Staines [he/him, they/them]

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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: July 29th, 2020

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  • The major advantage of vertical launch systems is that they can dump their entire load of missiles within a few minutes.

    The problem with intercepting large numbers of missiles is that you need to start intercepting them far away from the ship, because if, let’s say your missiles work well and hit 70% of the time, your first wave of interceptors soaks 7 incoming objects, your second wave of interceptors gets 2 out of the bleeders from the first wave, and ideally you have time to launch a third wave to get the last target, or, if you’re out of time, the CWIS/Goalkeeper intercepts it. But the smaller the incoming object is, the later you’ll detect it, and the less waves of missiles you can fire. Small drones made of lightweight materials might not give out much of a long range radar signature, meaning you’re only getting a chance to launch one or two waves. – This is probably what caused a Yemeni missile to get through the interceptor missiles of the USS Gravely.

    Sure, you could over react and fire like 20 missiles at 10 incoming objects and hopefully down all of them in one wave, but then you’ll only be able to defend yourself against a couple of those attacks before you have to go home, and your ship is effectively, mission killed.

    Here’s an interesting future problem though: China is the sole industrial superpower. They can actually produce enough missiles for a protracted naval war, which the US can’t. The US couldn’t actually fill every launch cell in the fleet with a missile right now, technically. Given that Vertical Launch Systems are self contained units, they can be manufactured elsewhere and just dropped into a random cargo ship hull. The important part of a warship is the sophisticated radar and sonar suites. Given that China has about 2000 times the shipyard capacity, and triple the industrial manufacturing capacity of the USA, they could just fit cargo ships out with hundreds of missiles that are aimed by an actual PLAN warship.


  • The red sea is already closed to genocide-axis shipping. Trying to actually obliterate a US warship would be a needless escalation considering the already successful blockade.

    Using the example of USS Gravely though, it has 96 missile cells (that must be rearmed at port). They contain a mixture of cruise missiles and interceptor missiles. Gravely has been firing cruise missiles, so it doesn’t have a full load of interceptors. The Aegis system as standard fires 2 interceptor missiles at each incoming target (they cost $2.5M each), so if half of the ships cells are loaded with interceptors, it has enough to intercept 24 incoming objects before having to go home to rearm. If Ansar Allah keeps firing small raids of missiles, they can deplete the US Navy’s ability to remain in the area without actually having to escalate in a flashy way by destroying a genocide-axis warship.

    One implication of this is that the US Navy would not be able to operate for very long in a war with China before suffering total depletion of interceptors.