Re: [GZG] Monster ships

Charles Lee wrote:

>I keep hearing MT missles are simply bigger and more fragile 
>versions of a salvo missle. My answer is who has served in the modern
military

I haven't served (too poor eyesight), but I work with anti-tank and 
support weapons development with a side task of keeping track of what 
our products' potential targets are up to tech-wise - particularly 
wrt countermeasures. Does that count?

>and why are smart weapons so denied.

In Full Thrust? Because we don't want a page of extra rules and 
oodles of die-rolls to handle the ECM-vs-ECCM cycle in Full Thrust 
when "SMs attack nearest target" combined with the "1D6 sub-missiles 
on target from each salvo" comes pretty close to the result such 
rules would create anyway.

>These are people that think a defensive weapon is so great while in 
>reality defence lags behind offence in weapon technology.

You've chosen an... interesting time to make that claim, you know. 
Twenty years ago you would've been kind-of right; nowadays the 
defence side is catching up at a pretty high rate. Some examples:

Naval ships have had pretty effective ECM, point defences and area 
defences for decades already; they just haven't been seriously tested 
in any major naval wars yet. The RN didn't have up-to-date defences 
in '82 (and many of their ship losses were from dumb air-dropped 
bombs anyway), the Iran-Iraq war usage of ASMs was mostly directed at 
civilian oil tankers and platforms, and the Israeli corvette hit 
during the latest Lebanon fracas had its defensive systems turned off 
(not that two missiles fired against a single ship counts as a major 
naval war, of course).

Recently some of those point defence systems have been morphed into 
land-based anti-artillery systems (used operationally in Iraq and 
Afghanistan), and although AQ&co. don't have anything larger than 
mortar rounds for these defences to knock down they nevertheless 
retain the ability to take out much larger guided weapons too. Some 
modern SPAAGs are surprisingly good against small numbers of 
precision-guided bombs and big missiles too, though their magazines 
are too small for a sustained defence so they're easier to overwhelm.

The Russians have had crude but reasonably effective vehicle-mounted 
PDS systems at least since the early '80s, but haven't had the cash 
to deploy them on a larger scale. They did use such systems 
operationally in their Afghanistan war; it reduced tank losses to RPG 
attacks for the units so equipped by around 80% (and would've done a 
similar number on ATGMs had the Mujahideen had any). There are plenty 
of anti-ATGM ECM systems for armoured vehicles both east and west 
too, though they go out-of-date pretty fast (Iraq's anti-ATGM ECM 
systems were rather too old to do much good in 2003, for example). At 
least five western nations are developing their own vehicle-mounted 
PDS systems too, though AFAIK only Israel has gotten theirs into 
service so far.

The THEL and similar laser-based anti-missile systems are a bit 
further from operational deployment, but they're coming along quite 
nicely. The tests have been a mixed bag of successes and failures, 
but we have lasers today that are powerful enough to shoot down even 
big ballistic missiles. 'There is also a whole bunch of missile-based 
anti-missile systems that can take down incoming ballistic missiles.

Yes, the defence *has lagged* behind, past tense, for some decades 
now. Doesn't mean it is still lagging behind today, much less that it 
will remain lagging behind in the future. Heck, a century ago the 
defence was very much ahead of the game at least wrt land warfare...

Regards,

Oerjan 

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