How many friendly ships were nearby when this attack occurred? And could you provide a link to this information regarding the ships you listed? Thanks in advance.
The sinking of South Korean Corvette Cheonan
- Thread starter siegecrossbow
- Start date
AssassinsMace
Lieutenant General
Interesting how this is another case where their sensors didn't detect a sub nor a torpedo. And why does that always seem to happen in places where you'd figure they would be on some state of alertness?
Pointblank
Senior Member
Area is notoriously poor for ASW conditions, and the Cheonan only has a hull-mounted sonar. A very dated sonar with a poor reputation in littorals at that.
In addition to what Pointblank said, hearing the sub doesn't necessarily mean that you have authorization to fire on it. It's unlikely, but perhaps they did hear the sub. Same thing as the Kitty Hawk incident.
AssassinsMace
Lieutenant General
What about sounding the alarm hearing the torpedo coming at you? The surviving crew must have some account and it sounds like they didn't know anything until it happened. The Kitty Hawk incident was probably on the bottom of my list. There are a few other situations at time of conflict where those who should've saw "it" coming but didn't. Also they said they knew NK subs were in the area. Again... not on alert?
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Neutral Zone
Junior Member
That's a good question, you would expect a warship operating in that area to be on a high state of readiness, but even if you are it's no guarantee that you'll be able to detect and intercept/evade your attacker. I'm thinking of HMS Sheffield and USS Stark, two warships which were operating in combat zones yet through a combination of bad luck and human error were both caught cold by their attackers with fatal consequences.
How many friendly ships were nearby when this attack occurred? And could you provide a link to this information regarding the ships you listed? Thanks in advance.
To be honest, I just loaded the name of the exercise into a few leading search engines and plowed through the results, there was no definitive article sadly just a large number of news reports. Repeat the exercise and you should find like wise.
The question though which remains unanswered is what would be in it for North Korea? They don't do things for no reason or no benefit. To be honest this whole thing just stinks of dodgy dossier mk x.
The BBc have published pictures of the evidence and I would be grateful to hear from genuine old Sea Dogs about how quickly machine parts will corrode underwater.
7 out of 8 makes a good day for me, I'll take it
Well, North Korea does have some motive for this. They have been itching to retaliate against South Korea for nearly destroying one of their vessels in November of 2009. But it doesn't really matter, since North Korea has attacked South Korea many times since the war ended.
The Cheonan Corvette (Pohang-class) is like S. Korea's version of PLAN's 053H1G (Jianghu-V). It's not an ASW frigate, and even if it was, I think it'd still have had a hard time detecting a small conventional sub laying in wait.
The Swedish Gotland class scored enough victories in exercises and mock battles, that even the USN leased one for ASW training (2 years). Although the North Korean subs aren't as advanced, neither is the SK Corvette's ASW capability.
Could SK have faked the evidence? Yes. Could NK's sub have attacked and sinked the SK ship? Yes. Regardless of what you believe, the fact is that surface warships fare poorly against an underwater torpedo attack in such environment. The Russians have some anti-torpedo weapons, but they're only useful if you detected the torpedo in time.
The Swedish Gotland class scored enough victories in exercises and mock battles, that even the USN leased one for ASW training (2 years). Although the North Korean subs aren't as advanced, neither is the SK Corvette's ASW capability.
Could SK have faked the evidence? Yes. Could NK's sub have attacked and sinked the SK ship? Yes. Regardless of what you believe, the fact is that surface warships fare poorly against an underwater torpedo attack in such environment. The Russians have some anti-torpedo weapons, but they're only useful if you detected the torpedo in time.