5 ms·

As a former naval officer can you help us understand the capabilities here, as there are some odd details emergying: 1) Do ships truly have good defences again

As a former naval officer can you help us understand the capabilities here, as there are some odd details emergying: 1) Do ships truly have good defences against Harpoons etc. these days? If 1 or 2 were sent a ship is there a decent chance they'd be neutralized? 2) There's indications Ukraine was flying a drone to distract them possible have their radars not on the right thing, firing missiles from behind. Does this remotely make sense i.e. radar coverage? Or possibly even just overwhelming/confusing the ships operators a bit?

wins32767 5y ago
Russian/Soviet CIWS are mostly effective at targets over 50m. Harpoons are wave skimming. There was a plan to upgrade the Moskova with more modern CIWS but it didn't get funded.
- emaginniss 5y ago
  Somebody needed a chalet instead
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  Ukraine claims to have used their Neptune's, not the new Harpoons.
WJW 5y ago
Sure! 1) Let's look at the ship I am most familiar with, the NL Navy Zeven Provicien class (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Zeven_Provinci%C3%ABn-class_frigate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Zeven_Provinci%C3%ABn-class...). It generally would have 2 types of anti air defense missiles, the SM-2 and the ESSM (both US-built, see wikipedia for their publicly available specs). Apart from that, there are electronic and flare/chaff passive countermeasures and finally a Goalkeeper CIWS for last-mile defense. I have little doubt that we would have been able to take on an attack of 2 Harpoon missiles. OTOH, the Neptune missiles are a lot more modern than the Harpoon and modern missiles have been known to do tricky things like having a pseudo-random noise generator generate corkscrew like maneuvers to evade the defensive fires. I'll also note that the Moskva was built in the early 80s (though refitted after the fall of the Soviet Union) and it was apparently quite stormy (so additional radar noise from wave reflections may have been a thing). All in all, IMHO it seems quite likely that they were indeed hit. Warships don't just suddenly catch fire, and especially in warzones when the opponent has sophisticated anti ship missiles it seems more likely that the fire was caused by a missile impact. 2) For older warships it could be possible. Usually they would have a rotating air warning radar and a dedicated targeting radar for missile guidance. An example would be the STIR (https://www.thalesgroup.com/en/stir-tracking-and-illumination-radar https://www.thalesgroup.com/en/stir-tracking-and-illuminatio...) on NATO vessels, basically a powerful narrowbeam radar on a servo pedestal. There would rarely be more than two or three on a vessel, so it might be possible to distract all of them with several drones. Modern naval radars use active phased array technology where the amount of tracked targets is no longer the bottleneck (in practice, you'd need dozens of missiles), but as mentioned before the Moskva is from the early 80s so they would probably not have this yet. So it could happen, especially in a stormy sea where the waves provide a lot of additional radar noise, but it is really only speculating without a lot more information than we have right now.
- dabeeeenster 5y ago
  Thank you! Comments like these are the reason HN is so great.
- veemjeem 5y ago
  Do you know what happens to explosives on sunk ships generally? Are they usually left at the bottom of the ocean, and could they have the potential to detonate?
  - cm2187 5y ago
    And would a ship of that size carry nukes?
    - ceejayoz 5y ago
      The Moskva is nuclear-capable, but I don't think anyone publicly knows whether it was nuclear-armed in this particular conflict. My bet would be no.
      - throwanem 5y ago
        That said, if anyone decides to mount a recovery or salvage mission of any kind, it may be worth upgrading that "no" to a soft "maybe". As far as I know, nobody has tried to retrieve conventional munitions from a shipwreck, and reasonably enough - they're not dangerous enough to be worth the trouble. Nations will go after lost nuclear warheads, though; indeed, Bayesian search theory saw significant development and interest to serve that purpose [1], and the CIA's been known to go to Bond-movie levels of trouble to the same end [2]. Granted, these were both First Cold War projects, but it seems like there's some degree of possibility that this use of "First Cold War" may eventually prove not to have been a somewhat silly joke, so... [1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RTt59BtFLqQbsSiqd/a-history-of-bayes-theorem https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RTt59BtFLqQbsSiqd/a-history-... [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Azorian https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Azorian
        5y ago
trasz 5y ago
This is more of an infotainment than proper data, but one could simulate it in DCS (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuMTVI65Myg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuMTVI65Myg for a rough demo what it can do). Note that DCS is (at least partially) Russian, so maybe don't install it on a trusted machine. Also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KeiOHgzic6Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KeiOHgzic6Y, lol.

