NS Military Realism Consultation Thread #5

[Imperializt Russia]

They're going to be running buildings down and shooting people a lot, being unpopular.
When "everyone" has an automatic weapon, no-one's going to dick about.

[Roski]

How long before we can make fully fledged fighters UAVs?

[Imperializt Russia]

How long before we can make fully fledged fighters UAVs?

Very long.

[Roski]

How long before we can make fully fledged fighters UAVs?

Very long.

Someone needs to hurry up with that. Reading some stuff about the F-22, its safer without people in it.

[Imperializt Russia]

Very long.

Someone needs to hurry up with that. Reading some stuff about the F-22, its safer without people in it.

You know they fixed that, right?

"Hmm, the F-22's life support system wasn't very good" shouldn't be approached with "let's remove the F-22's life support system", it should be approached with "let's fix the F-22's life support system", which is what the DoD did.
A UCAV intended for dogfighting will not look anything like the F-22. The F-22 is a very large and heavy aircraft, because it needs to be survivable for its pilot, amongst other goals. An unmanned aircraft has not pilot to keep alive, and could feasibly be smaller and designed very differently.

[Roski]

Someone needs to hurry up with that. Reading some stuff about the F-22, its safer without people in it.

You know they fixed that, right?

They've been fixing it, but the air problems are still plaguing the poor thing.

[Kouralia]

its safer without people in it.

Holy shit, war's safer if no people are involved?!

D:

[Roski]

its safer without people in it.

Holy shit, war's safer if no people are involved?!

D:

I was refering to the lack of air to the pilots.

It would be like World War One, more people dying of normal issues than being shot.

[Imperializt Russia]

Holy shit, war's safer if no people are involved?!

D:

I was refering to the lack of air to the pilots.

It would be like World War One, more people dying of normal issues than being shot.

Being hit by shell fragments isn't traditionally known as "normal issues".

What book on WWI are you reading?

[Roski]

I was refering to the lack of air to the pilots.

It would be like World War One, more people dying of normal issues than being shot.

Being hit by shell fragments isn't traditionally known as "normal issues".

What book on WWI are you reading?

Talking about the disease and stuff from trench life sir.

*takes off hat*

[Kouralia]

Being hit by shell fragments isn't traditionally known as "normal issues".

What book on WWI are you reading?

Talking about the disease and stuff from trench life sir.

*takes off hat*

No, IIRC either Boer or WWI was the first of Britain's major wars in which less people died from disease than from combat.

[Imperializt Russia]

Being hit by shell fragments isn't traditionally known as "normal issues".

What book on WWI are you reading?

Talking about the disease and stuff from trench life sir.

*takes off hat*

Which are arguably more horrible than actual losses to combat, certainly a more useless waste of manpower, easily preventable and also probably wrong - IIRC 60% of deaths in WWI were artillery related (more than traditionally considered for a parity conflict).
It's like how people think that chemical warfare was some all-encompassing part of WWI. It wasn't. Sure, it was used often, and to demoralising effect - but relative to the number of people injured by it rather than killed, and certainly compared to other sources of death and injury, it made up some tiny proportion of the war's horror.

[Gvozdevsk]

For a small military, is it better to have a dedicated naval infantry force or just have one of my mechanized infantry divisions be capable of amphibious operations and have the air crews in one of my air assault divisions trained to operate from ships?

[Imperializt Russia]

You might as well just administratively make them "naval" units.
With a small force, you've got more than enough capability to train them such.

[Britinthia]

For a small military, is it better to have a dedicated naval infantry force or just have one of my mechanized infantry divisions be capable of amphibious operations and have the air crews in one of my air assault divisions trained to operate from ships?

It's a matter of what you want really. Either will work just fine. personally I feel as though Marines, as cool as they are, are an outdated concept that I have little room for. So I have a small number of infantry in my navy, the 'Naval Kommandos' to deal with the shipboard tasks (boarding, security, close protection, special forces, etc...) and my Army has an amphibious assault brigade attached to the Navy. Mostly because I wanted to be different yet still have the convoluted logistical nightmare that comes with RL militaries.

[Velkanika]

Right, so...

1) The stages in launching strategic weapons from a silo, what sort of procedures should I mention in the build up? What sort of security features are there in it? Is it accurate for there to be a little phone there like in Red Alert 2?

This is the launch procedure for a Titan II brought to you by a tour guide. The guide actually explains the entire procedure they would have followed in the event of a launch order, so it's pretty informative.

