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?