wins32767 5y ago

Russian/Soviet CIWS are mostly effective at targets over 50m. Harpoons are wave skimming. There was a plan to upgrade the Moskova with more modern CIWS but it didn't get funded.

emaginniss 5y ago
Somebody needed a chalet instead
dragonwriter 5y ago
Ukraine claims to have used their Neptune's, not the new Harpoons.

WJW 5y ago

Sure! 1) Let's look at the ship I am most familiar with, the NL Navy Zeven Provicien class (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Zeven_Provinci%C3%ABn-class_frigate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Zeven_Provinci%C3%ABn-class...). It generally would have 2 types of anti air defense missiles, the SM-2 and the ESSM (both US-built, see wikipedia for their publicly available specs). Apart from that, there are electronic and flare/chaff passive countermeasures and finally a Goalkeeper CIWS for last-mile defense. I have little doubt that we would have been able to take on an attack of 2 Harpoon missiles. OTOH, the Neptune missiles are a lot more modern than the Harpoon and modern missiles have been known to do tricky things like having a pseudo-random noise generator generate corkscrew like maneuvers to evade the defensive fires. I'll also note that the Moskva was built in the early 80s (though refitted after the fall of the Soviet Union) and it was apparently quite stormy (so additional radar noise from wave reflections may have been a thing). All in all, IMHO it seems quite likely that they were indeed hit. Warships don't just suddenly catch fire, and especially in warzones when the opponent has sophisticated anti ship missiles it seems more likely that the fire was caused by a missile impact. 2) For older warships it could be possible. Usually they would have a rotating air warning radar and a dedicated targeting radar for missile guidance. An example would be the STIR (https://www.thalesgroup.com/en/stir-tracking-and-illumination-radar https://www.thalesgroup.com/en/stir-tracking-and-illuminatio...) on NATO vessels, basically a powerful narrowbeam radar on a servo pedestal. There would rarely be more than two or three on a vessel, so it might be possible to distract all of them with several drones. Modern naval radars use active phased array technology where the amount of tracked targets is no longer the bottleneck (in practice, you'd need dozens of missiles), but as mentioned before the Moskva is from the early 80s so they would probably not have this yet. So it could happen, especially in a stormy sea where the waves provide a lot of additional radar noise, but it is really only speculating without a lot more information than we have right now.

dabeeeenster 5y ago
Thank you! Comments like these are the reason HN is so great.
veemjeem 5y ago
Do you know what happens to explosives on sunk ships generally? Are they usually left at the bottom of the ocean, and could they have the potential to detonate?
- cm2187 5y ago
  And would a ship of that size carry nukes?
  - ceejayoz 5y ago
    The Moskva is nuclear-capable, but I don't think anyone publicly knows whether it was nuclear-armed in this particular conflict. My bet would be no.
    - throwanem 5y ago
      That said, if anyone decides to mount a recovery or salvage mission of any kind, it may be worth upgrading that "no" to a soft "maybe". As far as I know, nobody has tried to retrieve conventional munitions from a shipwreck, and reasonably enough - they're not dangerous enough to be worth the trouble. Nations will go after lost nuclear warheads, though; indeed, Bayesian search theory saw significant development and interest to serve that purpose [1], and the CIA's been known to go to Bond-movie levels of trouble to the same end [2]. Granted, these were both First Cold War projects, but it seems like there's some degree of possibility that this use of "First Cold War" may eventually prove not to have been a somewhat silly joke, so... [1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RTt59BtFLqQbsSiqd/a-history-of-bayes-theorem https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RTt59BtFLqQbsSiqd/a-history-... [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Azorian https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Azorian
      - 5y ago

trasz 5y ago

This is more of an infotainment than proper data, but one could simulate it in DCS (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuMTVI65Myg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuMTVI65Myg for a rough demo what it can do). Note that DCS is (at least partially) Russian, so maybe don't install it on a trusted machine. Also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KeiOHgzic6Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KeiOHgzic6Y, lol.