Naval Drones



 
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Expensive warships taken out by cheap drones converted from Jet-skis, I’m sure other militaries are taking note of this.
The USN was made aware of just how vulnerable ships and subs were to jetskis about 20 years ago.

I'm amazed it has taken this long before it made the open news...
 
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEihKLr8GMk&t=2s


Plenty of new USV designs in this Naval News video from DIMDEX 24. I do wonder how seaworthy some of them are given the tendency to pile weapons on them - notably the Turkish Marlin, which has so many weapons fitted it needs sponsons out from the side of the hull to fit them all. The Chinese design is clearly what you get if you take all the human spaces out of a Type 022 FAC(M) and fill them with weapons instead. I notice no one is talking about command and control.

Looking at the manned vessels I was wondering why 12.7mm RWS installations are suddenly so popular, and of course that could come down to the Ukrainians opening up a whole new need for waterline close-in defence.
 
Looking at the manned vessels I was wondering why 12.7mm RWS installations are suddenly so popular, and of course that could come down to the Ukrainians opening up a whole new need for waterline close-in defence.
I really think 30x113 is the minimum caliber for an RWS anymore... big enough shell for a good HE payload, not all that much heavier gun than an M2 .50cal.
 
I googled 'centner' (see the Sea Baby tweet), it's apparently a (non-SI) Eastern European agricultural term for 100 Kg, so 10 centners of explosives in the Sea Baby = 1 tonne.
 
I remembered the obsolete Dutch unit of weight centenaar, equivalent to 100 kg, jumped to the English wiki-link:
Usually defined as 100 base units, with the base units varying from country to country - pound, 1kg, 0.5 kg.
 
Makes you wonder when the concept of the anti-torpedo net will make a comeback?

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Also need to be pointed out that they did figure out how to get around torp nets back in the day.

By adding basically a shredders worth of wire cutters to the torps nose. Some even had a precusor charge to cut the wires to allow the torp through.

We can do all that far better now so it be honestly a fat question mark on how well Nets would work.

Leaving out the obvouis movement issues.

Alot of the recent kills were while the ship were underway.

Cant really go faster then like 10 knots with nets out.
 
Makes you wonder when the concept of the anti-torpedo net will make a comeback?

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I'd assume big-bulges like First World War Monitors would be more successful. They did after all face the same kind of threat in the form of the FL-Boat.

Of course the better solution would just be LMM-toting Lynxs and VL-Hellfire or Brimstone.
 
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