PLAN Carrier Strike Group and Airwing

Re: Anti-Carrier Trump Card

Well, what really determines the range of modern naval weapons today is not the performance of the weapon itself, but rather the instruments used to detect/track a contact. Missiles with fire-and-forget systems can (in theory at least) be fired in the general direction of a hostile ship, and then the missile itself would find it's target. The problem is that such a move would probably not result in a hit, simply since the sea is too big. You need to know exactly where a hostile ship is until you can attack it and count on hitting it. Also, a missile fired can be detected, giving the enemy an idea about where you are, which is something you definitly not want to happen.

Bottomline: usually firing at anything that you do not have a radar (or some other kind of sensor) track on is nearly always a waste of tax money.

Re: Anti-Carrier Trump Card

detection range also depends on the altitude of the target and the mast height of the radar. Sure you can detect a major surface combatant at 200+ km, but whatabout a harpoon skimming at 10 meters above the water? Some minor calculation shows that the detection range for that would be around 30 kms.

Re: Anti-Carrier Trump Card

vincelee said:

detection range also depends on the altitude of the target and the mast height of the radar. Sure you can detect a major surface combatant at 200+ km, but whatabout a harpoon skimming at 10 meters above the water? Some minor calculation shows that the detection range for that would be around 30 kms.

Click to expand...

That's why it's harder to destroy a sea-skimming missile.

Re: Anti-Carrier Trump Card

vincelee said:

detection range also depends on the altitude of the target and the mast height of the radar. Sure you can detect a major surface combatant at 200+ km, but whatabout a harpoon skimming at 10 meters above the water? Some minor calculation shows that the detection range for that would be around 30 kms.

Click to expand...

thats still alot of time to see it. even if was detected at 30 km, the chinese would only be able to use a ciws on it at around 4 km. the jyjs are sea skimming aswell, but fly faster.

Re: Anti-Carrier Trump Card

vincelee said:

detection range also depends on the altitude of the target and the mast height of the radar. Sure you can detect a major surface combatant at 200+ km, but whatabout a harpoon skimming at 10 meters above the water? Some minor calculation shows that the detection range for that would be around 30 kms.

Click to expand...

In case of AEW, you need to have a very good radar that can distinguised a sea skimming missile from the sea clutter.

As it goes, the faster the missile means a bigger the fuel load, which means a bigger missile, which equals easier to see.

Re: Anti-Carrier Trump Card

it's not the radar, but the software.

Re: AWACS for future chinese carrier

Gollevainen said:

Well i've heard that those RATO things are not quite popular onboard carriers...something to do whit the highly flamamble rocket fuels...mayby Popeye could tell more...

I once had this crazy tough that if Y-7/hawkeye size plane fitted whit similar type of engine aragment like in An-72 Coaler to provide STOL capapility?

Or what the hell...how about his one? THe Planned AWACS version of it called An-71 Madcap

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Dam.... a bit late. (Didn't America have a C-14 like this?)

But, well, it can take off in 70m, so I say it'll work on a CV(N). I don't know about the landing though, those legs are independent of each other, but we just don't know how much stress it can take.(Looks kinda flimsy.) But since it is smaller n more STOLed, I'll pick it over the Hawkeye.

As for the Hercules, it's pointless. It takes the whole deck, making it totally impractical. But why the C-2 leave the deck?

Re: AWACS for future chinese carrier

I've read that the F-14 have been used as a mini-AWACs. Could the same be done to a future variant of the J-8II?

Re: Anti-Carrier Trump Card

A Harpoon travels at 855 km/h, if detection range is 30 km, that means that it will cover those 30 km in just over 2 minutes. That is very little time to launch any SAMs at it in, and CIWS is not some kind of an almighty missile barrier, it is a last ditch effort to use when everything else has failed.

On detecting a sea-skimmer, it can be done using a pusle-doppler radar, since for anything that travels at such high speeds there will be a quite strong doppler effect. The waves do present some background clutter, but a modern radar with a good filter software should be able to overcome it quite easily.

Re: Anti-Carrier Trump Card

Here is a cool 4 carrier battle group