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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

#161

Post by pjc50 »

dmos62 wrote: post #147
pjc50 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People aren't going to sign up to get killed for that kind of money. That's why they had to be drafted in the Vietnam era. And that's also why minimum-wage restaurant workers are going on strike in the coronavirus era.

I don't (off the top of my head) remember my sources for claims about poverty being a mechanism for manning the US military, so I won't push the point. I'll leave it at saying that I wish you were right.

You're definitely right that it's a recruiting pressure - that and the free college and the path to naturalisation. But that only holds as long as the casualties are relatively low. And the ~4k dead and ~30k wounded of Iraq was relatively low compared to the ~58k dead of Vietnam. It's not clear what kind of non-nuclear war would bring that level of dead again, but I reckon restarting the Korean war would do it.

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

#162

Post by jacobush »

pjc50 wrote: post #141
dmos62 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if there was a war so bad, the US reinstituted the draft US has something better than the draft: poverty. As long as there's a large enough pool of young people without options, there's no problem. A draft generally can only be minimally discriminatory for PR reasons, so poverty as enlistment incentive works much better. Though, talking about US military running out of manpower is a far, far fetch, isn't? It surpas…

People aren't going to sign up to get killed for that kind of money. That's why they had to be drafted in the Vietnam era. And that's also why minimum-wage restaurant workers are going on strike in the coronavirus era.

A draft is good if the rich kids are in it too, that usually makes policy makers more sober.

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

#163

Post by nabla9 »

evgen wrote: post #144
nabla9 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True. The explanation given is wrong. Proximity detonation breaks the ship from the force the gas bubble directs upwards.

There are going to be two effects. The first is a very large upward moment directly beneath the ship at the point of explosion, followed soon after by a downward moment when the explosion void is filled by the water and everything around it is pulled inwards to fill the vacuum. The upward hit should actually be easier for a ship to resist because there is only air above the ship and it is “relatively” easy to lift th…

The way I was taught this is that the strongest force and impulse (integral of a force over the time interval) is upwards after the explosion. The ship is already structurally destroyed at this point. Nothing works even if the ship does not immediately sink. When the ship falls donwards is when the keel breaks, hull breaks and water gets in. Any subsequent oscillation can cause more damage.

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

#164

Post by cafard »

mhh__ wrote: post #44
cafard wrote: post #4

Has any ship been torpedoed by a submarine since the Admiral Belgrano in 1982?

Minor Nitpick, it was the General Belgrano https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARA_General_Belgrano

I just upvoted you. I can only say it has been a while...

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

#165

Post by regularfry »

tuxxy wrote: post #134
londons_explore wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I'm a cryptographer, so I'm inherently curious about secret communication. It just so happens that I'm also very curious about radios, satellite communications, etc. Do you have a link that provides more information on these "below-noise-floor gold codes"? I tried googling, but I haven't found much technical information that I trust is entirely truthful or relevant.

http://www.wirelesscommunication.nl/reference/chaptr05/cdma/... is relevant. How the noise floor comes into it I'm less sure, and am not about to wade through information theory textbooks on my lunchbreak.

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

#166

Post by jacobush »

smilespray wrote: post #128
magicsmoke wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, that was when individual muskets were inaccurate and the coordination issues with commanding thousands of men using drums and flags meant a large mass of soldiers firing in sync could scare the opposing side into fleeing and allow calvary to mop up. And before that, you had knights with plate armor that could could shrug off most bladed weapons on a battlefield that would have destroyed peasant conscript withou…

You're obviously right about this, but I still think of WW1 as "The Stupid War". In terms of defence gaining an edge over defense; I don't really think so. Offence is always cheaper. Think nukes.

As long as M.A.D. holds, nukes is almost a defense. I fear the day they are used in anger.

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

#167

Post by dsfyu404ed »

lordnacho wrote: post #160
orclev wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

>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.

And that is exactly why he said "from your house". Home goods lend themselves very, very well to outsourcing because low initial cost is such a key design criteria and they tend to have a density and packaging requirements that make them convenient to ship. If you browse through the McMaster or Grainger catalogs you'll find that a huge number of things (maybe not a majority but likely the largest minority) are made in the US and the rest are made all over the world.

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

#168

Post by chipsa »

razzmataz wrote: post #121
chipsa wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The no gun thing is over hyped. The Navy never did install guns in their fighters in Vietnam, and still ended up reversing the kill ratio.

They started carrying gunpods at the time. Missiles of the era were inaccurate and finicky.

No, the Navy didn't [0]. The Air Force did carry them. They Navy got better at avoiding the weaknesses.

0. https://combatace.com/forums/topic/91818-the-f-4-phantom-and...

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

#169

Post by jacobush »

ckozlowski wrote: post #97
Arubis wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somewhat cynical take: because the West doesn’t have superiority in this space.

These got a lot of attention a while back. But their use case is limited because they're really short-ranged. These things go all out soon after leaving the tube, make a hell of a lot of noise, and are good only really close in. They're sort of a last resort weapon, a snapshot provided that the enemy shooting at you is even within range. A modern US Mark 48 can swim out quietly under wire guidance and emit no noise o…

My personal theory is that a big use case for Shkval is in the littoral and shallow waters of the Baltic Sea where there is fantastic opportunity to play hide and seek. Especially sub to sub. I think the Soviet command expected enemy subs to successfully sneak up on them and then have something up their sleeve to raise hell right back.

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

#170

Post by dsfyu404ed »

angry_octet wrote: post #111
willvarfar wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Manpad-type missiles like the British Blowpipe have been mounted on submarine masks. A major threat to a submarine is all the helicopters and patrol aircraft with their dipping sonars etc. There are some really great pics taken from periscopes of opposition helicopters during the cold war. Nothing you'd want to see in a hot war neither. It seems good to throw a little missile at the helicopter you've just spotted app…

A helo would have to be much more careful if it thought it might be shot at by a missile, so some deterrence effect. OTOH if you shot at it and missed it would active dip right on top of you and then launch some LWTs, and you'd be blasted. If they could leave an autonomous missile pod floating just below the surface, with a submarine-like ESM mast, that would be more interesting. You couldn't get in dip range to veri…

The current tactical solution to people taking potshots at helicopters is flying in pairs. Whoever gets shot at evades. Whoever doesn't get shot at shoots at wherever the shot came from. The Navy doesn't use this tactic much because the ocean is relatively free of people hiding in apartment buildings and bushes with RPGs but they could quickly adopt it if needed at the expense of effectively halving the size of their helicopter fleet.
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