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So how did the designers solve the noise problem, if they solved it at all? Any kind of target guidance inside the gas bubble isn't happening, consequently the firing u-boat has to be sufficiently close to the target. Meanwhile, antisubmarine defenses are so good nowadays that a submarine that has been detected is as good as dead. Firing a supercavitating torpedo means you just went on a suicide mission.
Why not a two stage torpedo to solve the problem of the launching submarine having to come close? First stage is a conventional (but maybe larger than usual) torpedo that drives--with guidance--from the sub into the 15km range, second stage is the supercavitating torpedo that goes that last 15km or so.
Granted, that would require the submarine to have much longer torpedo tubes.
Aren’t torpedos fired from ships and planes as well? A plane dropping a torpedo wouldn’t care that it was loud and the high speed would ensure the target ship won’t have much time to get out of the way.
Torpedoes may also be launched from naval mines. An example is the Mark 60 CAPTOR, which is anchored to the sea floor where it waits for a target to shoot its Mark 46 (chemically powered) guided torpedo.
That's fascinating, there are so many modern weapon systems on wikipedia to keep up with.
Modern naval warfare sounds like it would get extremely expensive loses really fast in any serious war situation. I know it's mostly peaceful and these ships are mostly used for power projection. But everything I've read about anti-ship missiles (even mostly from the 1970s era which I'm counting as modern) and swarming Iranian torpedo boats hitting aircraft carriers, it seems to be a giant waste of money - if actual modern combat was the goal.
https://pando.com/2014/05/26/the-war-nerd-iran-is-building-a...
https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/a30392654/millenni...
There really hasn't ben full scale mass naval conflict since WW2. The Falkland Islands is the closest, and yes, anti-ship missiles proved quite potent.
Keep in mind some of the articles about carrier vulnerability are just empty nonsense. Carriers don't operate alone. The air wing gives them an enormous area of awareness. The group always has multiple ships with AEGIS and plenty of defensive missiles. A combination of a submarine and anti-submarine helicopters protects them from subsurface attacks.
It's an arms race, an important one, but it's not quite as one sided as some of these articles portray. Remember, improvements to missile technology helps defensive interception too.
_...are just empty nonsense._
Are they? From time to time one can read about some submarine "popping up" almost next to the carrier, after virtually have sunken it in some large training maneuver, in spite of all the stuff you mentioned. Folklore?
What you don't hear about much is underwater drones. I have no doubt that they exist, and a drone swarm, each drone armed with a few tons of conventional explosive is infinitely more politically palatable than a low-yield nuke to take out a carrier group.
Parent poster said "some", not "all"....
Air-launched torpedoes are different from submarine-launched ones. The former are usually lighter, battery-powered, and almost exclusively employed against submarines. The latter are larger, often chemically powered, and used against both submerged and surface targets.
Super-cavitation just isn't very helpful for air-launched torpedoes.
If we're talking about a plane attacking a ship, there are better and less risky ways to do that.
Plus, the short range means that you'd have to fly so close to to the enemy that you would almost certainly be taken out by anti-air defenses first.
In the case of the Soviet Va-111 Shkval, the intent was to fire the supercavitating torpedo at the enemy after the enemy already fired at you.
Mutually assured destruction then.
Many torpedoes are wire-guided. Using a fast, loud torpedo as a counter attack will make the enemy strongly consider cutting those wires and immediately changing course in effort to save themselves.
Wire-guided to get into the kill box, but once you cut the wires and the torpedo goes to active homing it is going to have a nice path to project back to the launch platform. Fixing this problem is just a software upgrade to the guidance package on a torpedo I would think.
In addition to what sawjet mentioned with wire guided torpedos, I think they might also have hoped for the nuclear warhead the VA-111s originally had to destroy the incoming torpedo. By being particularly fast, the supercavitating torpedo may have intercepted the enemy torpedo soon enough for that to work.. maybe.
