No, that's not how that works.
Ballistics and hypersonics are extremely difficult targets. With SM3s you can hit ballistic missiles in midcourse or high terminal.
But both cases rely on intercepting ships being on a very tight line between launcher and target. Hypersonics require being within about 10km of the target, I'm not sure on just how close you need to be to the ground path for a ballistic target.
Who said a Burke is going to be within a kilometer or two? Ships haven't stayed that close together since Korea or Vietnam!
Last time we saw a combat spread for USN ships in satellite, the ships were well over 10km away from each other!
When my sub was playing games with the Lincoln group back in 02, the group was more like 30km between ships.
I feel like you're just quibbling for the sake of it. You're right, I was wrong, "a kilometer or two" is a very poor spacing, and it was foolish of me to say that. However, a Burke is also able to intercept missiles from further away than that. The point I sought to make was that a Burke can protect a warship other than itself from conventional antiship missiles--the type an enemy submarine would launch. I was pushing against the idea that an ASW ship without Aegis is a sitting duck for an enemy submarine. If intercepting missiles targeting another warship is completely impossible at realistic spacing, as you seem to be implying, then one really wonders why we space out that much.
Against anti-ship ballistic or hypersonic missiles, which to my knowledge are not likely to be launched by a submarine that is close enough for fleet ASW to be engaging, a Burke is going to have much more trouble defending ships other than itself, I agree. Ballistic and hypersonic missiles are difficult to shoot down. However, I would point out that these missiles are also expensive and difficult to cue onto target, so it will be fairly infrequent that a fleet is even targeted by such systems. When that does occur, I imagine the missiles will go after the biggest, most expensive targets--the carriers, not 4000 ton ASW frigates. Passive defenses (jamming, decoys, plain maneuvering) will reduce the odds of a hit. My big issue is the idea of doubling the cost of an ASW frigate in order to install a fully capable AAW/BMD system, reducing the mission focus on ASW, rather than relying on dedicated AAW/BMD escorts and building more ships to improve resilience against attrition.
So, I just have to ask you to restate your thesis. My thesis is that we CAN have escort warships distinct from other warships, that not EVERY ship in a fleet has to be an equally capable air defender. One ship with Aegis can defend another without. If a sub-hunter is attacked by the missile armament of a sub, the missiles can likely be intercepted by an AAW escort that is part of the same fleet, and leakers can be caught by low-cost point defense like SeaRAM and Phalanx.
I have demonstrated how it could work, the what, and why.
No, buddy, you haven't done that. Here are some of your quotes from the portion of the thread in which you and I have been arguing:
GLSDB and AMRAAM have roughly the same forces on them at launch. Just putting to bed the idea the an SDB cannot take a rocket launch.
This quote seems to indicate you are talking about a pure rocket launch SDB. Which is a strange case to make, for two reasons: one, yeah, of course it can handle a rocket launch, it's been launched out of HIMARS; two, what value is another type of cruise missile? Does GLSDB accomplish something that the current inventory of ship-launched cruise missiles cannot? Is that valuable to the Navy?
I think before people try to sell 16-inch battleship guns here, they may want to read through the VGAS thread:
https://www.secretprojects.co.uk/threads/vgas-vertical-gun-for-advanced-ships.38947/
What makes sense may not be such a large conventional gun on a battleship. But if you get a lower pressure gun lobbing 7-8 Stormbreakers per minute downrange to a spot 500 km away then my ears perk up.
This quote is definitively talking about a gun. VGAS is a gun. You're talking about using a gun to boost a rocket launch. This is the position that I have been arguing against for the sum of my time in this thread: a gun-launched cruise missile is going to have to be hardened to take the shock of a gun launch (~20,000 Gs) and therefore won't resemble the payload or cost profile of a cruise missile anymore.
This is a separate argument than the last quote of yours. A 500G rocket launch is literally two orders of magnitude less forceful than a gun launch. Proving one does NOT prove the other. That is why I was confused when you brought up AMRAAM acceleration, because it is completely irrelevant--it's like saying that since I can survive being punched, I can survive being hit by a car.
What I think would be more appropriate than re-birthing giant battleship guns is instead using a recoilless vertical gun, or some 10-inch/255 mm offshoot of something like the Vertical Gun for Advanced Ships (VGAS). This is not meant to fire a flat trajectory, but rather act as a boost-launch to altitude where an attached motor takes it down range prior to release for its final glide. It probably means a minimum range at least beyond 30 or so miles, depending on the slant angle. The 10-inch shells typically carry under 50 pounds of explosives in a 500 pound projectile, so mounting in an SDB 2 payload is a big improvement. It would need some kind of modern sustainer motor, like a ramjet or several akin to what is on the Meteor missile. Your full projectile probably is still around 500 pounds.
