4 ms·

The problem with killing a carrier is not finding it. They're not difficult to spot and not very stealthy. They're massive. The only real problem with killing c

by mcv 6mo ago

The problem with killing a carrier is not finding it. They're not difficult to spot and not very stealthy. They're massive. The only real problem with killing carrier is getting close. They're constantly protected by a fleet and a small air force whose primary purpose is to protect the carrier.

defrost 6mo ago
Despite which US carriers are frequently "sunk" during war games. All that protection didn't stop the Swedish diesal-electric HSMS Gotland seamlessly torp'ing the Ronald Reagan in 2005. France pulled a similar score 2015, Canada "got" a UK carrier in 2007, IIRC even Australia's taken out a US ship or two in various fun ways over the years.
- mcv 6mo ago
  Diesel-electric subs seem to be the bane of carriers. I'm aware of Dutch, Portuguese and Swedish subs that have "sunk" carriers during exercises, and often together with a significant part of their fleet. But I do wonder what the starting conditions for those exercises were. The sub's underwater range is limited (although Swedish subs seem to be better than others) and the have to come up every once in a while, at which point they're vulnerable. There's plenty of places to hide near coasts, but I can imagine that on the open ocean, it might be a lot harder for a sub to get close enough.
- wredcoll 6mo ago
  Carriers are not unstoppable super fortresses, which is why the americans have like 11 of the things, and it's definitely important not to become over confident after years without serious naval challenges, but it's also reasonable to consider all of the mitigating factors involved in large scale military exercises. I haven't studied the HSMS Gotland incident in any great detail, but just in general for wargames, ships are required to be in certain locations at certain times, stay inside sea lanes, use transponders, ignore certain other ships and in general not completely mess up the existing sea commerce traffic that is trying to go past the exercise area. If your carrier group is literally 1000 miles away from any piece of land and you have full authorization to sink anything that looks even slightly suspicious, it probably becomes considerably more difficult to sneak up and torpedo a carrier. But yes, carriers will get sunk, modern warfare is in large part attritional, but if you send out, dunno, $100m worth of subs and sink a $10b carrier, that's a great return on investment, but doesn't help you in the slightest if you're now out of submarines and the enemy sails two more carriers into range.
  - defrost 6mo ago
    > Carriers are not unstoppable super fortresses I'm geting fairly old now and I have no recollection of ever thinking such a thing ... > but if you send out, dunno, $100m worth of subs and sink a $10b carrier, Even better if you can send out $80m worth of torpedoes attached to cheap arse unmanned drone delivery units all embedded within a 10x magnitude swarm of cheap arse drone units that have no torpedoes. High chance of penetration, good chance there'll be some left over to confound and confuse the next carriers. Absolutely that keeps the high end gear standing well off from tight spaces.
    - wredcoll 6mo ago
      Yeah, but what's stopping the side with carriers from just attacking your torpedo launchers? That's literally the entire point of aircraft carriers, you get to attack things while the ship itself is out of range of retaliation. If we're postulating magical "ai" attack drones loitering off the coast, what's stopping the americans from sending in their own fleet of equally magical ai attack drones to blow up all the defenders and then sail the carriers up? Also, again, you'd have to know exactly where the carriers even are, right now $80m worth of torpedo drones would cover like .01% of china's coastal waters.
