11 ms·

Rolling Airframe Missile

191 points by cwillu 3y ago

isoprophlex 3y ago
I'll just comment that that is the most clever website name I came across in a long time!
metadat 3y ago
So many great articles on this site. This rainy Sunday is in serious jeopardy of falling off the cliff and being sucked into the gravity well wormhole that is navalgazing.net. https://www.navalgazing.net/Phalanx https://www.navalgazing.net/Phalanx I've always wondered how the Battleship guns with the white dome cylinder chamber above the gattling gun worked, but the background story is way more interesting than I expected. Apparently it's called a Phalanx, and no, a person doesn't sit in the white cylinder chamber*. * Despite Battlefield 2 leading me to believe a person occupied the cylinder, anyone remember Wake Island with the USMC carrier, F-35B, and J-10? haha, good times.
- thunderbird120 3y ago
  The article on VLS is also quite nice https://www.navalgazing.net/VLS https://www.navalgazing.net/VLS
  - duxup 3y ago
    That adaptive deck launcher seems like you could almost drop that (well and some radar) on any ship and turn it into a warship…
- poooogles 3y ago
  >...only a handful of cases in which ships equipped with Phalanx have been the subject of missile fire, and none that have actually seen the system tested. Worth noting that this line is now out of date. Allegedly they've been tested in Yemen recently [1]. 1. https://www.businessinsider.com/houthi-missile-close-us-warship-close-in-weapon-system-2024-1?r=US&IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/houthi-missile-close-us-wars...
  - jhartwig 3y ago
    I had thought it had been used during the gulf war in a friendly fire event.
    - Simon_ORourke 3y ago
      The Missouri got raked with it from its escort ship - not pleasant for anyone concerned I'd say. http://billgx.com/2019/10/autonomous-friendly-fire/ http://billgx.com/2019/10/autonomous-friendly-fire/
      - jhartwig 3y ago
        Yep that's the one
      - thebruce87m 3y ago
        tldr: the Missouri fired a chaff and the other ships CIWS was all “not in my airspace” and started shooting at it even though the Missouri was behind the target. Interesting, I wonder if the whole battlegroup has synced systems now to avoid such things, e.g. 1) I’m going to launch something, everyone else disregard it as a threat and 2) if a threat has a friendly behind it, don’t shoot it. Maybe 2) is more of a judgement call since a few bullet holes is probably preferential to the alternative.
        ethbr1 3y ago
        IFF in any capacity on Phalanx seems like a poor match. At ranges that close... you really want a "deconstruct anything in the air" device, not a "consider what you're about to hit" device. Which I'd imagine has been designer pushback on complicating it and going that route. Safety through deciding what mode to set it in; not through leaving it alone and forgetting about it.
        thebruce87m 3y ago
        I don’t disagree, but I’m sure they had to come up with some mitigation after this. If each ship is shooting down the other ships primary/secondary/whatever countermeasure then in a worst case scenario you and your sister ships are only left with your CIWS. And they might still be busy shooting at your sister ships chaffs to deal with the real threat. I don’t know much about it, I just found it interesting. Seems a bit like Star Trek - “Their shields go down for a split second when they fire”. Maybe the system goes dark for a second to avoid shooting down outgoing items? Syncing the shields might make this better (or expose other weaknesses?)
- whartung 3y ago
  It's a radar directed gun. The dome thing is the radar. Once, a sailor was on top of one and the radar turned on, and it cooked the sailor. That radar has some real power. The Phalanx motto is "it flies, it dies". It has an autonomous function. Turn it on, and it kills anything in its airspace. However, that's never turned on. WAY too dangerous, there's always a man in the loop. There's two primary challenges for the Phalanx, also known as the CIWS (though this often pronounced "see whiz"). The first is finding the target in the first place, notably a sea skimming missile, picking it out of the surface clutter. The second is that, once identified, determining that its actually destroyed the target in a timely fashion so as to not keep pumping bullets into a flying debris field. The system uses the radar to track both the target and the stream of bullets. So, to the radar system, all of the bullets are "tracers" to help the system direct the fire into the target. Another issue with the Phalanx is that it's not armored, and the possibility of it getting hit by the shrapnel of the missile it took out, is not zero. Unlikely, depending on trajectories, but not zero. The missile may not explode, but it's still a bunch of metal hurtling at several hundred miles per hour. While designed for the naval environment, the machines have also been deployed, and used in combat, mounted on trailers to be used in forward land positions as point defense against missiles, low flying aircraft, and even artillery shells. The CIWS was recently used to down a Houthi missile in the conflict currently happening in the Red Sea.
  - chasil 3y ago
    Would the Phalanx have stopped a barrage of Neptune missiles, which were reported to have sunk the Moskva? Was the defensive weaponry on the Moskva unable to defend against the Neptune, or did the crew make mistakes in operating it?
    - whartung 3y ago
