MRVd ASBM with EMP warheads.

Ambivalent

Junior Member
Or to keep the nose cool enough to allow target acquisition sensors to be put in there.

Re the darts,

Well I liked the idea when it was first mentioned several years ago, and I think the most desirable outcome would be not to actually fully penetrate the flight deck.

If you get full penetration, you might get at the planes parked below, but unless you put a ridiculous number of holes in the deck to the point where the integrity of the whole thing is compromised, the carrier will still be capable of conducting flight ops with some very quick patching up, and if a large portion of the carrier air wing happened to be in the air at the time of the attack, those planes can just land and carry on as normal.

However, if the darts only manage partial penetration, and you got hundreds of darts half embedded in the flight deck, then that's going to make the carrier useless until those can be cut. Any plane trying to land before that happens well shred their carriage and crash. Any planes caught in the air during the attack will have to head to a land base if their are in range, or ditch in the sea.

I also think you don't have to limit yourself to 100g 20mm darts. If you can get the CEP of the missile down small enough, you could try some 125mm APFSDS. Place a few missiles with those sabots on an escort and you can easily mission kill the thing. Do that for all the escorts and cover the flight deck with darts and it'll be the easiest kills the follow on airstrike will ever hope to make.

Tell us how you propose to guide this thing? Then tell us all about the engineering that will permit munitions to be dispensed at Mach 20-24, the speed of re entry of an IRBM warhead. There are no current carriage munitions operating at anything near the speeds of such a warhead, yet everyone here writes as if it is a done deal. Well, it has never been done, and the engineering is truly daunting. So is the guidance problem. What qualifies you to make these assertions?
 

pla101prc

Senior Member
Tell us how you propose to guide this thing? Then tell us all about the engineering that will permit munitions to be dispensed at Mach 20-24, the speed of re entry of an IRBM warhead. There are no current carriage munitions operating at anything near the speeds of such a warhead, yet everyone here writes as if it is a done deal. Well, it has never been done, and the engineering is truly daunting. So is the guidance problem. What qualifies you to make these assertions?

i am pretty sure if we can think of this kid of idea, the Chinese engineers will be able to think even more. it'll be a done deal in a couple of years.
 

Ambivalent

Junior Member
i am pretty sure if we can think of this kid of idea, the Chinese engineers will be able to think even more. it'll be a done deal in a couple of years.

I can think of an IR sensor for such a warhead, but my thinking does nothing to advance the material science of seeker domes, none of which can withstand the heat of flight at more than Mach 5. That is a hard limit to the speed of IR missiles in the atmosphere that has defeated the best engineers for decades. Materials that are transmissive to IR wavelengths are few and far between, and none of them tolerate great heat. These are the real world engineering considerations no one here wants to address.
Now, by what mechanism do you both dispense dart shaped submunitions at Mach 20 plus, and then stop the darts from tumbling so that they orient themselves pointy end down to penetrate a carrier's flight deck, assuming they maintain enough energy to penetrate a carrier's HY-100 flight deck, assuming a sizeable number of them even hit the carrier after being scattered by the dispenser. When the USN drops a carriage munition on an enemy ship the bomb releases it's submunitions at low altitude and subsonic speed. Carriage munitions from a 127 mm naval gun would be utterly useless against a carrier, the munitions are simply too small to do any serious damage. That seems to me to be the closest analogy to an SLBM submunition. Lots of wild assumptions being made, none of which have any engineering backing them.
 

lilzz

Banned Idiot
Space shuttle when re-entry into the atmosphere shut down their sensor temporarily, and turned back on when inside the atmosphere.
 

King_Comm

Junior Member
VIP Professional
I can think of an IR sensor for such a warhead, but my thinking does nothing to advance the material science of seeker domes, none of which can withstand the heat of flight at more than Mach 5. That is a hard limit to the speed of IR missiles in the atmosphere that has defeated the best engineers for decades. Materials that are transmissive to IR wavelengths are few and far between, and none of them tolerate great heat. These are the real world engineering considerations no one here wants to address.
Now, by what mechanism do you both dispense dart shaped submunitions at Mach 20 plus, and then stop the darts from tumbling so that they orient themselves pointy end down to penetrate a carrier's flight deck, assuming they maintain enough energy to penetrate a carrier's HY-100 flight deck, assuming a sizeable number of them even hit the carrier after being scattered by the dispenser. When the USN drops a carriage munition on an enemy ship the bomb releases it's submunitions at low altitude and subsonic speed. Carriage munitions from a 127 mm naval gun would be utterly useless against a carrier, the munitions are simply too small to do any serious damage. That seems to me to be the closest analogy to an SLBM submunition. Lots of wild assumptions being made, none of which have any engineering backing them.
If you have read my original post, the warhead will not be guided at the terminal phase, it will receive its last update on the location of the carrier before blackout, and a hit is guaranteed by firing enough missiles to cover the entire area where the carrier can possibly be at at splash. There will be no speed of Mach 20, DF-21 is a MRBM with a terminal velocity of less than Mach 10, and it can be further reduced if the target is close enough to allow a depressed trajectory. If the submunition still tumbles at that speed, then ball bearings instead of darts can be used.