2) Would it be possible to have a starstreak-style nuclear warhead-equipped, or thermo-nuclear warhead-equipped ASAT? If not, is a nuclear or thermo-nuclear ASAT with only one warhead possible? How big would the yield likely be for either?

Use MIRVs or MARVs, depending on the date and missile type used in the RP. Ballistic Missiles have what's called an RV Bus under the nose shroud that will disperse the warheads onto different trajectories once the final stage burns out. There's a very limited window for the bus, which has its own method of thrust, to conduct a few inclination changes while it's outside of the atmosphere and release a RV onto slightly different ballistic trajectories. The area that a single missile with MIRVs can target varies depending on the launch profile and missile type, but is limited by the delta-v of the RV bus.

3) Does 'lower earth orbit...currently in retrograde orbit at the 20 minute orbital period point' state anything which means I could fire an MT ASAT at the ship in question?

Ship? There's no water in space.

You can fire at the spacecraft in question, but you need to launch from directly below its orbital track and far enough in front of it so that your missile will reach cross its altitude and point in space-time at the same moment it does. Don't worry about warheads on the ASAT as those are mostly useless at orbital velocity. All you need to do is fly a steel brick into the target and let kinetic energy do the rest.

---

Someone needs to hurry up with that. Reading some stuff about the F-22, its safer without people in it.

You know they fixed that, right?

"Hmm, the F-22's life support system wasn't very good" shouldn't be approached with "let's remove the F-22's life support system", it should be approached with "let's fix the F-22's life support system", which is what the DoD did.
A UCAV intended for dogfighting will not look anything like the F-22. The F-22 is a very large and heavy aircraft, because it needs to be survivable for its pilot, amongst other goals. An unmanned aircraft has not pilot to keep alive, and could feasibly be smaller and designed very differently.

I don't know who's budget you're using, but UAVs are far too expensive to be disposable. UCAVs have to be survivable to be worth it.

[Imperializt Russia]

Survivable in different ways.

[Velkanika]

Survivable in different ways.

You need a hardened communications link with low latency and a whole lot of optics instead of a cockpit and life support. There's not a whole lot that changes between manned and unmanned aircraft except input lag.

[The Soodean Imperium]

Talking about the disease and stuff from trench life sir.

*takes off hat*

No, IIRC either Boer or WWI was the first of Britain's major wars in which less people died from disease than from combat.

I do recall that the Spanish-American War of 1898 surprised many American military planners because combat casualties <<<< disease casualties. But that was only because (1) the Spanish military was fairly incompetent by that time, and (2) the US army was marching into tropical climates with little to no knowledge of how to protect against malaria.

By WWI, the trenches were indeed rife with horrible diseases, but combat casualties were still the biggest portion. Unless you factor in the devastating Spanish Influenza outbreak that followed immediately afterwards, but that's hardly fair.

Survivable in different ways.

You need a hardened communications link with low latency and a whole lot of optics instead of a cockpit and life support. There's not a whole lot that changes between manned and unmanned aircraft except input lag.

Actually, I've been planning a disposable air-to-air UAV for a long time, and I'm convinced that the concept is entirely workable.

> Because there's no fragile human pilot, add some internal reinforcements and you could potentially get it to survive 20+G turns and accelerate into the Mach 3-5 range in seconds. Computerized controls would give it precision and reaction times far ahead of what a human mind can manage.

> Targeting is trickier, but with an active radar in the nose you'd be able to give it a consistent automatic bearing on its target, and automatically program it to aim in front of the other plane's path of motion. Likewise, an inertial or GPS backup could be used for navigation until the active radar picks up a target.

> As far as weapons go, you could try giving it guns or rockets, but with that agility you could easily program it to ram full-speed into enemy planes - just like air-to-air kamikazes in WWII, only much, much faster and many times more accurate. You could even install a proximity fuse on the nose and a continuous-rod warhead near the front to improve the chances of a kill if it misses in its first ram attempt.

> And best of all, you could fit all of these features in an airframe much smaller than any fighters we have today. Heck, it could even be small enough to hang on a fighter's hardpoints and launch at standoff range. I'd wager that you could pack four of them into the central weapons bay on the F-22, to be quickly deployed in flight.

And before you ask, YES a system like this is entirely workable. You can find a guide to how they would work anywhere on the internet. The USSR was conducting experiments with the technology in the early stages of the Cold War, and so was the USA - both stole secret experimental anti-air UAV technology that had been developed by the Nazis in secret at the end of WWII. I'd even venture to say that any military with a decent air force has some stockpile of these air-to-air UAVs hidden away somewhere. The USAF even tested them in Desert Storm, I think.

source: (on Wikipedia)

[Kouralia]

Right, so...