      Conceptually, yes, the CIWS could have been effective against the missile the struck the Moskva. The US had a similar incident, back in '87, with the frigate USS Stark. It was struck by two Exocet missiles launched by an Iraqi fighter during the Iran-Iraq war. The Stark was in international waters, and the attack was unprovoked. Bluntly, the ship was not expecting the attack, and was unprepared for it. While it was equipped with the CIWS, it was in standby mode. Also, the Stark mounted a single unit in the center of the ship, facing aft. As I recall the missiles actually struck the forward quarter of the ship. Even if the CIWS was enabled, I believe they would have had to turn the ship for it to engage the missiles. As for the Moskva, let me qualify I have no support whatsoever for what Russia is doing. That said, I do have a base level of respect for fighting forces, and the people who staff them and stand the line. I was shocked to hear about the Moskva. There's no reason those missiles should have struck that ship. That ship is particularly designed, much like our cruisers, to defeat threats such as those missiles. For the US Navy, a prime role for our cruisers is to defend not just themselves, but a fleet role. In simple terms, the cruisers are there to protect the carriers, and are bristling with systems and sensors designed for that task from several threats. The Moskva was similar to that role. The CIWS is the "last resort". The CIWS is for when missiles penetrate the other layers of defenses in place, including things like the combat air patrol, air-to-air missiles, etc. The CIWS is a "last mile" defense. The Moskva had layers as well. It should have taken several missiles to penetrate what the Moskva could have utilized. Obviously, being in the West, I do not hear flattering things about the Russian forces, their state of readiness, training, morale, etc., etc. Based on that knowledge, and the fact that the Moskva was lost, it's clear to me that that ship should not have been where it was. Here was a high level ship of war, in a war zone, not as a spectator, but as a participant, and it was not ready for that attack. That ship and her crew were not qualified to be there, not prepared to be there, and those service people deserved better. The Russian navy failed that crew, and they should not have been in harms way like that. The Ukrainian attack should have failed utterly. It shouldn't have even been close. The Stark was very embarrassing, and there are many critics of the modern US Navy. The Stark, however, was completely surprised, they weren't a combatant, they weren't posturing, the Stark was in the area. The Moskva should not have been surprised. They clearly did not anticipate the attack (as I understand it, everyone was surprised the Ukrainians had this capability), but it's not really clear if the ship was prepared and capable even if they did. There's stories that even after it was struck, the crew did not perform well and contributed to the loss of the ship.
- WalterBright 3y ago
  I've wondered many times why a radar-directed machine gun isn't used to protect against drone attacks. The drones the terrorists used are rather slow moving, so the gun doesn't have to be that sophisticated. And it should be relatively cheap.
  - icegreentea2 3y ago
    They are to some extent? One issue of radar-directed machine guns in the context of the Red Sea is that machine gun range is limited, so they can only provide point defense. This means that a warship can only protect itself, and any commercial ships that are -very- nearby. Yes, you could probably figure out a way to rig up a lot of these onto smaller ships to escort individual ships/convoys through, but hey you go to war with the navy you have. Unironically, the LCS's might be useful in this role. More generally, you see stuff like the army's new M-SHORAD having missiles (Stinger+Hellfire) and 30mm + 7.62mm guns.
    - WalterBright 3y ago
      I was thinking of the recent drone attack on a military base, where three soldiers were killed.
      - icegreentea2 3y ago
        Oh. Yeah, I mean there's nothing preventing such a system - land based Phalanx is a thing. We also don't know what air defenses were even at the base (maybe they already had land based Phalanx...). Sounds like the base was caught by surprise.
        swagasaurus-rex 3y ago
        There was a friendly drone returning to base, so their defensive systems were turned off.
      - giantrobot 3y ago
        There is such a system, it's called C-RAM and is basically a Phallanx mounted on a trailer. You can find videos of them working at bases in Iraq recently. There's also smaller systems in development like M-SHORAD and MADIS (Army and Marines respectively if I remember right). Whether stuff like that is deployed to a particular base is a question of them being available and the particular location being well supplied enough to use them. The M-SHORAD and MADIS systems are designed to mount on light vehicles so they can be deployed more readily and to smaller forward positions.
- saiya-jin 3y ago
  Went for Phalanx article immediately too when I saw the link, I guess there is just something about that 20mm beast throwing massive tungsten slugs at even crazier speeds that no missile can compete with (for attracting readers). These things require super quick reactions, operator is optional (and thats why no real usage in combat, USN ends up turning it off often in situations where they don't want to risk absolutely destructive friendly fire. Now if everything will be eventually 'ai'-infused, well, fuck. Navy apparently doesn't trust automation with their lives much, and fancier neural network with unpredictable decision paths ain't gonna improve things.
  - hef19898 3y ago
