The Armored Vehicle Thread

There protected by what is essentially the space version of MAD, unless there on re-entry, you could very well initiate kessler syndrome.

Who said you needed to or wanted to erase the city? Railgun tech means there's nowhere the military can hide in a practical manner and be immune to attack. Those hardened silos become targets, not assets. A railgun salvo for instance could kill the nuclear launch silos located inside Moscow itself while leaving the rest of the city unharmed.

That's what made precision weaponry so scary to the 1980s Soviets. You could kill so much so accurately and precisely for so little effort and none of it was nuclear.

Besides in a Rods From God scenario, some of those rods could be city-killers themselves if they simply weighed enough and came in fast enough. That airburst over Chelyabinsk had a blast yield greater than most nuclear weapons ever built. (I think only Tsar Bomba exceeded the yield of Chelyabinsk.) That meteor exploded simply out of kinetic force, not nuclear reactions. We can replicate that possibility today by dropping something from orbit.

And as mentioned, those MIRV's are likely not gonna reach their targets. With increasingly effective ABM systems like THAAD, SM-3 and more they'll never get through.

THAAD and SM-3 say hi. There's a reason why AEGIS technology exists. That's the reason.

How are you gonna get your railgun into position to do all that? If we're gonna use them as fancy long range artillery pieces as opposed to proper cannons you've gone and lost your advantage right there. Might as well use a missile.

edited 5th Mar '15 8:04:57 PM by LeGarcon

None of which are 100% effective, and with 12 MIRV per sub, 8 warheads per MIRV one of those fuckers will get through.

edited 5th Mar '15 8:07:06 PM by Imca

What was that saying? I think it was about WW 2 bombers or something?

One always gets through.

^ And like the thought of land battleships it got its ass pounded in wartime. Bombers took such high losses that the thought of "The bomber will always get through" proved folly.

Back in the SAC days if the call went out to go nuke Moscow, none of those B-52s were expected to return alive.

Possibly but missiles are a lot faster than those bombers.

Lets see Aegis kill a BrahMos-II when it comes in at mach 7.

Missiles aren't dead yet, they can go faster and get smarter still.

Those ABM systems are improving. Plus, a single sub gets 12 shots. A Ticonderoga with AEGIS gets upwards of 90 or more depending on what it's loaded with in the VLS's. If it's on missile defense duty it has plenty of tries.

And that assumes the sub got by SOSUS and PAVE PAWS in the first place.

Both SM-2 and SM-3 are rated to engage hypersonic targets. Remember all it took was a firmware update for an SM-3 to shootdown a satellite going 25,000 mph over the Earth on the first shot.

And then you still have tech improving. The Navy intends for railguns and eventually lasers in the next 20 years or less to be battlefield ready and effective in anti-missile and point defense roles. That tech will spread to other branches like the Army ADA or Air Force Missile Command.

edited 5th Mar '15 8:16:05 PM by MajorTom

The US has demonstrated the ability to intercept weapons at the mid and terminal phases. The SM-3 can do it in orbit. The Russians are very unhappy with the Americans over this because it reduces the effectiveness of MAD type nuclear weapon deterrence.

As for Rods from God it was deemed too expensive to loft and maintain and impractical when cheaper and more common weapons platforms can deliver something that does the same job with less cost and more accuracy. Never mind issues with the Space Ban treaty.

Satellites are increasingly vulnerable to interception but as noted there is a concern with causing Kesseler syndrome from the debris. The Chinese ASAT test being the shining example of just how hazardous that is.

The point was we can't count out any sort of SHORAD weapons now or in the future because we cannot guarantee the nature of future conflicts and whether or not we may face an enemy with modern capability or not.

edited 5th Mar '15 8:20:32 PM by TuefelHundenIV

Responses to a couple of points:

Missile silos getting drone'd: How, exactly, is a drone supposed to take out a missile silo? Those things are kind of solidly built and, well, buried in the ground. If a drone showed up and lobbed a couple of Hellfires at it, I'm not sure the guys inside would ever realize they were under attack until someone saw the pock marks on the lid later. Assuming most countries use the US's preferred method of placing silos deep in the interiors of their home territory or in hard-to-detect submarines, I'm also curious how you're going to get a drone there with anything resembling the element of surprise (if they realize you're trying to first-strike the silos, you'll probably find that the silos are all empty by the time the drone gets there)

The bomber always getting through and the idea being hammered: Well, the bombers did always get through, for the most part, unless the defenders were able to spend years building up their forces and just grinding them down through sheer attrition. Exceptions to this include countries that lacked strategic bombers (Japan), and even they were able to remain an active threat to forward-deployed Allied forces throughout the war.