      - defrost 6mo ago
        > Yeah, but what's stopping the side with carriers from just attacking your torpedo launchers? Numbers game, what's the maximum number of targets that can be covered in a window, the cost of dealing with non torpedo launch capable platforms is the same as the cost of taking out an actual torpedo carrying launcher - the overwhelming threshold is something that is tested in games, of course. > If we're postulating magical "ai" attack drones loitering off the coast I'm not, I'm looking at a reasonable near term extrapolation of what China already has and tested. > what's stopping the americans from sending in their own fleet of equally magical ai attack drones to blow up all the defenders The usual constraints of hunting and finding in vast area > Also, again, you'd have to know exactly where the carriers even are Well, approximately .. and that's what China provides to Iran via sat coverage. > right now $80m worth of torpedo drones would cover like .01% of china's coastal waters. I thought the carriers were off Iran and staged well back? I can't see them being as far back as China myself, but perhaps you have some curious reason for wanting to spread them out some place far far away from the conflict. I have no knowledge of that, obviously.
wredcoll 6mo ago
> The problem with killing a carrier is not finding it. They're not difficult to spot and not very stealthy. They're massive. The only real problem with killing carrier is getting close. They're constantly protected by a fleet and a small air force whose primary purpose is to protect the carrier. The pacific ocean is over 60 million square miles. A full sized carrier group probably takes up like 100 square miles when it's fully spread out, but that's a very, very, small percentage of the available search space. And beyond that, you need to actually see the carrier with something, a laser sensor, a direct radar hit, even the human eyeball; you can't just fire a bunch of missiles in the general direction you think the carrier is at and expect them to hit anything (for one thing there's a whole bunch of other ships that will distract the targeting sensors). Like, I cannot stress this enough, even if you knew the exact location of a carrier at a given moment, down to like 4 decimals of lat/long, and you knew which direction it was sailing, if your missile launcher is 1000 miles away you can't just program it in and fire it off and expect it to fly 1000 miles and then hit the carrier. Even with some kind of amazing on board sensors, there's a dozen other ships just existing near by, the carrier itself is moving unpredictably, not to mention the actual decoying/spoofing systems specifically designed to interfere with targeting sensors. And this is the problem, you now say "oh well just use a platform that's closer to the carrier so it can get accurate targeting data for a weapon to hit the specific carrier", which is technically possible... until the carrier destroys your targeting platform because why wouldn't it? Whatever distance you have to be within to "lock on" to the carrier will be, pretty much by definition, in range of the carrier to shoot back at. Hell, as far as I know, they could put literal anti-satellite missiles on carrier aircraft and just fly straight up and shoot down targeting satellites. I don't know if that's something they're currently planning/practicing, but I don't know if any reason they couldn't.
- mcv 6mo ago
  Exactly my point: getting close is the hard part.