    You always want a human in the loop. FDS sometimes drives into trucks or disengages randomly. Automated defence systems shoot at stuff they consider to be a threat, and that can be anything from non-combatants to friendlies. Or just the enemy, but the particular attack might be a diversion, hence a human might hold the defence back. Also just for stealth, radar is a giant beacon leading right to back to you. As is a rapid fire 20 mm cannon. Unless we have General AI, in which case, well, you'd still want a human in the loop, just at different level.
  - deleted 3y ago
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  - maxglute 3y ago
    >crazier speeds that no missile can compete with CIWS muzzle velocity is ~1000-1200 m/s, ~mach3, substantially slower than modern hypersonic threats at ~mach5+. Hence counters to hypersonic missiles are other advanced interceptors. There were papers in the 80s detailing physical limits from mechanical tracking to over horizon response times and TLDR IIRC was CIWS not suitable for fast, low flying and slightly maneuverable anti ship missiles.
- paulmd 3y ago
  Phalanx: “is it for me???” https://www.reddit.com/r/NonCredibleDefense/comments/13kd6m0/russians_wouldve_done_it_no_question/ https://www.reddit.com/r/NonCredibleDefense/comments/13kd6m0...
- a12k 3y ago
  Wow, you're right. Every link I follow on the posted article leads me into a fascinating wasteland of other articles from the site, each better than the last. This is some extremely high quality content.
- matheusmoreira 3y ago
  > Battlefield 2 > anyone remember Wake Island with the USMC carrier, F-35B, and J-10? I remember. The J-10s would eat the F-35s for lunch and immediately start attacking the carrier. They'd gun down the CIWS as they passed and bomb the crap out of players on the carrier's flight deck for good measure. Good pilots could time their passes so that their guns were lined up with the F-35 just as it respawned, destroying it before it could take off. Shame you couldn't sink the carrier like in BF1942. Good times. Eternal shame on EA for C&Ding the community server effort. > Despite Battlefield 2 leading me to believe a person occupied the cylinder Haha I thought so too... BF2 required you to man it like a vehicle in order for it to do anything. It's only natural kids would think that.
- finfrastrcuture 3y ago
  My grandfather invented / designed the bullets for the Phalanx. The dumbed-down idea is that smaller bullets with high kinetic energy can be more devastating to armored targets than larger, slower bullets releasing chemical energy. He used to take my mother out to the CA desert to help him test his latest designs on thick armored plates (they now decorate her front yard - metal!). Reflecting on the Phalanx brings mixed emotion, given that the US Navy avoided paying patents on his designs and buried him in legal fees so that he never saw a dime (at least that's what I've been told). He was older at the time, and this absolutely took several years off his life. That said, I know he'd be proud to see his ideas still being relevant today, from implementation to video games.
CafeRacer 3y ago
I wish you could control with arrows or `wasd`. Or if at least it showed a message explaining how controls work. Took me a bit to figure out controls on a laptop.
- qwertox 3y ago
  Did my adblocker block out a game on that page or did we read different articles?
  - throwanem 3y ago
    I believe that was meant for https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39189285 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39189285, "Missile Game".
droro 3y ago
I had always wondered whether there was a missile that was spin stabilized with minimal control surfaces like this one. They mentioned it only had two control fins, but not whether they are independent. It seems possible to steer a spinning missile using a single actuator if the control pulses are precise enough.
- icegreentea2 3y ago
  From https://secwww.jhuapl.edu/techdigest/Content/techdigest/pdf/V02-N03/02-03-Bruns.pdf https://secwww.jhuapl.edu/techdigest/Content/techdigest/pdf/... it seems that the two control fins are driven off a single shaft/motor - so they are not independent. The RAM uses single plane tracking - basically imaging that it's only ever steering in pitch. But because it's constantly rolling, "pitch" will sweep over both axes and control to zero.
  - 13of40 3y ago
    Yeah (and apologies if I get this wrong after 30 years) with a rolling airframe, you can have two fins on the same axis that "wiggle" back and forth at the same frequency as the rotation of the missile. Direction control comes from the phase of the movement, so the fins are pushed in the direction you want to go when it rotates to that point.
- amenhotep 3y ago
  Vikhr also does this, and Starstreak and M1156 both use a clutch to transfer force from a freely spinning fin assembly at the nose to the rest of the projectile when appropriate, achieving guidance without any movable control surfaces! Missile designers are very clever.
- lazyeye 3y ago
  Just curious....what else have you always wondered about?
- saiya-jin 3y ago
  newer versions have 4 fins... better read the actual article, pretty good stuff there
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LispSporks22 3y ago
I don’t think these systems will work against cheap, tiny drones or swarms of drones. eg. Russian ships vs Ukrainian boat drones.
- ranger207 3y ago