>Any kind of target guidance inside the gas bubble isn't happening
originally it was armed with nuclear warhead - you just needed to point it somewhere in the general direction of the target :)
The old saw is nuclear torpedoes always sink at least one ship.
Brilliant
Why this is as advantage as a weapon over a submarine just launching a conventional missile which can be 10x the speed of the supercavitating torpedo. A Harpoon missile has a warhead almost the exact same size as a Shkval, twice the speed and 25x the range, and it can guide itself to the target. If you want to shoot a rocket at something, why try to fly it through water in the first place?
> If you want to shoot a rocket at something, why try to fly it through water in the first place?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RPK-6_Vodopad/RPK-7_Veter
Actually, and anti-sub weapon, and very "funny" one. Apparently, it was puzzling NATO intel analysts up until the collapse of the union.
Launches underwater, like a torpedo, fires an SRB, maneuvers out of the water, flies to withing few kilometres of the target, and turns into torpedo again.
It originated from a no less eccentric weapon:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metel_Anti-Ship_Complex
An ASROC lookalike, with a twist. In it, the torpedo, and the carrier rocket _both carry a warhead._
So, in an anti-shipping mode, the ship gets hit, first, by the missile, and, then, it's torpedo, so as to maximally confuse the enemy.
What's really wild is when they launch these from the side of ships. The missile/torpedo starts above the water, dips into the water then launches out, flies above the water then eventually dives back in.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4dy90rzZNY
that way, you can launch your missiles and conventional torpedos from the same launcher.
torpedoes are generally more survivable than antiship missiles.
What is SRB?
Solid rocket booster
Apart from the other reasons listed, modern battle groups are equipped with close-in weapons systems like the Phalanx which have a decent chance of shooting down inbound airborne missiles, especially if they're not ballistic.
That and the fact you can launch underwater without disclosing your position makes it a pretty compelling weapon.
A torpedo can be used against underwater targets (including other torpedoes). They also allow the launching platform to remain at least somewhat covert, whereas launching a missile creates a really obvious datum.
ASROC could be launched from a submarine against other submarines.
And a missile can be launched over the horizon and change it's approach angle radically before closing with the target. The Shkval basically can only travel in a straight line, and given its speed and short range the launching sub won't be able to do much evasion.
The supercavitating torpedo is also traveling at high speed in a bubble of fizzing seawater, it must make a tremendous racket while approaching, there really isn't anything covert about it.
Torpedoes and missiles kill in a fundamentally different way.
Missiles impact the target (or in very close proximity) and explode producing concussive damage - very effective against anything sensitive to pressure like personnel. However an appropriately armored target can be made to survive these explosions. Hundreds of kilograms of explosive can do quite a bit of damage, but ships weighing hundreds of millions of kilograms can be made to tank such hits.
Modern torpedoes explode below a ship. This explosion creates a void of high pressure, low density steam in the surrounding much denser water. As this bubble rises due to bouyancy, the pressure difference causes it to expand. Eventually momentum causes it to over-expand, and the void collapses, creating an extremely high pressure region in the center, which re-expands. This keeps happening as the void keeps rising. If detonated at the appropriate depth, by the time it reaches the surface the bubble has expanded into a massive void comparable to the size of the ship. When it breaks the surface, the steam pressurizing it internally is released, and the void collapses rapidly. With the water underneath it's center suddenly gone, the ship's weight is now only supported on its ends, and it bends like an overloaded beam. Within fractions of a second, the water that rushed to the center of the void reaching extremely high pressures now takes the path of least resistance to rebound, which happens to take it straight through the most stressed part of the ship. This geyser acts like a waterjet, cutting right through the ship. On top of all this, for a well designed torpedo, those fluctuations of the bubble on its way up weren't random: the frequency of its cycles is close to the resonance frequency of its hull. Much like how a wine glass can be shattered by an opera singer hitting the right note, the ship is especially susceptible to energy delivered at its resonance frequency. The largest supercarriers may be too big to be sunk by a single conventional torpedo, but anything smaller will sink within minutes of a successful hit.
