Issues on Intercepting Hypersonic Missile.

Spartan95 said:

Interesting calculations.

However, a ship is not a point target. The majority is between 100m to 200m in length, while a CVN is more than 300m in length. Thus, a manoeuvring missile actually have some margin for error and yet can still hit its target.

The point of a missile manoevring in its terminal phase is to complicate the firing solution for CIWS. Its effectiveness has not been borne out in real combat, but it certainly beats a straight flyer.

As for the point about CIWS being able to engage multiple incoming missiles if they are coming in several seconds apart, I'd say that depends on how much ammo it carries in its magazine (not the ready use locker). If I'm not mistaken, the magazine contains enough rounds for ~30s worth of ammo for the CIWS firing at its max RPM (i.e., ~3,000 rounds). That's not a lot of ammo against multiple incoming missile.

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Gatling guns don't achieve that firing rate instantaneously. A CIWS spits out only 75 rounds in the first second as the barrel spins up, a criticism of gatling guns. But, a two second burst is about all I have ever seen from one, and that is 375 rounds. That is enough to positively shred something like a BQM-74. I'm talking orange confetti!

Only problem would be that some AShMs are actually armored! Other than that, liquid fueled AShMs apparently have a difficult time exploding from nicks to their fuel tanks as apposed to solid fueled AShMs so that degrades the effectiveness of a Gun-based CIWS.

IronsightSniper said:

Only problem would be that some AShMs are actually armored! Other than that, liquid fueled AShMs apparently have a difficult time exploding from nicks to their fuel tanks as apposed to solid fueled AShMs so that degrades the effectiveness of a Gun-based CIWS.

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Care to make any claims about which missiles are armored? I know a little about missiles, and from what I see, there is no margin for the extra weight of armor. Missiles usually come up short on performance if anything, requiring further lightening and more rocket motor development to achieve threshold performance requirements ( or the requirements are reduced to match the limits of performance ). Now you claim there is armor? Oy!
The only missile I have ever heard being armored was the big old P-700, and there was nothing particularly agile about that missile, or stealthy. The Soviets would just fire a metric butt load of them at you and hope something gets hit.

Ambivalent said:

Gatling guns don't achieve that firing rate instantaneously. A CIWS spits out only 75 rounds in the first second as the barrel spins up, a criticism of gatling guns. But, a two second burst is about all I have ever seen from one, and that is 375 rounds.

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Is that against a sub-sonic straight flyer? Or against a manouevring super-sonic target?

Quite a bit of difference for firing solution against these 2 types of targets.

Ambivalent said:

Care to make any claims about which missiles are armored? I know a little about missiles, and from what I see, there is no margin for the extra weight of armor. Missiles usually come up short on performance if anything, requiring further lightening and more rocket motor development to achieve threshold performance requirements ( or the requirements are reduced to match the limits of performance ). Now you claim there is armor? Oy!
The only missile I have ever heard being armored was the big old P-700, and there was nothing particularly agile about that missile, or stealthy. The Soviets would just fire a metric butt load of them at you and hope something gets hit.

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Actually, the P-700 is exactly what I'm referring too. It's still quite agile as I know of it, Mach 1.5 and 120 km? in a low-low trajectory. Mach 2+ and 550 km in a high-low trajectory. Fast enough and tough enough warhead to dig itself oh, 5 meters maybe? into the hull of an Aircraft carrier, and then boom! goes 750 kilos of warhead.

I also heard some chatter from a Russian fanboy off another forum about the P-800 having similar characteristics. He also claimed that it had RAM paint. Although, as we all know about these big fast low flowing missiles, flying that low in the atmosphere and that fast makes a lot of friction, would help a FLIR, but by the time the missile is in the ship's visual horizon the ships quite toast.

Talking about P-700, I always found that self contained network / target selection capability of these missile really interesting. I wonder how usefull that actually was. And has that feature made it into follow on designs / was it picked up by others, or has this capability vanished.

P-700 were nuclear armed for a reason. Their guidance couldn't guarantee a hit on a single ship that was moving, but you could pretty much guarantee getting a nuclear warhead close enough to do the requisite damage, assuming at least one of the missiles in the swarm survived the CSG's defenses. They were not particularly agile either, at least that is my understanding of them. They were big and fast and you would probably have a whole bunch coming at you from different directions all at once, along with air launched missiles from Blackjacks and Backfires, and only one had to get through. In most cases the launch platforms considered it a suicide mission because they still had to come inside the carriers air cover to launch. Good luck with that.
Of course the carrier isn't sitting there waiting for the enemy to launch at them. They will be out hunting too, and won't necessarily be all that easy to find.