  Probably not. They were designed to take out multi-ton supersonic cruise missiles so they need a larger warhead than would be required against drone swarms. Of course, since they're so large and capable they certainly could take down _a_ drone, and then it becomes a question of how large the incoming swarm is. Now, if the incoming swarm is large enough, then either each drone carries a tiny amount of explosives, or each drone is large and expensive. The US Navy has been building ships to protect against mass swarms of incoming cruise missiles since about the 60s or so, so if the incoming drones are large enough then you could also use larger missiles against them and rely on the RAM only for whatever leaks through.
- cgearhart 3y ago
  That’s what the lasers are for. https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2022/10/19/navy-destroyer-adds-helios-laser-to-arsenal https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2022/10/19/...
  - vasili111 3y ago
    In foggy weather lazers are not working well.
- kcb 3y ago
  Is there a fundamental difference between a drone and an anti-ship missile?
  - jabl 3y ago
    In the sense that both are flying things loaded with explosives heading towards your ship, no there's no "fundamental" difference between them. In practice, there's a world of difference. Drones are cheap and slow, but can be a big threat in a saturation attack style scenario. Do you want to spend a $1M+ missile to shoot down a $5000 drone?. Do you even have enough missiles to shoot down a swarm of 100 drones? An anti-ship missile is much bigger and more expensive, but flies at around 300 m/s for a subsonic one, and up to 900 m/s for supersonic ones, giving much less time to shoot it down. And while the missile per se isn't armored, the warhead has a thick casing designed to penetrate deep into the ship before exploding, so hitting the missile with some shrapnel at short range isn't gonna help as the wreckage of the missile will still likely continue on a ballistic path and hit the ship. And the warhead is often big enough to cripple a warship with a single hit (well, maybe a carrier is big enough to keep on trucking).
wolverine876 3y ago
Always important to look critically at the person speaking (I mean to imply nothing about them, just sharing what I found): It [the blog] grew out of my time as a tour guide on the battleship Iowa (BB-61) in Los Angeles, and although I now live halfway across the country, Iowa is still one of the mainstays of this blog. It also came from my frustration with existing sources, which tended to be either way too high-level or too technical, with very little to bring an interested general audience up to speed. ... I've been a military geek since I was in grade school, although my affections didn't settle on matters naval until after I graduated college with a degree in aerospace engineering. ... Unfortunately, I didn't like my actual job, and ended up getting another job in Oklahoma, doing work on military aircraft. https://www.navalgazing.net/About https://www.navalgazing.net/About Certainly they should understand how flying machines work. I dunno about their history. :)
- lapsed_pacifist 3y ago
  bean used to post long and in depth posts into the SlateStarCodex Open Threads, then someone helped him set up his own site, and here we are. He organizes meetups at Naval History sites too.
wolverine876 3y ago
> The use of a gun limited effective range to no more than 1500 yards Aren't sniper rifles effective at that distance (if they hit)? A weapon not constrained to human limits in dynamic movement, heat, sound, pressure, size, etc, isn't effective at a much greater distance?
- unwind 3y ago
  I am no expert but I imagine one important tradeoff is between cartridge power (necessary for long range with sufficient energy) and cartridge size/mass, these systems have high rates of fire (because trying to hit very fast-moving targets) and that can't be easy with a giant cartridge. What happened to "Metal storm"?
  - numpad0 3y ago
    It didn't go anywhere that's for sure, found an /r/NCD post speculating reasons as to why[1]. Looks like they were bought and pivoted to explosive drones somehow[2]. 1: https://old.reddit.com/r/NonCredibleDefense/comments/16xhmpv/ https://old.reddit.com/r/NonCredibleDefense/comments/16xhmpv... 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_Storm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_Storm
- laverya 3y ago
  How long does it take for a bullet to reach 1500 yards? Around 2 seconds. How confident do you have to be in the movement of your target to hit them with a 2 second lead? Very. (Or you can follow the CIWS methodology and throw quite a few bullets at once) The effective range isn't limited by the ballistics of the weapon (The 20 mm shells it fires will easily go 5+km), it's limited by actually hitting the damn thing you're aiming at.
- ranger207 3y ago
  Sniper rifles are firing a single shot, the bullet is smaller, and snipers can take significant time to prepare. I've heard of snipers firing a few hundred yards away from their target first to see exactly how their shot will be affected by drop and wind and only then aiming at their target. Sniper rifles have much less stress on them imposed by firing the cartridge than a Phalanx; a 12.7x99mm cartridge is nothing compared to 20x102mm. Finally, a sniper is firing a single carefully aimed shot; a Phalanx is firing 75 rounds a second from six rotating barrels.
yoyoinbog 3y ago
There are only two types of ships: Submarines and targets http://www.johntreed.net/sittingducks.html http://www.johntreed.net/sittingducks.html
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mynameisnoone 3y ago
To shrink MIC budgets, using lasers to counter tactical missiles in clear weather will be significantly cheaper to operate than expending expensive missiles. Repeated drone and improvised rocket attacks shouldn't lead to an expensive war of attrition that only makes defense contractors rich while taking away budget from better uses.

