Re: [GZG] Monster ships

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Gzg-l mailing list
Gzg-l@mail.csua.berkeley.edu
http://mail.csua.berkeley.edu:8080/mailman/listinfo/gzg-lThank you for
responding with logig and fact. The fact that so much has come to lead
this time is evidence that missles and guided munitions are powerful.
But think of the fact it took over two or three decades to come closer.
Missle designers aren't sittin on their laurals. Offence is easier to
design and build than defence. This fact is ferever been proven. A sdad
fact of man's mind.

--- On Tue, 1/12/10, Oerjan Ariander <orjan.ariander1@comhem.se> wrote:

From: Oerjan Ariander <orjan.ariander1@comhem.se>
Subject: Re: [GZG] Monster ships
To: gzg-l@mail.csua.berkeley.edu
Date: Tuesday, January 12, 2010, 3:04 PM

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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