1) The stages in launching strategic weapons from a silo, what sort of procedures should I mention in the build up? What sort of security features are there in it? Is it accurate for there to be a little phone there like in Red Alert 2?

This is the launch procedure for a Titan II brought to you by a tour guide. The guide actually explains the entire procedure they would have followed in the event of a launch order, so it's pretty informative.

A'ight.

2) Would it be possible to have a starstreak-style nuclear warhead-equipped, or thermo-nuclear warhead-equipped ASAT? If not, is a nuclear or thermo-nuclear ASAT with only one warhead possible? How big would the yield likely be for either?

Use MIRVs or MARVs, depending on the date and missile type used in the RP. Ballistic Missiles have what's called an RV Bus under the nose shroud that will disperse the warheads onto different trajectories once the final stage burns out. There's a very limited window for the bus, which has its own method of thrust, to conduct a few inclination changes while it's outside of the atmosphere and release a RV onto slightly different ballistic trajectories. The area that a single missile with MIRVs can target varies depending on the launch profile and missile type, but is limited by the delta-v of the RV bus.

Okay.

3) Does 'lower earth orbit...currently in retrograde orbit at the 20 minute orbital period point' state anything which means I could fire an MT ASAT at the ship in question?

Ship? There's no water in space.

A space-ship.

You can fire at the spacecraft in question, but you need to launch from directly below its orbital track and far enough in front of it so that your missile will reach cross its altitude and point in space-time at the same moment it does. Don't worry about warheads on the ASAT as those are mostly useless at orbital velocity. All you need to do is fly a steel brick into the target and let kinetic energy do the rest.

Yeah, I need a warhead. It's a geostationary orbit, above a point roughly 10-20,000km away.

[Novorden]

I don't fully understand ships so i still have a few unresolved issues with the VLS and sensors

Multirole frigate [WIP]

Length: 141m
Beam: 20m
Speed: ~30 knots
Complement: 150, with space for an additional 50.

Sensors:
SMART-L long-range air and surface surveillance radar
Multifunction air tracking radar
Towed array sonar
Bow sonar
[long list of sensors i don't really get]

Electronic warfare & decoys:
2x Chemring centurion decoy launchers*
ECM suite

Armament:
Anti-air missiles:
4x 8 cell Sylver VLS A-50**
Anti-surface missiles:
2x 8 cell Sylver VLS A-70**
2x 4 Harpoon Launchers
Anti-submarine
1x Anti submarine rocket system***
Sting Ray torpedo system
Guns
1x OTO 127/64 LW (Dual purpose)
2x 35mm NBS MANTIS (Dual purpose)
6x HMG/GPMG mounts.

Aviation facilities:
Hangar and flight deck for 1 medium or 2 light helicopters

* This can also launch short range Anti-air and anti-surface missiles, as well as 'Low lethality' measures, illumination rounds and even small UAVs
** I am undecided between Sylver and Mk41
*** This may now be removed with the addition of the Stingray

[Austrasien]

[

> Because there's no fragile human pilot, add some internal reinforcements and you could potentially get it to survive 20+G turns and accelerate into the Mach 3-5 range in seconds. Computerized controls would give it precision and reaction times far ahead of what a human mind can manage.

> Targeting is trickier, but with an active radar in the nose you'd be able to give it a consistent automatic bearing on its target, and automatically program it to aim in front of the other plane's path of motion. Likewise, an inertial or GPS backup could be used for navigation until the active radar picks up a target.

> As far as weapons go, you could try giving it guns or rockets, but with that agility you could easily program it to ram full-speed into enemy planes - just like air-to-air kamikazes in WWII, only much, much faster and many times more accurate. You could even install a proximity fuse on the nose and a continuous-rod warhead near the front to improve the chances of a kill if it misses in its first ram attempt.

> And best of all, you could fit all of these features in an airframe much smaller than any fighters we have today. Heck, it could even be small enough to hang on a fighter's hardpoints and launch at standoff range. I'd wager that you could pack four of them into the central weapons bay on the F-22, to be quickly deployed in flight.