191 points by cwillu 3y ago

I'll just comment that that is the most clever website name I came across in a long time!

So many great articles on this site. This rainy Sunday is in serious jeopardy of falling off the cliff and being sucked into the gravity well wormhole that is navalgazing.net. https://www.navalgazing.net/Phalanx https://www.navalgazing.net/Phalanx I've always wondered how the Battleship guns with the white dome cylinder chamber above the gattling gun worked, but the background story is way more interesting than I expected. Apparently it's called a Phalanx, and no, a person doesn't sit in the white cylinder chamber*. * Despite Battlefield 2 leading me to believe a person occupied the cylinder, anyone remember Wake Island with the USMC carrier, F-35B, and J-10? haha, good times.

thunderbird120 3y ago
The article on VLS is also quite nice https://www.navalgazing.net/VLS https://www.navalgazing.net/VLS
- duxup 3y ago
  That adaptive deck launcher seems like you could almost drop that (well and some radar) on any ship and turn it into a warship…
poooogles 3y ago
>...only a handful of cases in which ships equipped with Phalanx have been the subject of missile fire, and none that have actually seen the system tested. Worth noting that this line is now out of date. Allegedly they've been tested in Yemen recently [1]. 1. https://www.businessinsider.com/houthi-missile-close-us-warship-close-in-weapon-system-2024-1?r=US&IR=T https://www.businessinsider.com/houthi-missile-close-us-wars...
- jhartwig 3y ago
  I had thought it had been used during the gulf war in a friendly fire event.
  - Simon_ORourke 3y ago
    The Missouri got raked with it from its escort ship - not pleasant for anyone concerned I'd say. http://billgx.com/2019/10/autonomous-friendly-fire/ http://billgx.com/2019/10/autonomous-friendly-fire/
    - jhartwig 3y ago
      Yep that's the one
    - thebruce87m 3y ago
      tldr: the Missouri fired a chaff and the other ships CIWS was all “not in my airspace” and started shooting at it even though the Missouri was behind the target. Interesting, I wonder if the whole battlegroup has synced systems now to avoid such things, e.g. 1) I’m going to launch something, everyone else disregard it as a threat and 2) if a threat has a friendly behind it, don’t shoot it. Maybe 2) is more of a judgement call since a few bullet holes is probably preferential to the alternative.
      - ethbr1 3y ago
        IFF in any capacity on Phalanx seems like a poor match. At ranges that close... you really want a "deconstruct anything in the air" device, not a "consider what you're about to hit" device. Which I'd imagine has been designer pushback on complicating it and going that route. Safety through deciding what mode to set it in; not through leaving it alone and forgetting about it.
        thebruce87m 3y ago
        I don’t disagree, but I’m sure they had to come up with some mitigation after this. If each ship is shooting down the other ships primary/secondary/whatever countermeasure then in a worst case scenario you and your sister ships are only left with your CIWS. And they might still be busy shooting at your sister ships chaffs to deal with the real threat. I don’t know much about it, I just found it interesting. Seems a bit like Star Trek - “Their shields go down for a split second when they fire”. Maybe the system goes dark for a second to avoid shooting down outgoing items? Syncing the shields might make this better (or expose other weaknesses?)
whartung 3y ago
It's a radar directed gun. The dome thing is the radar. Once, a sailor was on top of one and the radar turned on, and it cooked the sailor. That radar has some real power. The Phalanx motto is "it flies, it dies". It has an autonomous function. Turn it on, and it kills anything in its airspace. However, that's never turned on. WAY too dangerous, there's always a man in the loop. There's two primary challenges for the Phalanx, also known as the CIWS (though this often pronounced "see whiz"). The first is finding the target in the first place, notably a sea skimming missile, picking it out of the surface clutter. The second is that, once identified, determining that its actually destroyed the target in a timely fashion so as to not keep pumping bullets into a flying debris field. The system uses the radar to track both the target and the stream of bullets. So, to the radar system, all of the bullets are "tracers" to help the system direct the fire into the target. Another issue with the Phalanx is that it's not armored, and the possibility of it getting hit by the shrapnel of the missile it took out, is not zero. Unlikely, depending on trajectories, but not zero. The missile may not explode, but it's still a bunch of metal hurtling at several hundred miles per hour. While designed for the naval environment, the machines have also been deployed, and used in combat, mounted on trailers to be used in forward land positions as point defense against missiles, low flying aircraft, and even artillery shells. The CIWS was recently used to down a Houthi missile in the conflict currently happening in the Red Sea.
- chasil 3y ago
  Would the Phalanx have stopped a barrage of Neptune missiles, which were reported to have sunk the Moskva? Was the defensive weaponry on the Moskva unable to defend against the Neptune, or did the crew make mistakes in operating it?
  - whartung 3y ago
    Conceptually, yes, the CIWS could have been effective against the missile the struck the Moskva. The US had a similar incident, back in '87, with the frigate USS Stark. It was struck by two Exocet missiles launched by an Iraqi fighter during the Iran-Iraq war. The Stark was in international waters, and the attack was unprovoked. Bluntly, the ship was not expecting the attack, and was unprepared for it. While it was equipped with the CIWS, it was in standby mode. Also, the Stark mounted a single unit in the center of the ship, facing aft. As I recall the missiles actually struck the forward quarter of the ship. Even if the CIWS was enabled, I believe they would have had to turn the ship for it to engage the missiles. As for the Moskva, let me qualify I have no support whatsoever for what Russia is doing. That said, I do have a base level of respect for fighting forces, and the people who staff them and stand the line. I was shocked to hear about the Moskva. There's no reason those missiles should have struck that ship. That ship is particularly designed, much like our cruisers, to defeat threats such as those missiles. For the US Navy, a prime role for our cruisers is to defend not just themselves, but a fleet role. In simple terms, the cruisers are there to protect the carriers, and are bristling with systems and sensors designed for that task from several threats. The Moskva was similar to that role. The CIWS is the "last resort". The CIWS is for when missiles penetrate the other layers of defenses in place, including things like the combat air patrol, air-to-air missiles, etc. The CIWS is a "last mile" defense. The Moskva had layers as well. It should have taken several missiles to penetrate what the