A German cargo ship has slammed into an Indian frigate in the port of Mumbai, causing the military vessel to catch fire and eventually sink.
[…]
The Indian navy called the sinking of the Vindhyagiri India’s greatest peacetime casualty, noting that a frigate has never been sunk by a civilian vessel.http://ktwop.wordpress.com/2011/02/04/german-freighter-sinks-indian-navy-frigate/
I honestly didn’t want this to happen.
So they’re not happy about the tech support thing either.
So, declaration of war by foreign civilian proxy?
The future of naval warfare: ramming valuable frigates with expendable freighters!
Aircraft carrier vs supertanker: WHO WOULD WIN??
That sounds like a bad movie.
The US Navy is a bit mor badass about these things (remember the shooting down of an Iranian passenger jet?) an aircraft carrier have a lot of support ships and I don’t think a civilian vessel would come close.
(yes, I knew you were joking)
Is this a supertanker filled with nitroglycerin? Possibly piloted by Kris kristofferson?
I assume it’s a supertanker loaded with King Kong. You get in close then launch the giant ape attack.
If you’re going with a one-man boarding party, then really the only choice is Michael Dudikoff.
Come on newbrof, quit screwing around.
I’m not sure I get your point.
Even if that guy is right - and he isn’t according to hours spent playing Harpoon, which regrettedly is all the kowledge I have - I’ve yet to see a freighter or supertanker that can launch itself 1800 meters into the air and slam down on the deck of a carrier… which is what he’s writing about.
I read that, and I thought, “ok, what defenses do city buildings have against ballistic missiles that ships don’t?”
They have the same defenses (which depending on how much confidence you have in SDI and Aegis cruisers and Patriot missile type stuff can be anything from “none at all” to “workable up to a point”), except that ships can also move around and are thus harder to hit. Yet we don’t stop building cities.
He comes off as very nerdy indeed, sperging out over a minor point and making it out to be this big revolutionary thing when it’s more just part of a general pattern that people just have to deal with.
Man! I’d love to be able to get a few people together to play Harpoon. I read an old copy with loads of missing pages and it seems absolutely awesome.
What he’s talking about is ballistic missiles and the lack of defense against it from an aircraft carrier, which it think he’s right about.
The Chinese military has developed a ballistic missile, Dong Feng 21, specifically designed to kill US aircraft carriers: “Because the missile employs a complex guidance system, low radar signature and a maneuverability that makes its flight path unpredictable, the odds that it can evade tracking systems to reach its target are increased. It is estimated that the missile can travel at mach 10 and reach its maximum range of 2000km in less than 12 minutes.”
Thanks, I am capable of reading.
I read his entire article and like Coreander I’m not entirely convinced by his argument… or rather his histrionic repetition of a single point. But he might be right, since he’s The War Nerd and I’m not.
What I failed to see was what Jason thought ballistic missiles and the lack of defense against them had to do with sailing a very slow ship through a carrier group to ram an aircraft carrier.
With one short post Jason managed to turn an innocent thread about the German F-Boat program into an argument about China and ballistic missiles. This is why he has 30,000 posts, and also why he will be first against the wall when the revolution comes.
I win the internet!
You haven’t seen it yet, but oh yes, soon. I’m thinking a War Nerd/Michael Bay/Transformers crossover. Definitely need the Hugin ape to get greenlighted.
!Note! These links are NSFW because of The Exile’s love of cheap russian porn.
I was referring to the second one where a simulated Iranian navy using cheap shit sunk the hell out of the fleet in the gulf.
But what van Ripen did to the US fleet…that’s something very different. He was given nothing but small planes and ships-fishing boats, patrol boats, that kind of thing. He kept them circling around the edges of the Persian Gulf aimlessly, driving the Navy crazy trying to keep track of them. When the Admirals finally lost patience and ordered all planes and ships to leave, van Ripen had them all attack at once. And they sank two-thirds of the US fleet.
That should scare the hell out of everybody who cares about how well the US is prepared to fight its next war. It means that a bunch of Cessnas, fishing boats and assorted private craft, crewed by good soldiers and armed with anti-ship missiles, can destroy a US aircraft carrier. That means that the hundreds of trillions (yeah, trillions) of dollars we’ve invested in shipbuilding is wasted, worthless.
Ok, the actual ramming part isn’t included, but “run a bunch of cheap ships at the carrier all at once” is. Technically you could pack them all full of explosives and ram, getting the same effect; it’s a variation of what took out the Cole.
He’s kinda painful to read and again I must be careful because I’m no expert and not even a self proclaimed one like him.
But this wasn’t really news. Those aforementioned hours of Harpoon back in the early 90’s already showed similar results. That if you had a shitload of missile delivery systems and were willing to sacrifice them all and lose 90% of the missiles, then you might just sink a carrier. One scenario even had you playing as the Iranians and your only goal was denting the USS Nimitz (probably making the US Navy lose its nerve and skulk home…).
So if you’re fighting an insane enemy content at throwing everything at one carrier and then declaring a win, then…
Whether it’s as easy as he mnakes it out and even possible without missiles… I doubt it, But perhaps he’s right - I’d like to see the argument being made with less hyperbole by somebody else.
This swarm-of-boats thing appears not to be a wartime scenario, just as the attack on the Cole was terrorism, not warfare. As a surprise attack, it’s plausible, but I think in wartime, all those little boats would be sunk a long way off from any carrier – unless of course it’s a British carrier, which (according to the Register) wouldn’t have any escorts with modern weapons, or warplanes on board for that matter.