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Modern submarine torpedo attacks are not like in the movies

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Re: Modern submarine torpedo attacks are not like in the movies

#151

Post by valesco »

londons_explore wrote: post #129
jfoutz wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very tangential question. I can think of only a handful of targets that the US might want to shoot at. (I realize there might be a ton, and this is my lack of imagination). The handful I can think of, almost all of them seem like they're in the supply chain to actually build the torpedos. I'm pretty skeptical of the depth of the US stockpile. To put it another way, if there was a war so bad, the US reinstituted the d…

> To put it another way, if there was a war so bad, the US reinstituted the draft, would these tools still be relevant? The drafted people would all go to factories and boatyards to build thousands of new submarines. Each submarine would likely have no people on board, and be fully remote control. The age old problem of "you can't hide while sending and receiving data, so you can't make a drone sub" has been solved b…

No doubt that's what the end of the war would look like. But war is, generally speaking, a kind of work on the field. That kind of work isn't currently done by robots.

Re: Modern submarine torpedo attacks are not like in the movies

#153

Post by bambataa »

Spooky23 wrote: post #105
goatinaboat wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Top Gun was created in response to heavy losses in Vietnam That in itself is a crucial piece of historical context. The MiGs of the day were better than contemporary American fighters such as the F-86. They operated at altitudes the Americans couldn’t reach and shot downwards. One reason America was in Vietnam in the first place was a genuine fear that the Soviet system was actually better! It was the Sidewinder miss…

US strategy in the 50s when this stuff was designed or ordered was oriented around our friend the atom... nuke everyone. At one point there was serious discussion about the need for a Navy. Vietnam was a crucible where a lot of entrenched thinking had to be burned away, unfortunately those lessons were taught in the context of that awful conflict.

Can you recommend any resources on how Vietnam changed US strategy?

Re: Modern submarine torpedo attacks are not like in the movies

#154

Post by vanderZwan »

> With command wire capabilities, the weapon can change its attack geometry or even shut down if directed by the fire control operator. Detected targets can be changed, depth and range limitations can be set, and countermeasures, such as decoys and jammers, can be ignored using the submarine’s sonar data instead of the torpedo's lower-fidelity onboard sonar data. If the data link is lost, the weapon will follow its last given command and execute pre-programmed countermeasure defeating profiles, if necessary.

This somehow reminded me of the final scene from John Carpenter's Dark Star (spoilers, obviously) where a smart bomb wants to blow up (yes, you read that right), and the crew has to talk it into not doing so by using philosophy to give it an existential crisis:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h73PsFKtIck

Re: Modern submarine torpedo attacks are not like in the movies

#155

Post by orclev »

nabla9 wrote: post #145
orclev wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US industrial base was mighty, but these days it's a very pale shadow of what it was. Rampant cost cutting, outsourcing, and lack of protecting domestic production has absolutely devastated US manufacturing. There's still lots of design work that goes on, but almost all the actual manufacturing takes place elsewhere. What little is actually "made" in the US is almost entirely assembled from raw components that ar…

> Rampant cost cutting, outsourcing, and lack of protecting domestic production has absolutely devastated US manufacturing. This is utterly false thing that you learn if only read news articles. The value and quantity of manufacturing is now the highest it has ever been in the US. What has declined is the number of workers and the share of GDP. This applies to almost all OECD countries. As economies change from indus…

> This is utterly false thing that you learn if only read news articles. The value and quantity of manufacturing is now the highest it has ever been in the US.

I've seen it first hand. I've talked with people that have been impacted by it. I've also seen the corporate slight of hand that tries to disguise it. Components manufactured in China, shipped to Mexico for assembly, then shipped to the US to have some decorative panels and stickers slapped on so they can put a "made in USA" sticker on the side.

Go grab virtually anything from around your house (excluding food) and it's more likely than not that that thing was manufactured in whole or in part outside the US. That didn't used to be the case. Coming out of WW2 it was rare for people to own non-domestically produced goods.