This is another quote of yours that makes it clear you are talking about a gun launch, not a rocket launch. So again, it is completely irrelevant that GLSDB can survive the forces of a rocket launch, because a gun launch is that much more powerful. This is true of a recoilless gun as well. Unless, you misused the term "recoilless gun" and meant a pure rocket-propelled projectile. In which case, is this proposition any different from an existing VLS?
Recoilless guns are basically big bazookas. Maybe they could figure out an electromagnetic launcher reaching 680 miles per hour at release. Correct my general math here, but if you could even accelerate an object to 1,000 feet per second (680 mph) in 50 feet it is abput 310 G's. If you lengthen to 100 feet the acceleration is half as many G's. With air resistance that should get someone to 20,000 feet altitude on a slant before losing vertical speed. If you can get a motor going during ascent then by using control surfaces the projectile could bend its path to a level flight without losing all of its initial velocity. The entire flight could be subsonic, and probably stays within GLSDB 2's performance tolerances. The real trick is giving it a way to travel further than a GLSDB by using a pod to carry it downrange before release. And after release you can still travel significantly further with a much smaller RCS and heat signature. Since SDB 2 can survive impacting several feet of concrete, I can only guess it is robust for handling 150 to 300 G launches.
At this point you mention an electromagnetic launcher, which I think is a much better idea but subject to engineering challenges. A magnetic accelerator that moves a 500 pound object to 1,000 feet per second does not, to my knowledge, exist; there are faster accelerators for lighter objects and slower accelerators for heavier objects, though, so it is not an insurmountable problem. I just don't think the engineering problem here can be handwaved casually. I agreed from the beginning that SDB could probably handle accelerations on the order of 300 Gs.
But again, here at the current end of the thread, you definitively close in on "rocket launch" as the point you are arguing. So. Which is it? Rocket launch, conventional/recoilless gun launch, magnetic accelerator launch? These are three different prospects with radically different tactical implications, so I think it is important that you clarify.
If there is confusion its not shared. You are a bit all over the place and not sure what if any point you are trying to stand on.
Allow me to clarify, then, although I think I've been consistent.
I do not believe that gun systems should use rocket-assisted projectiles. Rocket propulsion and gun launch fulfill the same niche and do not complement each other well. A gun is an expensive device to make inexpensive projectiles useful--in a sense, it transfers the cost of an effect from the projectile to the launch system. A rocket launch system is an expensive projectile but an inexpensive launcher, transferring the cost from the launch system in two ways--the rocket tube is cheap, and since missiles are usually very long ranged, the launch platform doesn't have to survive approaching the enemy, and can therefore be cheaper. If you combine the two, you get an expensive gun that fires expensive projectiles, which do not have the range of cruise missiles nor the payload, but are too expensive to be fired at targets without precise designation, such as in the event of active sensor denial. Furthermore, there are cases where precise designation does not improve the effects of a hit (airstrips, large factories, naval bases), and a very precise and expensive system will require the same number of shells as an imprecise and inexpensive system.
I advocate using a very large gun system to transfer even more of the cost from projectiles to a reusable platform. In my opinion, the Navy should produce a 16"-18" gun capable of firing guided, base-bleed subcaliber projectiles to extreme range, or heavier projectiles from a proportionately shorter range, should the situation allow. The guidance package should be simple to cut down costs--this isn't an EW-hardened system that can hit a tank on the first shot, it is just accurate enough to hit within a few hundred meters of the target when fired at extreme (>100km) range. This imprecision is not likely to negatively impact the mission: targets will not be precisely designated since the enemy likely has many forms of sensor denial, and it is likely that the targets will be spread over a large area, anyways. Gas generators for base-bleed are in no way comparable in cost to rocket assistance for gun-fired projectiles, so I imagine the cost per shell will be relatively low. Inaccuracy and low payload relative to a cruise missile should be made up for with volume of fire, which is why the projectile should be cheap and why the warship should mount a large number of guns.
The Navy used to produce 16" and 18" guns, so that engineering problem has already been proven solvable. Building a new one would pose industrial challenges, I fully admit. Guided projectiles are a solved problem, as are base-bleed projectiles. The Army and Navy have both done technical studies on the use of fin-stabilized, saboted, subcaliber projectiles, and found that they are possible and would usefully improve range. At the time of the major study that I read, and the Navy study that I saw referenced, affordable guidance kits were not available; I feel comfortable with the conjecture that this is a significant reason these extended-range projects were not pursued. Therefore, in aggregate, I feel that my proposal uses only proven technology that only requires implementation, rather than any new engineering. New technology, such as an active-cooled 58 caliber 18" gun, could be leveraged for even better results, but is not necessary. We can absolutely discuss probable technologies that only require a little engineering work, like a cruise missile booster that uses a middleweight magnetic accelerator, but it just needs the accompanying disclaimer that we are talking about
probable, not
definitive, technology.
Does that help? If you reply, I do ask that you be a little more verbose, if you can spare the time. I appreciate reading the full text of an opposing position, sometimes I have trouble inferring context that is not explicitly given.