Moskva could have utilized. Obviously, being in the West, I do not hear flattering things about the Russian forces, their state of readiness, training, morale, etc., etc. Based on that knowledge, and the fact that the Moskva was lost, it's clear to me that that ship should not have been where it was. Here was a high level ship of war, in a war zone, not as a spectator, but as a participant, and it was not ready for that attack. That ship and her crew were not qualified to be there, not prepared to be there, and those service people deserved better. The Russian navy failed that crew, and they should not have been in harms way like that. The Ukrainian attack should have failed utterly. It shouldn't have even been close. The Stark was very embarrassing, and there are many critics of the modern US Navy. The Stark, however, was completely surprised, they weren't a combatant, they weren't posturing, the Stark was in the area. The Moskva should not have been surprised. They clearly did not anticipate the attack (as I understand it, everyone was surprised the Ukrainians had this capability), but it's not really clear if the ship was prepared and capable even if they did. There's stories that even after it was struck, the crew did not perform well and contributed to the loss of the ship.
WalterBright 3y ago
I've wondered many times why a radar-directed machine gun isn't used to protect against drone attacks. The drones the terrorists used are rather slow moving, so the gun doesn't have to be that sophisticated. And it should be relatively cheap.
- icegreentea2 3y ago
  They are to some extent? One issue of radar-directed machine guns in the context of the Red Sea is that machine gun range is limited, so they can only provide point defense. This means that a warship can only protect itself, and any commercial ships that are -very- nearby. Yes, you could probably figure out a way to rig up a lot of these onto smaller ships to escort individual ships/convoys through, but hey you go to war with the navy you have. Unironically, the LCS's might be useful in this role. More generally, you see stuff like the army's new M-SHORAD having missiles (Stinger+Hellfire) and 30mm + 7.62mm guns.
  - WalterBright 3y ago
    I was thinking of the recent drone attack on a military base, where three soldiers were killed.
    - icegreentea2 3y ago
      Oh. Yeah, I mean there's nothing preventing such a system - land based Phalanx is a thing. We also don't know what air defenses were even at the base (maybe they already had land based Phalanx...). Sounds like the base was caught by surprise.
      - swagasaurus-rex 3y ago
        There was a friendly drone returning to base, so their defensive systems were turned off.
    - giantrobot 3y ago
      There is such a system, it's called C-RAM and is basically a Phallanx mounted on a trailer. You can find videos of them working at bases in Iraq recently. There's also smaller systems in development like M-SHORAD and MADIS (Army and Marines respectively if I remember right). Whether stuff like that is deployed to a particular base is a question of them being available and the particular location being well supplied enough to use them. The M-SHORAD and MADIS systems are designed to mount on light vehicles so they can be deployed more readily and to smaller forward positions.
saiya-jin 3y ago
Went for Phalanx article immediately too when I saw the link, I guess there is just something about that 20mm beast throwing massive tungsten slugs at even crazier speeds that no missile can compete with (for attracting readers). These things require super quick reactions, operator is optional (and thats why no real usage in combat, USN ends up turning it off often in situations where they don't want to risk absolutely destructive friendly fire. Now if everything will be eventually 'ai'-infused, well, fuck. Navy apparently doesn't trust automation with their lives much, and fancier neural network with unpredictable decision paths ain't gonna improve things.
- hef19898 3y ago
  You always want a human in the loop. FDS sometimes drives into trucks or disengages randomly. Automated defence systems shoot at stuff they consider to be a threat, and that can be anything from non-combatants to friendlies. Or just the enemy, but the particular attack might be a diversion, hence a human might hold the defence back. Also just for stealth, radar is a giant beacon leading right to back to you. As is a rapid fire 20 mm cannon. Unless we have General AI, in which case, well, you'd still want a human in the loop, just at different level.
- deleted 3y ago
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- maxglute 3y ago
  >crazier speeds that no missile can compete with CIWS muzzle velocity is ~1000-1200 m/s, ~mach3, substantially slower than modern hypersonic threats at ~mach5+. Hence counters to hypersonic missiles are other advanced interceptors. There were papers in the 80s detailing physical limits from mechanical tracking to over horizon response times and TLDR IIRC was CIWS not suitable for fast, low flying and slightly maneuverable anti ship missiles.
paulmd 3y ago
Phalanx: “is it for me???” https://www.reddit.com/r/NonCredibleDefense/comments/13kd6m0/russians_wouldve_done_it_no_question/ https://www.reddit.com/r/NonCredibleDefense/comments/13kd6m0...
a12k 3y ago
Wow, you're right. Every link I follow on the posted article leads me into a fascinating wasteland of other articles from the site, each better than the last. This is some extremely high quality content.
matheusmoreira 3y ago
> Battlefield 2 > anyone remember Wake Island with the USMC carrier, F-35B, and J-10? I remember. The J-10s would eat the F-35s for lunch and immediately start attacking the carrier. They'd gun down the CIWS as they passed and bomb the crap out of players on the carrier's flight deck for good measure. Good pilots could time their passes so that their guns were lined up with the F-35 just as it respawned, destroying it before it could take off. Shame you couldn't sink the carrier like in BF1942. Good times. Eternal shame on EA for C&Ding the community server effort. > Despite Battlefield 2 leading me to believe a person occupied the cylinder Haha I thought so too... BF2 required you to man it like a vehicle in order for it to do anything. It's only natural kids would think that.
finfrastrcuture 3y ago
My grandfather invented / designed the bullets for the Phalanx. The dumbed-down idea is that smaller bullets with high kinetic energy can be more devastating to armored targets than larger, slower bullets releasing chemical energy. He used to take my mother out to the CA desert to help him test his latest designs on thick armored plates (they now decorate her front yard - metal!). Reflecting on the Phalanx brings mixed emotion, given that the US Navy avoided paying patents on his designs and buried him in legal fees so that he never saw a dime (at least that's what I've been told). He was older at the time, and this absolutely took several years off his life. That said, I know he'd be proud to see his ideas still being relevant today, from implementation to video games.