And before you ask, YES a system like this is entirely workable. You can find a guide to how they would work anywhere on the internet. The USSR was conducting experiments with the technology in the early stages of the Cold War, and so was the USA - both stole secret experimental anti-air UAV technology that had been developed by the Nazis in secret at the end of WWII. I'd even venture to say that any military with a decent air force has some stockpile of these air-to-air UAVs hidden away somewhere. The USAF even tested them in Desert Storm, I think.

source: (on Wikipedia)

1."faster than the human mind can track" please stop dumb hyperbole.
2. G's aren't free. The more G's an airframe is designed to pull, the heavier it becomes. Super-high G maneuvers will also bleed airspeed.
3. Size is not free either. The cockpit does not take up that much space, eliminating it does not mean you can suddenly cut the vehicle to a fraction of the size without compromising any other capabilities.
4. Ramming? WTF? You are going to use a UAV with a price-tag in the tens of millions of dollars as a ram?
5. Nazi UAV technology... ok remind me not to take you seriously anymore. What you are describing has no resemblance to anything that existed in WWII.

[Oaledonia]

1."faster than the human mind can track" please stop dumb hyperbole.
2. G's aren't free. The more G's an airframe is designed to pull, the heavier it becomes. Super-high G maneuvers will also bleed airspeed.
3. Size is not free either. The cockpit does not take up that much space, eliminating it does not mean you can suddenly cut the vehicle to a fraction of the size without compromising any other capabilities.
4. Ramming? WTF? You are going to use a UAV with a price-tag in the tens of millions of dollars as a ram?
5. Nazi UAV technology... ok remind me not to take you seriously anymore. What you are describing has no resemblance to anything that existed in WWII.

He's talking about Air to air missiles, but described them as if they were an original idea
It's a joke, lighten up.

[Purpelia]

1."faster than the human mind can track" please stop dumb hyperbole.
2. G's aren't free. The more G's an airframe is designed to pull, the heavier it becomes. Super-high G maneuvers will also bleed airspeed.
3. Size is not free either. The cockpit does not take up that much space, eliminating it does not mean you can suddenly cut the vehicle to a fraction of the size without compromising any other capabilities.
4. Ramming? WTF? You are going to use a UAV with a price-tag in the tens of millions of dollars as a ram?
5. Nazi UAV technology... ok remind me not to take you seriously anymore. What you are describing has no resemblance to anything that existed in WWII.

He's talking about Air to air missiles, but described them as if they were an original idea
It's a joke, lighten up.

It's actually quite funny in hindsight. It's just that it really does not work without knowing the joke in advance which kills it.

[Mitheldalond]

[

> Because there's no fragile human pilot, add some internal reinforcements and you could potentially get it to survive 20+G turns and accelerate into the Mach 3-5 range in seconds. Computerized controls would give it precision and reaction times far ahead of what a human mind can manage.

> Targeting is trickier, but with an active radar in the nose you'd be able to give it a consistent automatic bearing on its target, and automatically program it to aim in front of the other plane's path of motion. Likewise, an inertial or GPS backup could be used for navigation until the active radar picks up a target.

> As far as weapons go, you could try giving it guns or rockets, but with that agility you could easily program it to ram full-speed into enemy planes - just like air-to-air kamikazes in WWII, only much, much faster and many times more accurate. You could even install a proximity fuse on the nose and a continuous-rod warhead near the front to improve the chances of a kill if it misses in its first ram attempt.

> And best of all, you could fit all of these features in an airframe much smaller than any fighters we have today. Heck, it could even be small enough to hang on a fighter's hardpoints and launch at standoff range. I'd wager that you could pack four of them into the central weapons bay on the F-22, to be quickly deployed in flight.

And before you ask, YES a system like this is entirely workable. You can find a guide to how they would work anywhere on the internet. The USSR was conducting experiments with the technology in the early stages of the Cold War, and so was the USA - both stole secret experimental anti-air UAV technology that had been developed by the Nazis in secret at the end of WWII. I'd even venture to say that any military with a decent air force has some stockpile of these air-to-air UAVs hidden away somewhere. The USAF even tested them in Desert Storm, I think.

source: (on Wikipedia)

1."faster than the human mind can track" please stop dumb hyperbole.
2. G's aren't free. The more G's an airframe is designed to pull, the heavier it becomes. Super-high G maneuvers will also bleed airspeed.
3. Size is not free either. The cockpit does not take up that much space, eliminating it does not mean you can suddenly cut the vehicle to a fraction of the size without compromising any other capabilities.
4. Ramming? WTF? You are going to use a UAV with a price-tag in the tens of millions of dollars as a ram?
5. Nazi UAV technology... ok remind me not to take you seriously anymore. What you are describing has no resemblance to anything that existed in WWII.

Fail. Try actually looking at the linked article next time before you attack someone. You might also want to take some time to think about what a UAV actually is.