This isn't a case of US manufacturing just being so ridiculously efficient that you just don't need many companies making things. That might hold water if most goods were still manufactured in the US, but they aren't. Cars are about the only manufactured consumer good still made in the US, and even they are quite often assembled in Mexico. Pretty much any electronic device is made in China.

Here's a case study, Ikea which is a very popular furniture manufacturer (among other things) mostly assembles their products in Mexico and China. They do have some US manufacturing, but that's largely because they acquired rights to some large swaths of woodland and it makes sense to process and assemble that on site.

To be clear, you mentioned agriculture, and yes, the US does have a thriving agriculture sector, but agriculture isn't manufacturing.

The US screwed up badly when it let basic manufacturing get outsourced. When the factories making screws and transistors are all based in other countries, eventually all the other factories are going to follow them.

Re: Modern submarine torpedo attacks are not like in the movies

#157

Post by nabla9 »

orclev wrote: post #155
nabla9 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Rampant cost cutting, outsourcing, and lack of protecting domestic production has absolutely devastated US manufacturing. This is utterly false thing that you learn if only read news articles. The value and quantity of manufacturing is now the highest it has ever been in the US. What has declined is the number of workers and the share of GDP. This applies to almost all OECD countries. As economies change from indus…

> This is utterly false thing that you learn if only read news articles. The value and quantity of manufacturing is now the highest it has ever been in the US. I've seen it first hand. I've talked with people that have been impacted by it. I've also seen the corporate slight of hand that tries to disguise it. Components manufactured in China, shipped to Mexico for assembly, then shipped to the US to have some decorat…

> I've seen it first hand.

You can't quantify manufacturing by looking around. What you see is cheap consumer products with low value added.

If you follow value chains for products manufactured in China, you quickly notice China imports high value added manufacturing products from other countries (including the US) then assembles them with cheap workforce and adds cheap components.

Re: Modern submarine torpedo attacks are not like in the movies

#159

Post by morsch »

umvi wrote: post #51
neurobashing wrote: post #3

Somewhat related, my uncle was a “Phantom driver” (F4 Phantom II) in Vietnam. Flew a bunch of missions of varying types. So Top Gun comes out, and my mom points out he had graduated Fighter Weapons School - my uncle is a real Top Gun! So I asked him for tales of dogfights, war stories. He had exactly one: “they’d send us out to fight some MiGs, and as soon as we got in range and turned our radar on to start shooting,…

My grandfather flew F-86s in Korea, and his experience was similar - the MiGs always ran most of the time. From his personal history: "In September 1952, I was made an instructor pilot in the F-86 and, in early November, I was made a flight commander and an engineering test pilot. It was also in November that we had one of our most frustrating experiences while I was at Kimpo. One day we were called into a hush hush…

Quaint story of gramps expertly killing a guy.

Re: Modern submarine torpedo attacks are not like in the movies

#160

Post by lordnacho »

orclev wrote: post #155
nabla9 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Rampant cost cutting, outsourcing, and lack of protecting domestic production has absolutely devastated US manufacturing. This is utterly false thing that you learn if only read news articles. The value and quantity of manufacturing is now the highest it has ever been in the US. What has declined is the number of workers and the share of GDP. This applies to almost all OECD countries. As economies change from indus…

> This is utterly false thing that you learn if only read news articles. The value and quantity of manufacturing is now the highest it has ever been in the US. I've seen it first hand. I've talked with people that have been impacted by it. I've also seen the corporate slight of hand that tries to disguise it. Components manufactured in China, shipped to Mexico for assembly, then shipped to the US to have some decorat…

> Go grab virtually anything from around your house

Manufacturing can be for goods that you don't find in your house?

If you look at the German mittelstand there's a lot of businesses that make stuff for some unknown-to-the-public industrial niche.

I'm guessing the US also has a bunch of those.

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