And the point is not to sink or even cause considerable damage to the carrier, but to create enough small craters and holes on the flight deck, and damage the catapult, arresting systems, elevators and parked aircraft so that take-off and landing would be prohibited for at least two weeks, which is the longest feasible duration of any armed conflict China may be involved in in the foreseeable future.
 

plawolf

Lieutenant General
Tell us how you propose to guide this thing? Then tell us all about the engineering that will permit munitions to be dispensed at Mach 20-24, the speed of re entry of an IRBM warhead.

Ah yes, the classic logical fallacy favored by those who don't want to discuss a possibility.

I don't have to explain anything to you, because guess what, I'm not the one who is designing the missile now am I?

The guidance is pretty much off the shelf stuff that is available today since as soon as you take direct hit out of the equation, 20-30m CEP becomes overkill and even the far more conservative 150m CEP projections become acceptable.

Dispensing is going to be harder, but hardly an insurmountable challenge. All you need to do, on the most basic level, is design a RV that can break up neatly when required, the application of small amounts of HE can do that easily enough. Controlling it to get a good even spread will be far harder, but that's just a matter of number crunching.

So long as the basic underlying principles are sound, everything else is just testing and fine tuning.
 

Engineer

Major
Tell us how you propose to guide this thing? Then tell us all about the engineering that will permit munitions to be dispensed at Mach 20-24, the speed of re entry of an IRBM warhead.
If anyone here can design an ASBM warhead single-handedly, he would been working for second artillery with high wage instead of wasting his time on this forum. Your expectation of a common military enthusiasts to give you full working details of the warhead is an expectation of the impossible.

There are no current carriage munitions operating at anything near the speeds of such a warhead, yet everyone here writes as if it is a done deal. Well, it has never been done, and the engineering is truly daunting. So is the guidance problem.
That has absolutely no relation as to whether it can be done.

What qualifies you to make these assertions?
So you are qualified then? Fine, show us detailed engineering calculation proving how it cannot be done.

I can think of an IR sensor for such a warhead, but my thinking does nothing to advance the material science of seeker domes, none of which can withstand the heat of flight at more than Mach 5. That is a hard limit to the speed of IR missiles in the atmosphere that has defeated the best engineers for decades. Materials that are transmissive to IR wavelengths are few and far between, and none of them tolerate great heat. These are the real world engineering considerations no one here wants to address.
Right. I'm sure that Chinese engineers would choose the most impossible method as the mean of guidance of the warhead. And upon realizing their target is a US carrier, the warheads would gain self-awareness and self-destruct, so as to preserve the myth that US carriers are invincible.

Now, by what mechanism do you both dispense dart shaped submunitions at Mach 20 plus, and then stop the darts from tumbling so that they orient themselves pointy end down to penetrate a carrier's flight deck...
By what mechanism do you assert that the darts will tumble in the first place?

...assuming they maintain enough energy to penetrate a carrier's HY-100 flight deck, assuming a sizeable number of them even hit the carrier after being scattered by the dispenser. When the USN drops a carriage munition on an enemy ship the bomb releases it's submunitions at low altitude and subsonic speed. Carriage munitions from a 127 mm naval gun would be utterly useless against a carrier, the munitions are simply too small to do any serious damage. That seems to me to be the closest analogy to an SLBM submunition. Lots of wild assumptions being made, none of which have any engineering backing them.
It is pretty clear to everyone here except you, that the darts will not and are not meant to penetrate the carrier. They are meant to destroy anything and anyone that is at the top of the carrier.
 
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pla101prc

Senior Member
we are not cooking up a whole new generation of technology that has never been developed. its just a matter of taking what are available, and apply them in away that would maximize the chance of achieving a certain tactical objective.
 

Engineer

Major
its just a matter of taking what are available, and apply them in away that would maximize the chance of achieving a certain tactical objective.
No one here is even doing that. The discussion is on how an ASBM might work if it exists, nothing more.
 

Finn McCool

Captain
Registered Member
The idea of carrier-attacking submunitions delivered by ballistic missile is, I think, a sound one. Releasing ball bearings shouldn't be impossible, and this is just an idea, but what about using a sort Russian nesting-doll-like arrangement of the main missile, a smaller reentry vehicle designed to de-celerate, and then a larger munition like a torpedo as the final released payload?
 
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