The Navy Thread

Have we dealt with the new Russian anti-ship missile, the Zircon, in this thread? It popped up on my phone's news feed yesterday morning, but there's chatter dating from at least March online about it.

The Other Wiki

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A hypersonic cruise missile with a 500 km range going 4600?

Time to start investing in Deflector Shields or something.

Or stay right the fuck away from the Spratleys, that new Chinese provocation, the Straits of Taiwan or the Bering Sea.

That's if they work as advertised though. It does seem to be a capability that a/ we should have, and b/ hope like hell it don't work properly if the other guy has it.

That being Russian, I'll believe their claims when I see it.

Not even Utah has enough salt to take when it comes to Russian claims about the efficacy and range of their weapon systems.

I grew out of dismissing out of hand Russian claims about their weapons systems when I was being trained to help beat them back in the Nineties. Sure, some of them were shit, but we had DIVAADS, the SA 80 weapons system and Reynolds Boughton trucks. (Those two latter ones being some of the more egregious procurement issues I came across as a British soldier).

Better to be pleasantly surprised than to have a burning Nimitz class in the Bering Sea.

Exactly.

Fixed. The Bering Sea is no place for carriers or even large naval forces. There's very little of worth to fight over. Neither the US nor Russia has much naval presence there anyways.

Bering Sea is still a vital transit link for all those shinies that are coming from north of the Arctic Circle thanks to global warming. A Nimitz may be a bit big, probably, but the US Navy's got a lot of other ships that could be up there.

And who knows, it might get a lot more important now that we've backed out of the Paris Accords

^ Ya know, they said the same thing when Bush 43 pulled out of Kyoto. (Seriously, go read the articles from back then, the leftist meltdown in activist circles and the media would have you swear it was written last week and referencing Trump.) It still freezes shut regularly.

I couldn't help but notice that this new "<Insert nation here> super ship killer" TM has been in development for the past 20 years, likely longer, with no one cutting steel on even a test model. That the only proof of existence was a concept model dummied up for a show back int he 90's.

edited 3rd Jun '17 8:41:59 PM by TuefelHundenIV

Followed by several articles by War is Boring stating that carriers are a dead end.

Ain't even gonna pick off how the Bering strait ice bridges have been getting smaller and the period where the sea is frozen has been getting shorter.

I feel like the biggest reason that carriers will remain relevant is that the destruction of one of our carriers would be a massive escalation on the part of whoever did it. By that point I'm not really sure if anyone will care about a carrier group the next day.

So today is the 75th anniversary of the start of the Battle of Miday.

Never underestimate the impact that a bunch of sun-starved geeks working in a basement can have on the course of history. Key to the American victory were the efforts of a group of signals intelligence and cryptographic specialists who had partially cracked Japan's radio codes, and baited them by instructing Midway (via undersea telegraph wire) to send out a radio message indicating their water desalination plant had crapped out.

Once they picked up the Japanese radio signals relaying this (false) information, they were able to verify that Midway was the target of an impending attack the Japanese had been referring to by codeword.

Caught Michiel de Ruyter on Netflix today (under the title "The Admiral"). Kind of cheesy, actually more about Dutch politics than naval combat, but a good movie.

China developing submerged arsenal ship. How the hell do they find the money for all this? Our government can barely afford to do anything.

China attempting to leap beyond current US technology with first electric drive on a military submarine

They print the money, how else is the renmibi so devalued compared to the dollar or Euro?

A submerged arsenal ship, so some kind of missile submarine?

However will we ever catch up to them on this capability?

Wanna bet this won't ever leave the drawing board? Or if it ever does it won't be able to a fraction of what was proposed because you certainly can't have a high speed hydroplane, large hull and submersible capabilities at the same time without compromising each other? And even if you maned it would be so expensive they wouldn't be able to get more than one?

It isn't like the Ohio-class doesn't have versions filled with 154 cruise missiles or anything like that.

edited 5th Jun '17 8:13:53 AM by AngelusNox

Oh no, China trying (and from the sounds of it, failing) to produce decades old technology.

Whatever will we do?

No. It would be able to handle itself well on the surface, one version is even equipped with defensive weaponry. It's more of a technique to reduce radar cross section, and a very clever one at that.

Admittedly, it's hard to imagine a more effective way to camouflage a warship from radar than to hide it below the terrain.

Is it going to wind up parked in the middle of Tiananmen Square?

No its going to end up parked on the bottom, with no capibility to raise.

They cant even build a ferry that stays afloat for more then an hour, or copy the shinkansen which is known for its reliability, and not have it crash so bad within a week they have to burry it with a bulldozer and pretend it didnt happen.

Or then there is the exploding computer chairs that kill the occupier, or more ludicrously the exploding manhole covers.

There engineering track record fills me with doubts they could homegrow an ohio class, let alone that monstrocity.