by mcv 6mo ago

defrost 6mo ago

Despite which US carriers are frequently "sunk" during war games. All that protection didn't stop the Swedish diesal-electric HSMS Gotland seamlessly torp'ing the Ronald Reagan in 2005. France pulled a similar score 2015, Canada "got" a UK carrier in 2007, IIRC even Australia's taken out a US ship or two in various fun ways over the years.

mcv 6mo ago
Diesel-electric subs seem to be the bane of carriers. I'm aware of Dutch, Portuguese and Swedish subs that have "sunk" carriers during exercises, and often together with a significant part of their fleet. But I do wonder what the starting conditions for those exercises were. The sub's underwater range is limited (although Swedish subs seem to be better than others) and the have to come up every once in a while, at which point they're vulnerable. There's plenty of places to hide near coasts, but I can imagine that on the open ocean, it might be a lot harder for a sub to get close enough.
wredcoll 6mo ago
Carriers are not unstoppable super fortresses, which is why the americans have like 11 of the things, and it's definitely important not to become over confident after years without serious naval challenges, but it's also reasonable to consider all of the mitigating factors involved in large scale military exercises. I haven't studied the HSMS Gotland incident in any great detail, but just in general for wargames, ships are required to be in certain locations at certain times, stay inside sea lanes, use transponders, ignore certain other ships and in general not completely mess up the existing sea commerce traffic that is trying to go past the exercise area. If your carrier group is literally 1000 miles away from any piece of land and you have full authorization to sink anything that looks even slightly suspicious, it probably becomes considerably more difficult to sneak up and torpedo a carrier. But yes, carriers will get sunk, modern warfare is in large part attritional, but if you send out, dunno, $100m worth of subs and sink a $10b carrier, that's a great return on investment, but doesn't help you in the slightest if you're now out of submarines and the enemy sails two more carriers into range.
- defrost 6mo ago
  > Carriers are not unstoppable super fortresses I'm geting fairly old now and I have no recollection of ever thinking such a thing ... > but if you send out, dunno, $100m worth of subs and sink a $10b carrier, Even better if you can send out $80m worth of torpedoes attached to cheap arse unmanned drone delivery units all embedded within a 10x magnitude swarm of cheap arse drone units that have no torpedoes. High chance of penetration, good chance there'll be some left over to confound and confuse the next carriers. Absolutely that keeps the high end gear standing well off from tight spaces.
  - wredcoll 6mo ago
    Yeah, but what's stopping the side with carriers from just attacking your torpedo launchers? That's literally the entire point of aircraft carriers, you get to attack things while the ship itself is out of range of retaliation. If we're postulating magical "ai" attack drones loitering off the coast, what's stopping the americans from sending in their own fleet of equally magical ai attack drones to blow up all the defenders and then sail the carriers up? Also, again, you'd have to know exactly where the carriers even are, right now $80m worth of torpedo drones would cover like .01% of china's coastal waters.
    - defrost 6mo ago
      > Yeah, but what's stopping the side with carriers from just attacking your torpedo launchers? Numbers game, what's the maximum number of targets that can be covered in a window, the cost of dealing with non torpedo launch capable platforms is the same as the cost of taking out an actual torpedo carrying launcher - the overwhelming threshold is something that is tested in games, of course. > If we're postulating magical "ai" attack drones loitering off the coast I'm not, I'm looking at a reasonable near term extrapolation of what China already has and tested. > what's stopping the americans from sending in their own fleet of equally magical ai attack drones to blow up all the defenders The usual constraints of hunting and finding in vast area > Also, again, you'd have to know exactly where the carriers even are Well, approximately .. and that's what China provides to Iran via sat coverage. > right now $80m worth of torpedo drones would cover like .01% of china's coastal waters. I thought the carriers were off Iran and staged well back? I can't see them being as far back as China myself, but perhaps you have some curious reason for wanting to spread them out some place far far away from the conflict. I have no knowledge of that, obviously.

wredcoll 6mo ago

> The problem with killing a carrier is not finding it. They're not difficult to spot and not very stealthy. They're massive. The only real problem with killing carrier is getting close. They're constantly protected by a fleet and a small air force whose primary purpose is to protect the carrier. The pacific ocean is over 60 million square miles. A full sized carrier group probably takes up like 100 square miles when it's fully spread out, but that's a very, very, small percentage of the available search space. And beyond that, you need to actually see the carrier with something, a laser sensor, a direct radar hit, even the human eyeball; you can't just fire a bunch of missiles in the general direction you think the carrier is at and expect them to hit anything (for one thing there's a whole bunch of other ships that will distract the targeting sensors). Like, I cannot stress this enough, even if you knew the exact location of a carrier at a given moment, down to like 4 decimals of lat/long, and you knew which direction it was sailing, if your missile launcher is 1000 miles away you can't just program it in and fire it off and expect it to fly 1000 miles and then hit the carrier. Even with some kind of amazing on board sensors, there's a dozen other ships just existing near by, the carrier itself is moving unpredictably, not to mention the actual decoying/spoofing systems specifically designed to interfere with targeting sensors. And this is the problem, you now say "oh well just use a platform that's closer to the carrier so it can get accurate targeting data for a weapon to hit the specific carrier", which is technically possible... until the carrier destroys your targeting platform because why wouldn't it? Whatever distance you have to be within to "lock on" to the carrier will be, pretty much by definition, in range of the carrier to shoot back at. Hell, as far as I know, they could put literal anti-satellite missiles on carrier aircraft and just fly straight up and shoot down targeting satellites. I don't know if that's something they're currently planning/practicing, but I don't know if any reason they couldn't.

mcv 6mo ago
Exactly my point: getting close is the hard part.