My head hurts...
Heavy bombers have been known to have many turrets. And the complexity is largely in the rapid and wide traversal and the extremely rapid trajectory calculations, both of which are extremely reduced when you are only bothering to protect yourself from something that is chasing you from behind. And that still dowsn'e explain how naval would be "the" reasonable choice when ground exists and is preferable in most ways. That last bit might seem like petty semantics, but when one is arguing "this way is wrong, these other ways are correct" and yet shows no consideration at all of relative appropriateness then it calls into question whether they have considered anything at all or are instead purely arguing from blind adherence to convention.
1. Sure.
It existed, in a way, which is why I said it could technically work on bombers, but you initially suggested it as an answer in case Cannalans get ones that are much better and useable against fighters, which do not have the space nor can spare the weight to mount something that will pretty much be relatively heavy, and also incredibly complex answer for a problem easily solved by use of flares.
2. The problem is, the missiles are really small. We do not have radar remotely accurate enough to track down a missile. There is one anecdotal story of later version of B-52 Stratofortress shooting down a missile because the gunner was shooting at Vietnamese plane when it was relasing the missile, and the shots just happened to connect with the it. This was later researched with various simulations, and it was found that in perfect conditions, such missiles could technically be intercepted, the problem being in that those conditions basically never happen. The problem with the early air to air missiles is that they are, well, early, those aren't your videogame white lines perfectly tailing a plane, they are wobbly and shaky red dots. They do not have nowhere near predictable trajectory. In any given case, especially considering their speed, size and range, we would be much better just shooting down enemy planes rather than trying to kill the missiles.
3. Ground/naval based missile defences are the reasonable application because there is no better one, and when compared, you can have many more turrets on a ship than you have on a plane, the weight and size limitations don't matter that much, the standoff range is much greater due to missiles sites shooting down planes themselves, and most importantly - you can cram enough fucking ammo to make it work. The guns that shoot down missiles with relative degree of success do it simply because they rely on putting enough lead downrange that ultimately something hits by sheer luck. There is also the problem that reloading each one of those takes considerable time, something that can be done when it's your weapon of last resort to shoot down one or two missiles that somehow got through other types of defense, not when it's your major way of defending your plane from probably multiple missiles at once.
4. Did I mention FUCKING SHEER COST AND COMPLEXITY. The turrets will probably be complex, probably expensive, and will make our planes and bombers also expensiver, whilist a flare is something so cheap that it might not even get cost attached to it.
A guidance system for a missile can work for a turret, it doesn't need to be huge and expensive.
It needs to. What you're basically proposing is full-AI point-defense, which, with other problems of sheer radar size and complexity (Did you remember we totally still carry our radar on
dedicated fucking transport ships). It will need to be basically AI, because it will need to recognize what to shoot down and what not to shoot down. At lower altitudes there will be way too much radar interference to even try to use it, fucking mentioned B-52 radar turrets don't recognize anything smaller than a full sized plane in non-optimal conditions, and guess what - it will be non-optimal conditions.
Turrets themselves already exist on planes and the human element tends to be a bottleneck.
Yeah, it is a bottleneck, because
your only other fucking option is mentioned AI. Human is needed to be there to recognize targets. In best case scenario you will be wasting all your ammo on goddamn brids or other shitty radar interference, something that I mentioned is heavy, and we will need a lot to do succesful intercepts of missiles (that is implying we even get radar so good to see such small shit with reasonable detection rate), at worst it will just shoot completly randomly at friendly planes or send a burst when flying over friendly lines.
I wouldn't expect them to have a particularly good interception rate,
Then why the fuck do you propose something, that is completly useless for anything other than to stroke your stupid "BUT WE GOT MUH HIGH TECH" ego? The primary rule that should be applied in every fucking Arms Race, is to keep it simple. We can get much better results with something as simple as a fucking flare, and they will have to sink dozens of design turns to defeat that, as it's a
problem even today. but I would expect it to be significant against planes and missiles that are on the relatively narrow trajectory passage that indicates a rear approach against a quite fast craft on a relatively fixed heading against very large missiles.
