Indian Military News, Reports, Data, etc.
- Thread starter bd popeye
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Any guesses how big of an RCS that configuration gives off? Destroyer, cruiser or carrier?
And it's not as if Brahmos is a new prototype missile.
About 4000 sqm for one corner reflector at its peak lobe. Which may correspond to destroyer sized target.
and what literature which mention correlations between the amount of corner reflectors in a target ship and seeker reliability ?
It is a small ship. Maybe they want to simulate a carrier.
Lethe
Captain
To be fair, this is a Pondicherry-class minesweeper only 60m long and less than 900 tons full load.
One suspects that the reason behind the additional reflectors is that they aren't looking to evaluate the performance of the seeker, but rather to evaluate impact/damage characteristics. A "miss" would fail to achieve test objectives and require another missile to be used, in turn requiring reallocation from inventory and ultimately drawing from expense accounts, which could have career implications. From a broader perspective, this is obviously silly: if BrahMos' seeker has trouble with smaller warships, that absolutely needs to be identified and addressed. But from the perspective of mid-level bureaucracy, I can see the motivation to control extraneous factors.
I think you will find that such tight control of supposed "real world" tests is quite common in military services worldwide, and fear of failure and important people looking silly or incompetent is the biggest reason why. Most tests and exercises are designed to "prove" or "demonstrate" something that has already decided upon, and nobody involved wants to learn that e.g. the adversary force has its own ideas about how it is going to operate. This is why officers at all levels need to be empowered to take initiative and make mistakes without fear for their career prospects.
See: USMC General Paul van Riper and the exercise . Playing a "Red Team" (basically a thinly veiled Iran), he used small missile craft to sink most of a USN carrier battle group only to have the exercise paused and USN's ships "refloated" because that wasn't the way the exercise was meant to be going.
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Millenium challenge is a bad example since Red Team had teleporting motorbikes and a whole bunch of unfair advantages.
Then again the Blue Opfor at Zhurihe had tactical nukes and a whole bunch of underhanded b.s. advantages but the PLA Red Force kinda sucked up and didn't say much.
How do you know that? Any sources or the likes.
Ideally, tests should aim for realism, and in real life warships do not equip itself with corner reflectors to help anti-ship missiles. Deliberately equipping your target ship with corner reflectors mean you are not certain your test will succeed without them, which is a red flag.