It's far more complicated than you think to sink a modern combat ship with a missile. The Neptune would qualify as "minimally capable" and if it weren't for Rus

It's far more complicated than you think to sink a modern combat ship with a missile. The Neptune would qualify as "minimally capable" and if it weren't for Russian incompetence and target intelligence, or it wouldn't have succeeded. First, you have the sea. It's flat, it's quiet, and it's pretty much void of surface and aerial radar contacts. Missile stealth is really hard in this environment because of the quiet background, and the Neptune is not stealthy. The ship-based radars are really only limited to the curvature of the earth... so for the Moskva, that's probably 9miles in bad conditions, 18miles in best conditions. The cold background even allows IRST to work quite effectively (not sure if the Moskva has that capability). The target ship is going to know you're coming, especially the Moskva, as in the absolute worst conditions, that's about 30s-45s of warning time, or 10m-15m if you have an AEW radar. Second, radar blindness is a two way street. You can fire a missile, but it will be blind to its target until it's pretty close and can activate some sort of terminal phase guidance. Navies _always_ keep their ships moving to avoid attacks. Basically, for a sub-sonic missile, you can fire it at where the target is now, but by the time it gets to where it thinks the target is, it may not be there anymore. There's a couple of ways to handle this. For Navy's very modern LRASM, that's a passive link receiving mid-course updates, with fallback to GPS/Inertial guidance. For the Neptune, it's just inertial guidance. Just _moving_ the target ship around randomly is enough to protect it from a Neptune strike and Russia did not do this. Third, your missile needs to broadside. Ships are designed to cut through the water, so a head-on attack will just cause the missile to skip off the bow. Your missile needs to have enough spare fuel to turn about and detect the orientation of the ship. Again, you can defeat this by randomly turning your ship a bunch of times. There's a case in the Falklands war where an Exocet was coming in hard for a kill, but the ship's commander had enough time to orient the ship towards the missile with full rudder, and the Exocet bounced, then exploded on the deck rather than penetrating. There was damage, but ship stayed in combat. The Neptune doesn't have great loiter time. And its rudimentary radar terminal guidance it's probably easily attacked electronically anyway. Finally you have point defenses. Russia actually has quite sophisticated CIWS systems, both missile and rotary cannon. It's speculated that the only really guaranteed way to defeat these systems is a saturation attack, which was not the case, or a supersonic terminal phase, which the Neptune is not capable of. Russia pretty much had all its defenses down. So no, the Neptune is really not that sophisticated. This attack was successful purely based on knowing the limitations of the weapon system and timely intelligence.