircraft on deck, or where the missle reaches the magazine.

Nobody planned to lauch just one missile against CVN. Since full salvo is 24 (or 48) missiles against CVBG, I think that about half would be targeting CVN itself.

Of that, only a couple could be expected to actually hit the carrier.

Originally Posted by sparten

Of that, only a couple could be expected to actually hit the carrier.

Sure. I would say fair number would be around five.

5 hits, that would probably cause the carrier to sink.

Originally Posted by sparten

5 hits, that would probably cause the carrier to sink.

Mission kill for sure. Sometimes it does not require too many hits to do a big ship in, in case of Hood - just one.
If it causes a big fire - it probably will sink.

Originally Posted by lurker

Mission kill for sure. Sometimes it does not require too many hits to do a big ship in, in case of Hood - just one.
If it causes a big fire - it probably will sink.

I highy doubt 5 out of 48 missiles would get through and specifically target the carrier in the center of the screen.

5 or 10 or any amount of missiles probably won't sink a carrier, but they could completely gut it with fire. To sink a carrier you need holes at or below the waterline, and missiles don't make those.

How about the "Sunburn?" I heard a lot about this new carrier killer that the Chinese have been very high on.

Also, how resistant are these missiles in a heavy ECM environment? So far all the discussions are on intercepting them with hardware. What about soft kills?

There are varying views on the Sunburn. Heres one.:

Monday, April 25, 2005
The Sunburn is generally overrated
The Chinese acquisition of Russian Mosquito (Moskit) antiship missiles has stimulated a lot angst among conservative scribblers on defense issues. A commentator writing under the pseudonym of Stokes Pennwalt begs to differ:

The Moskit/Sunburn was originally designed to be launched en masse at a CVBG to deluge and overwhelm the weapons of fleet defense combatants, and make its way through to the carrier said ships would be protecting. Originally designed to be carried by supersonic Tu-22M/26 Backfires (knock-off Soviet clones of the defunct American B-1A), they ended up being deployed in air launchable versions with carrier-based Su-27M Flankers and sea-launchable from Sovremenny-class destroyers. Soviet naval air power was fairly laughable at the time, but a good deal of their surface combatants were also Sunburn-equipped, which made the missile a nonetheless ubiquitous threat to be considered.

It's fast. And that's about it. Its flight speed reduces the engagement time-envelope of hard point defense systems like CIWS and RAM from ~2 minutes to around 30 seconds at best. With a shortened envelope, this increases the chances of a missile (component of a large salvo) saturating a defense system, and getting inside its decision cycle. The surface combat systems of 1980 had a hard time identifying and prioritizing targets that quickly, and given that a Sunburn attack would have ostensibly involved hundreds of them, it was nearly assured that enough would make it through to harm the carrier. That was pre-AEGIS though, and the US Navy's Ticonderoga-class cruisers changed all that. AEGIS was designed, at inception, to specifically mitigage the threat of a Soviet missile attack on an American carrier battle group. Block 0 AEGIS showed up, tactics were developed, and a mode of protection became available.

The missiles became even less of a concern around 1987-88, when the entire AEGIS system received a baseline upgrade. Chief amongst these changes was the refinement of the AN/SPY-1D phased array radar and Block 1 CIWS upgrade. The new SPY-1D could better track sea skimming missiles than the 1A because its digital signal processors had been upgraded with faster CPUs that could filter out RF backscatter from wavetops. The Block 1 CIWS upgrade increased CIWS's rate of fire by 25% (4500r/min, pneumatic gun drive) and extended its engagement envelope past 2 nautical miles with subcaliber Tungsten teflon-saboted ammunition (14mm penetrator) - thus increasing potency markedly. Also upgraded was the internal search radar, although this was not as significant, given that AEGIS CIWS is slaved to the SPY, and usually doesn't even spin up its own internal search radar.

