Can someone tell me what kind of Anti-Ship missiles the Backfire would have? I am not very knowledgeable about Chinese and Russian weapons, but I am (somewhat) confident on American weapons...
I've been thinking about the effectiveness of Chinese weapons to sink a US carrier... in my analysis I used the Harpoon (Because it's probably a pretty good marker to compare with)
I found an interesting article and it seems pretty accurate. Those of you with real military experience correct me if you see something wrong... I've edited the article slightly, original credit goes to Paul Flocken.
To my knowledge, a carrier is laid out this way. The flight deck is labeled "04". The deck underneath that is "03" and that's contiguous throughout the entire ship. Underneath that are (obviously) "02" and "01". (04 is never really called 'of four', it's simply called the "flight deck".
This is mostly for reference points...
The harpoon is an excellent missile for the job it was designed to do, but it would be completely inadequate to "blow the top off a carrier". While it's got more explosive content than a 1000 lb Mk83 dumb bomb, it is only a subsonic missile and even more speed would be lost in the pop-up that is needed to come down on the flight deck from above.
The velocity of a weapon is far more important for penetration of armored ships than for non-armored ones. The explosive part is only important after the weapon has penetrated the ship. Anybody who has been on an American aircraft carrier and has transited from the flight deck to 03 knows that the flight deck is over a foot thick. While I can't do the accurate math to know what could get throug this, I do know that prior to the ascention of carriers battleship shells had to be pretty heavy, sometimes several tons in order to penetrate that kind of armor. I don't know if those shells were supersonic in flight.
Modern warships, with the exception of those super-carriers aren't heavily armored and thereby are extremely vulnerable to weapons that have such low speed that armored ships would simply shrug off. The French Exocet missile has a pitifully small warhead but that was enough to sink several British ships and damage several more severely in the Falklands, all of them small, unarmored ships.
Some people (not necessarily on this board) have stated that it is easy to sink an aircraft carrier because a missile will ignite the fuel onboard, thereby engulfing the entire ship in fire. This is somewhat inaccurate...
The grades of fuel that the (US) Navy uses and I can identify are JP-5, and DFM. AvGas and JP-4 are worth mentioning. First off I'll state what I've found out about their volatility. (That of AvGas, JP-4, JP-5, and DFM) AvGas is just high octane gasoline. The US Navy stopped using that decades ago after the A-1 Skyraider was removed from service. People hated it because of its volatility.
JP-4 is what the Air Force uses for its jets and is comparable to kerosene in volatility. I believe it is also what modern airliners use in which case it is called Jet A or Jet B, I never could keep those two straight. The Air Force was phasing JP-4 out but that was years ago so I don't know if that is complete or not.
(A side note here, automotive diesel should fit in here between JP-4 and JP-5).
Next is good ol' JP-5. Stings like fire ants and always seemed to have infiltrated the water. Eventually breakfast just didn't taste right without that JP-5 Tang. ALL Navy aircraft that go to sea aboard carriers use JP-5. It's low volatility is what made it the Navy's choice. In FF school we watched instructors put out lit matches in buckets of JP-5. It is also used in the emergency electrical power 'diesel' engines of the carriers. Big honking in-line 9 cylinder engines the size of a VW micro bus from the sixties. I never did get to see one running, but they were impressive. Next is DFM or diesel fuel marine. It was for the ships engines(I served on the Independence, CV62, one of the non-nuclear ships).
As for the destructive possibilities of the Harpoon... The "03" deck of the carriers is dominated by several things. At the front are the catapult rams, steam, for cat's 1 and 2. Amidships are the various warfare control centers, though in terms of volume they don't really occupy much. Also amidships, slightly back of the CIC's, are the second set of catapult rams, for cat's 3 and 4. Aft are the arresting wire rams, hydraulic. Tucked into all the remaining spaces are the berthing and staterooms of the officers(including pilots) of the air-wing's squadrons. There are also a various workshops for the squadrons. In terms of volume these last two are the biggest but they are not systematically inserted into the deck because of the requirements of the others, it is more random, because after all a person can sleep anywhere.
Now, did I mention fuel anywhere? No. That must be because there is no fuel stored on the '03'. Fuel is run up from many decks down, below the waterline of the ship, in pipes that run just under the outer skin of the ship. All refueling stations on the carrier are on the outer deck edge of the flight and hangar decks, not in the middle. This makes it safer as a hazard for damage and does not interfere with stability, after all, tanks of fuel are not hollow and would raise the C.G. of the ship. The location of the fuel is a no-brainer lesson from WWII, because bombs do penetrate flight decks and having fuel right under them would therefore not be good. The best way for a Harpoon to attack a carrier is the terminal sea skimming mode. That would get the missile into the vital spaces below the first deck where it would be much more likely to encounter large quantities of fuel and explosives. Additionally, though the flight deck is armored, the skin of the ship on the sides is only about 1/2 inch thick, not enough to keep out even a subsonic missile.
That says something about how effective missiles are against carriers (Of course that's regarding the Harpoon)
Can anyone tell me how the missile that the Tu-22 Backfire would carry would fare in this situation?
If anyone notes something incorrect about the article, by all means correct me! (Popeye?)
