It's time once again for our regular Open Thread. Talk about whatever you want, so long as it isn't culture war.
Something of interest to lots of you is Naval Estimates, a new game that is best described as Rule the Waves, but with a much more detailed engineering simulator built in. Or at least that's the plan. Right now, it's just the weapon and ship design simulator that's available, and it's just set up for the British, c.1905. That said, it's remarkably good for that. I did some checking against a few books, and it does as good a job as you can ask modeling pretty much everything. I plan to do a longer writeup when the battle system is available, but it's still an impressive result for a one-man operation, and Elouda (the creator) is hopefully just getting started.
Overhauls are my review of Batfish, Falklands Part 4*, Museum Ships - United States, Signalling Parts one, two and four, NWAS - ASW Part 1, Zumwalt Parts one and two and for 2025, my review of the Oakland Air Museum, Military Spaceflight Parts eleven and twelve and Allied Military Aircraft Part 1.
Comments
On a recent stop in Belfast I had occasion to take pics of the museum ship, HMS Caroline. Dockside pics only; too late for an on-board tour. I see now that Caroline has been mentioned before on this site, but I was unaware until seeing her name on a tourist map of the Titanic quarter. This is the only World War One-era cruiser and only Jutland participant still in existence. Unfortunately she is not in original condition; between the wars she was modified to serve as a training ship, with an ugly bulky deckhouse aft. Let me know if you would like me to provide some pics.
I always wondered, when you say overhaul of articles, how extensive are these? Might be worth pointing out the most substantial changes that would justify a re-read.
@Tom
Potentially interested there, yes. I definitely want to see Caroline someday, but it's likely to be a while.
@EngineOfCreation
It's usually fairly minor, fixing some awkward wording or adding a link to something newer. I do mark more substantial work (fairly rare) with an asterisk. This time, that was Falklands part 4, because I got a new source on the ASW action, but I should probably be more explicit when I do that sort of thing.
How good is modern anti-ship missile defense?
I've been watching some videos recently from the "Grim Reapers" youtube channel, where they use games like Digital Combat Simulator and Sea Power: Naval Combat to simulate modern naval warfare. Obviously these are just games/simulations, so they can't be 100% accurate, but I think they do try to be as realistic as possible, given the limits of publicly known information.
One thing that jumps out at me is that the missile defense in those simulations is very strong. The chance to hit seems to be close to 100%. Usually the loser is just whoever runs out of defensive missiles first, because until then they're almost invulnerable to offensive AShp missiles.
A) Is that at all realistic? What's the P(hit) of defensive missiles nowadays?
B) Is this even known, or is this just a big guessing game?
C) What would you do differently, if the P(hit) is significantly lower?
Still mostly unknown, but preliminary results from the US Navy fighting with Yemen and Iran suggest high effectiveness if you do it right. But that's only a subset of the threat spectrum; I haven't heard of the Chinese selling our enemies supersonic AShMs yet.
There's a lot of experience with doing it wrong, with the biggest culprit being just not turning on the missile-defense systems until it's too late. Naval missile defense typically has to respond in under a minute, but keeping your missile defenses on hair-trigger alert 24/7 causes problems with electromagnetic interference and possibly friendly fire. Easier to just convince yourself that the Iraqis like us and would never fire on one of our ships, that Hezbollah and Ukraine are primitive screwheads that could never carry out a missile attack on one of our mighty warships.
The Israeli missile defence experience is that anything moving slower than the speed of sound from a range of over 30 kilometers is intercepted unless air defence can't prove its not a friendly. Shooting down an airliner is far more dangerous than not shooting down a missile, and when the bad guys dribble in UAVs into an airliner-rich environment, about 1% of them can't be distinguished from airliners in time and hit .
Ballistic missiles (as opposed to over-the-border rockets) bypass interception at a rate between 5-15%. Of course, to sink a ship, a missile has to not only bypass interception but actually hit that ship, which is harder than hitting a city, and I am not sure anyone knows what is the probability a Chinese missile aimed at an American ship hits that ship.
Reports from the Persian Gulf suggest that no one's going to buy patriot missiles ever again, once the word gets out. Sometimes they blow up their own battery, while trying to "defend" an installation.
That's not ship-based, mostly.
With 180 or so ships, America can't afford to lose a single one (and we're already nearly out of operational time -- 10 months abroad, and with a lot of our ships already doing time in Venezuela since October.) Time was, we used to have thousands of ships. Then we could just rotate them.
Situation's bad over there (for America). Situation's also bad for Iran, but they're used to it. "Not getting paid? That's normal."
About a month until we need this crisis settled, come hell or high water.
When Trump announced that Memorandum of Understanding, we were at a narrow win for America, a Gigundus win for Iran, and a loss for Israel (prestige and credibility minimum).
Now?
Loss for America, big loss for someone (Roll the dice! Someone's losing!), even bigger win for Iran, and Israel DOA.
@Elihoo, no weapon in all of history has been fault-free or never malfunctioned.
The Ukrainians, who've been using PAC for several years now, would still happily buy every single missile being manufactured this year. And these reports from the Persian Gulf (do you have links?) don't seem to have interrupted Rheinmetall's plan to build a PAC missile factory in Europe.