CafeRacer 3y ago

I wish you could control with arrows or `wasd`. Or if at least it showed a message explaining how controls work. Took me a bit to figure out controls on a laptop.

qwertox 3y ago
Did my adblocker block out a game on that page or did we read different articles?
- throwanem 3y ago
  I believe that was meant for https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39189285 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39189285, "Missile Game".

droro 3y ago

I had always wondered whether there was a missile that was spin stabilized with minimal control surfaces like this one. They mentioned it only had two control fins, but not whether they are independent. It seems possible to steer a spinning missile using a single actuator if the control pulses are precise enough.

icegreentea2 3y ago
From https://secwww.jhuapl.edu/techdigest/Content/techdigest/pdf/V02-N03/02-03-Bruns.pdf https://secwww.jhuapl.edu/techdigest/Content/techdigest/pdf/... it seems that the two control fins are driven off a single shaft/motor - so they are not independent. The RAM uses single plane tracking - basically imaging that it's only ever steering in pitch. But because it's constantly rolling, "pitch" will sweep over both axes and control to zero.
- 13of40 3y ago
  Yeah (and apologies if I get this wrong after 30 years) with a rolling airframe, you can have two fins on the same axis that "wiggle" back and forth at the same frequency as the rotation of the missile. Direction control comes from the phase of the movement, so the fins are pushed in the direction you want to go when it rotates to that point.
amenhotep 3y ago
Vikhr also does this, and Starstreak and M1156 both use a clutch to transfer force from a freely spinning fin assembly at the nose to the rest of the projectile when appropriate, achieving guidance without any movable control surfaces! Missile designers are very clever.
lazyeye 3y ago
Just curious....what else have you always wondered about?
saiya-jin 3y ago
newer versions have 4 fins... better read the actual article, pretty good stuff there

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LispSporks22 3y ago

I don’t think these systems will work against cheap, tiny drones or swarms of drones. eg. Russian ships vs Ukrainian boat drones.