The largest reason why the Sunburns never became more of a threat, however, had little to do with technology and everything to do with modern American naval tactics. A carrier battle group operates at sea with impunity. That's the only way to put it. Both under the waves and over, hundreds of nautical miles out, the maritime battlespace is under control of the CVBG. If the sea can't be secured, the carrier won't be there. It's too much of a strategic risk, given the aircraft carrier's role in American defensive posture. Anyway, to launch an attack with Sunburns, bombers would have to close to within the missile's 50 nautical mile standoff range. The problem for them is, carriers in wartime steaming run a two tiered net of CAP aircraft, beginning 300 nautical miles out. The 300nm CAP flight usually consists of 2-4 fighters at 10-12,000 feet with an E-2C Hawkeye flying charlie around 30,000 feet. At that altitude, the Hawkeye's SAR has a range of another ~250nm. So, starting at 600nm away, the bomber formations are detected. Outer tier CAP aircraft are vectored, inner-tier CAP aircraft, 2-4 fighters patrolling at 150-200nm, move out to the outer track, and the carrier launches its alert-5 fighters to relieve the inner tier. Supposing the outer tier fighters can't do the job, the inner tier moves out, and the carrier launches the alert-15 fighers - and so on. In the event that the bombers can negotiate the fighter gauntlet, there remains the surface combatants - AEGIS ships that can track and engage up to 256 targets at a time. Remember, AEGIS was designed to be able to stop a missile barrage. Aircraft are fish in a barrel to a Ticonderoga with a magazine full of SM-2s. And that's the primary reason why the USN didn't get skittish around the Sunburn like we would think they would. The attacking aircraft would be attacked and likely destroyed before they closed to within 200 nautical miles of the battle group, much less the 50nm outer engagement limit of the missiles. The missiles would never leave the pylons.

The Sunburn is a novelty; nothing more. Some things about it are pretty cool though. Ramjet-sustained cruise missiles have a certain simplistic finesse to their design that's appealing. The Sunburn is so fast, that at 1,300mph at sea level, its skin gets so hot that it's a veritable beacon on a FLIR. The speed is astounding, but the missile is fairly mediocre as a weapon. Like most Russian technology, it excels in one specific attribute, forsaking all others. (See also: MiG-25 Foxbat, Oscar II SSGN) More of a curious sideshow than something to be feared, the Sunburn really isn't the threat that Tom Clancy cracked it up to be. The Soviet engineers came up with some crazy stuff in their day. Although once in a while they had some real winners. That whole gas turbine thing turned out pretty well, and I've always had a soft spot for the Kirovs.
Congressman Dana Rohrabacher of California has highlighted this threat on various occasions. The question here is whether the honorable Congressman has been engaged in disinformation against the Chinese, on behalf on the Pentagon, in hopes that they will waste billions of dollars amassing what the US Navy considers piles of useless junk.

posted by Zhang Fei @ 9:00 AM

The whole article is based on god knows what, Sunburn is designed to attack ships size of cruiser and less.
Middle caliber, if you want

Originally Posted by M21Sniper

I highy doubt 5 out of 48 missiles would get through and specifically target the carrier in the center of the screen.

5 or 10 or any amount of missiles probably won't sink a carrier, but they could completely gut it with fire. To sink a carrier you need holes at or below the waterline, and missiles don't make those.

Sniper, last year at another board we were discussing Jutland, and and specifically the blowing up of the Battlecruisers. The thing one guy pointed out was that all three took multiple hits from, Derfflinger and the rest. The damage to Invicible and Indetafigable was already bad enough to force them to retire from the line, even before the fatal hits. Queen Mary was the only one whhere the explosion was sudden, but even then its been pointed out that she had already recieved on order of half a dozen hits from Derfflinger. before the one that penetrated "Q" Turret.

So if a carrier is hit by 5 or six Shipwrecks, you alraedy have heavy damage, large fires and quite a bit of flooding that the ship would be doomed anyway, due to the sheer number of hits.

"The whole article is based on god knows what, Sunburn is designed to attack ships size of cruiser and less.
Middle caliber, if you want "


I posted the article as an example of the many dubious and conflicting views out there.

While Im sure theoretically Sunburn could be used against a carrier I would tend to agree with Lurker .

Although this missle is much larger and faster than the Harpoon/Exocet/Switchblade anti-ship missles usually considered "middle caliber" it is similarly ranged approx 50-70nm depending on the version.

Now the P-700 Shipwreck missles produced for use on the Kirov class cruisers and the Oscar class SSGN's is another story along with the Sandbox missles fitted to the Slava class cruisers.

Originally Posted by sparten

So if a carrier is hit by 5 or six Shipwrecks, you alraedy have heavy damage, large fires and quite a bit of flooding that the ship would be doomed anyway, due to the sheer number of hits.

I don't disagree with any of that...but it would still not sink unless it was finished off with torpedos or scuttled. In order to sink a ship you need to hole the hull. AShMs are not the right weapon for that endeavor. That's why god invented Torpedos.

LOL.

Originally Posted by gunnut

How about the "Sunburn?" I heard a lot about this new carrier killer that the Chinese have been very high on.

Also, how resistant are these missiles in a heavy ECM environment? So far all the discussions are on intercepting them with hardware. What about soft kills?

According to Rick USN and some other sailors i'm friendly with US soft kill(ie ECM) systems are very effective.