Now to achieve these results, torpedoes are far more expensive than comparably sized missiles, and of course they have much shorter range and speed. Missiles are more versatile and for many purposes totally sufficient. But if you suspect a hostile navy is sailing towards your shores, a few torpedo boats in strategic chokepoints that can each take out any vessel in one hit might be game changing.
It's a good question. Modern ships have both anti-missile missiles and guns. Anti-torpedo torpedoes exist but AFAIK aren't widely deployed.
The largest factor, among many?
If you are hoping to sink a ship by making a hole in it... you generally need to make the hole _underwater._
=)
It's never been explained how these torpedoes are meant to be guided to their target. That made sense during the Cold War when you could just fit a medium-sized nuclear weapon on the torpedo, but that sort of thing wouldn't fly in today's (geo-)political environment.
The firing ship isn't safe from it's target if the target carries ASROCs or the like.
Hmm...I suggested above a two-stage torpedo, with the second stage being supercavitating. A variant would be a sub-launched equivalent of an ASROC: the rocket pops up above the surface, flies toward the target, then drops back in the water and the supercavitating torpedo takes over. Possible advantage: ships can (perhaps!) shoot down incoming rockets or cruise missiles, but it's harder to shoot an incoming torpedo; bullets don't travel well underwater.
What is an ASROC?
Anti-submarine rocket.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RUR-5_ASROC
https://www.militaryperiscope.com/weapons/naval-minestorpedo...
similar machinery is employed for hypersonic missiles - the plasma from the special ablation layer on the nose of the missile plays similar role to that bubble wrap around torpedo. Also if i remember correctly SpaceX reverse engine firing in the stratosphere isn't that much to slow down and more to provide the plasma wrapper to decrease the atmospheric friction heating. For a space gun of the future i think it also would be possible to "preheat" the path ahead using the something like very powerful laser to decrease the air friction.
Re the space gun idea, didn't that idea come up back in the 80s wrt beam weapons under Reagan's Star Wars program? A laser ionizes a path to the target, and the particle weapon fires along that pre-ionized path.
Star Wars had a lot of great tech ideas. Too bad the Cold War ended so soon - we'd have by now a nuclear propulsion, Moon and Mars bases and a lot of other great stuff ... as long as nobody pressed the button activating the pointy stuff :)
Kursk submarine disaster was caused by testing these. Hydrogen peroxide monopropellant blew up in the launch tube. Or at least that's the official version of what happened. There are plenty of "unofficial" versions as well. What's known for certain is that it was testing such torpedoes at the time. AFAIK the main issue with these is that they're "blind". There's no guidance of any kind. You sort of set the course, fire, and hope for the best.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kursk_submarine_disaster
Your very own link says that this was not the case.
>The official investigation concluded that, as the crew of Kursk was preparing to load a dummy 65–76 "Kit" torpedo, a faulty weld in its casing leaked high-test peroxide (HTP), causing the torpedo's kerosene fuel to explode.
If you follow the wikipedia page, it's just a "normal" variety torpedo with a turbine engine and propellers.
Sure, a "normal" torpedo that blew the front off an "unsinkable" sub, and then Russia declined foreign help and let their sailors (who were banging metal from inside for days) die to not let anyone close to the site.
I was in Russia at the time. They were testing supercavitation torpedoes, this was even reported in newspapers and on Russian TV shortly before the incident. Here's a contemporaneous slashdot post, referring to one of the top Russian TV channels, NTV:
https://science.slashdot.org/story/00/08/22/1857222/kursk-de...
Russia is somewhat unique in using very high proof hydrogen peroxide with their torpedos. An accident with one of their conventional torpedos is entirely capable of destroying a sub. Other nations have avoided this approach for exactly this risk.
Coverups were also the natural inclination of the USSR government. The Kursk is just one of the instances where their approach backfired, arguably the most significant next to Chernobyl.
Nah man. I was there, in Russia, when this happened. I think my information is more reliable than any information you can get in the US.