ranger207 3y ago
Probably not. They were designed to take out multi-ton supersonic cruise missiles so they need a larger warhead than would be required against drone swarms. Of course, since they're so large and capable they certainly could take down _a_ drone, and then it becomes a question of how large the incoming swarm is. Now, if the incoming swarm is large enough, then either each drone carries a tiny amount of explosives, or each drone is large and expensive. The US Navy has been building ships to protect against mass swarms of incoming cruise missiles since about the 60s or so, so if the incoming drones are large enough then you could also use larger missiles against them and rely on the RAM only for whatever leaks through.
cgearhart 3y ago
That’s what the lasers are for. https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2022/10/19/navy-destroyer-adds-helios-laser-to-arsenal https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2022/10/19/...
- vasili111 3y ago
  In foggy weather lazers are not working well.
kcb 3y ago
Is there a fundamental difference between a drone and an anti-ship missile?
- jabl 3y ago
  In the sense that both are flying things loaded with explosives heading towards your ship, no there's no "fundamental" difference between them. In practice, there's a world of difference. Drones are cheap and slow, but can be a big threat in a saturation attack style scenario. Do you want to spend a $1M+ missile to shoot down a $5000 drone?. Do you even have enough missiles to shoot down a swarm of 100 drones? An anti-ship missile is much bigger and more expensive, but flies at around 300 m/s for a subsonic one, and up to 900 m/s for supersonic ones, giving much less time to shoot it down. And while the missile per se isn't armored, the warhead has a thick casing designed to penetrate deep into the ship before exploding, so hitting the missile with some shrapnel at short range isn't gonna help as the wreckage of the missile will still likely continue on a ballistic path and hit the ship. And the warhead is often big enough to cripple a warship with a single hit (well, maybe a carrier is big enough to keep on trucking).

wolverine876 3y ago

Always important to look critically at the person speaking (I mean to imply nothing about them, just sharing what I found): It [the blog] grew out of my time as a tour guide on the battleship Iowa (BB-61) in Los Angeles, and although I now live halfway across the country, Iowa is still one of the mainstays of this blog. It also came from my frustration with existing sources, which tended to be either way too high-level or too technical, with very little to bring an interested general audience up to speed. ... I've been a military geek since I was in grade school, although my affections didn't settle on matters naval until after I graduated college with a degree in aerospace engineering. ... Unfortunately, I didn't like my actual job, and ended up getting another job in Oklahoma, doing work on military aircraft. https://www.navalgazing.net/About https://www.navalgazing.net/About Certainly they should understand how flying machines work. I dunno about their history. :)

lapsed_pacifist 3y ago
bean used to post long and in depth posts into the SlateStarCodex Open Threads, then someone helped him set up his own site, and here we are. He organizes meetups at Naval History sites too.

wolverine876 3y ago

> The use of a gun limited effective range to no more than 1500 yards Aren't sniper rifles effective at that distance (if they hit)? A weapon not constrained to human limits in dynamic movement, heat, sound, pressure, size, etc, isn't effective at a much greater distance?

unwind 3y ago
I am no expert but I imagine one important tradeoff is between cartridge power (necessary for long range with sufficient energy) and cartridge size/mass, these systems have high rates of fire (because trying to hit very fast-moving targets) and that can't be easy with a giant cartridge. What happened to "Metal storm"?
- numpad0 3y ago
  It didn't go anywhere that's for sure, found an /r/NCD post speculating reasons as to why[1]. Looks like they were bought and pivoted to explosive drones somehow[2]. 1: https://old.reddit.com/r/NonCredibleDefense/comments/16xhmpv/ https://old.reddit.com/r/NonCredibleDefense/comments/16xhmpv... 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_Storm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_Storm
laverya 3y ago
How long does it take for a bullet to reach 1500 yards? Around 2 seconds. How confident do you have to be in the movement of your target to hit them with a 2 second lead? Very. (Or you can follow the CIWS methodology and throw quite a few bullets at once) The effective range isn't limited by the ballistics of the weapon (The 20 mm shells it fires will easily go 5+km), it's limited by actually hitting the damn thing you're aiming at.
ranger207 3y ago
Sniper rifles are firing a single shot, the bullet is smaller, and snipers can take significant time to prepare. I've heard of snipers firing a few hundred yards away from their target first to see exactly how their shot will be affected by drop and wind and only then aiming at their target. Sniper rifles have much less stress on them imposed by firing the cartridge than a Phalanx; a 12.7x99mm cartridge is nothing compared to 20x102mm. Finally, a sniper is firing a single carefully aimed shot; a Phalanx is firing 75 rounds a second from six rotating barrels.

yoyoinbog 3y ago

There are only two types of ships: Submarines and targets http://www.johntreed.net/sittingducks.html http://www.johntreed.net/sittingducks.html

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mynameisnoone 3y ago

To shrink MIC budgets, using lasers to counter tactical missiles in clear weather will be significantly cheaper to operate than expending expensive missiles. Repeated drone and improvised rocket attacks shouldn't lead to an expensive war of attrition that only makes defense contractors rich while taking away budget from better uses.