You can make it costly as hell, but you can't make it impossible. And with the advent of the atom bomb, if only one bomber out of all of them made it over the target, the exchange rate in damage and casualties would still pay off in the bombers' favor.

The thing about anti-nuke defense is that it's not perfect. What it does is to increase the cost for the attacker: where before four missiles might be enough, now he has to expend eight, or twelve, to account for attrition due to defenses. To quote from Stuart Slade:

Tom's correct in that the attrition rate of bombers hurt the theory that "the bomber would always get through"; this was proven again in the Vietnam War, as plenty of Thud pilots targeted against Hanoi and Haiphong could tell you. However, it's also only questionably applicable in nuclear warfare, for reasons that have already been pointed out.

Also, shifting us back to the topic of armored vehicles, here is a very good study of the Battle of Tskhinvali in the Russo-Georgian War. (One of the War is Boring articles linked to it.)

IIRC, just because the Brits had 200 targets didn't mean they'd be in 200 cities. Sometimes a city is important enough to have multiple targets, and if you had the warheads to spare, it's not like you needed to worry about being thrifty given the nature of nuclear warfare.

True enough.

What was that odd tank that basically had a modified naval turret slapped on to it?

The Otomatic 76mm SPAAG.◊ Would've been horribly lethal as an AA weapon, in theory. Also rapid-fire 76mm high-pressure APFSDS seriously blurs the line between "autocannon" and "tank gun".

Also, your daily reminder that somehow the US never developed a better SHOARD weapon in the Cold War than the Vulcan PIVADS, which was already getting a bit old by the 1970s. Despite the Russians coming out with ZSU-23-4 and Tunguska, and the Germans coming out with Gepard, the US M-247 Sgt York was not only hilariously ugly but just plain didn't work—at all.

edited 5th Mar '15 10:17:36 PM by SabresEdge

Who needs SHORAD when you've got fighter jets?

- Some air force guy. Probably.

Not probably an air force fighter jock, but definitely an air force fighter jock. I've said it before and I will say it again, fighter pilots who get to high positions in the USAF still have way too much say on what happens in air defence across all three services.

That the Americans still don't have effective ground based tracked vehicles with a mix of missiles and cannons bolted on them providing divisional and lower echelon formation triple A support is frankly fucking disgraceful. And with the Pigeon coming in you will have fewer, lower quality fighters providing what's going to be piss-poor top cover in the future.

Thanks Saber. That gun would certainly do some work as a direct fire weapon.

The Sgt York was a depressing failure. I remember a few years back someone found a gatling tank with a large bore gatling weapon for SHORAD. I need to find it again.

T249 VIGILANTE SELF-PROPELLED ANTI-AIRCRAFT GUN Found it. That is a 37mm Gatling gun.

edited 5th Mar '15 11:40:19 PM by TuefelHundenIV

I wonder if it's feasible to use the Goalkeeper CIWS system, or part of it, as mobile SHORAD. Oh yes, that is the A-10's gun.

Hmm. That gun would turn most aircraft in its range into swiss cheese pretty damned quick.

So it's no wonder it never got adopted.

The Goal keeper can track and engage missiles so like Phalanx you could likely engage aircraft with it.

A list of cannon tech concepts Basically a type of recoilless rifle that has timed venting that the pressure doesn't vent the blast until the shell is exiting the muzzle.

Some nice bits of kit there in both notional and "this stuff already works, folks" mode.

I still fanboy over Warzone 2100. The artillery in that game is just sublime.

Goalkeeper is a huge system. The mount alone is almost 4 metres high and the below-deck penetration takes it to 6 metres. The chassis you'd need to mount the gun + any significant amount of ammo would be enormous. Doubt very much you could just drop it into an Abrams or Bradley.