>narrow trajectory passage
>rear approach
>relatively fixed heading
>very large missiles
First of all, they don't have very large missiles. Narrow trajectory rear approach with fixed heading is a fucking suicide for interceptors with regular human crewed turrets too, and for fucks sake, that is very specific set of things that need to happen for your overly complex and expensive Wunderwaffe to even work. Fucking sinking ten design turns into nukes would be a way better idea.
And without the needed space for a gunner, they could be mounted right next to the engines and such.
Sure. Replace that gained space with big ammo drum, expensive and complex aiming mechanisms, expensive and complex aiming computer, expensive and complex radar,
and a fucking 2000s supercomputer to check if the thing it's shooting at is really a missile or you just have really fucking dirty radar dome.
Not armouring the whole thing, just armouring the likely damage zones,
To armour engines, you need to strengthen the wing beams, which means a lot of other things to deal with, so for relatively small gain of armour you're already sacrificing a lot of weight you can carry.
which are relatively predictable given the nature of the missiles, and the Beagle only goes on the strike zone itself.
How to rip the wings from your own plane for dummies. We will literally give Cannalans an option to completly stop using the missiles since fucking flak will be more effective,
exploding our engines because we put fucking explosives on them.Planes can carry TANKS! and already have armour.
Planes don't have armour, not really, not in the "defeating missiles" sense. Planes are stupidly resilent in the way of having a lot of relatively open space that can be damaged without problem, and critical components being small and being redundant, so losing one engine on a bomber isin't that much of a problem.
You don't lose AL of your payload just from adding a bit of heavy shrapnel protection around a few regions and some heavy structure and explosive packs on a few key locations. There IS a cost, but it is not THAT dire.
You will have to add heavy structure to support that heavy structure. This won't even be like that old times when the bottom fell off our planes, this time the whole fuselage will simply detach from the wings.
I did mention that the temperature issue could use some work, but otherwise, it is an armour rated to resist heavier ordnance(those missiles are going to have a tiny warhead proportion) that is projecting out the back of the rear of a craft with a heavy airflow pushing away from it. Even if the first-generation anti-air missile IS a tank-killer, it won't detonate a salamander into a bomb any more than it would detonate the inside of a bomber into a bomb.
The Salamanders don't resist heavy ordnance, they get killed by autocannons. Also, remember, when Blood Eagle gets hit,
it tends to fucking explode everywhere, so what you will have is a smoking Salamander falling very fast towards the ground and a plane lacking it's tail section and majority of the cargo hold.
So not an exploding tank in the cargo hold, a still-functional tank in the cargo hold that serves mostly as an example that a single panel of the necessary armour is not a big deal payload-wise and could actually be implemented using equipment that is already fielded and not even require a revision. I'll admit to a high degree of ridiculousness, but you will need to do better than "tank goes boom" to call it implausible. The necessary elements all seem to be present.
I honestly can't even begin to explain how fucking wrong and ridiculous it is, if you yourself admit it's highly ridiculous. This isin't regular stupid, this is advanced stupid, the kind of stupid that makes it unable to reasonably approach.
"missiles like the taste of rocket"... There is a meaning to that phrasing. I had hoped it was clear. Additionally, they are shooting them out the side, rather than out the back. It really seems pretty clear to me that the rockets are acting as flares but using existing technology rather than inventing something new, thus obviating the need to spend an actual action on defensive flares. I realise that it makes it difficult to argue a single point when I am flitting around between an assortment of attempt to come up with interesting solutions to a problem rather than just arguing a single thing to death but given that it is all text here, it is pretty easy to juggle a mess of ideas when everything can be referenced.
It will probably still require a revision, and even then I doubt that would have a lot of success, especially because rocket engines tend to operate for relatively short times... and I mean sure, I like alternative approaches (
FLOATPLANE NAVY), but there is a certain point where you have to look at real life and realize that perhaps the way they dealt with it there is the best one, especially if it's stupidly simple, stupidly cheap and stupidly small and easy to use.
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Topic: Intercontinental Arms Race: Finale (Read 600425 times)