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Phanatic posted:When would those times be? Video games like ArmA 2 and other times that don't really happen.
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Dec 14, 2011 23:31
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Phanatic posted:When would those times be? Evacuating an embassy maybe?
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Dec 14, 2011 23:43
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One of the missions I've heard mentioned for the possible Canadian amphibious ships (either licensing the Mistral design or building our own) is disaster relief missions like in Haiti after the earthquake. I don't know if this is a real valid reason to build them, but it's a sell tactic to the public anyway.
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Dec 14, 2011 23:45
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priznat posted:One of the missions I've heard mentioned for the possible Canadian amphibious ships (either licensing the Mistral design or building our own) is disaster relief missions like in Haiti after the earthquake. And what do you do when that squadron of Haitian Su-30s come roaring over the horizon? Shoot them down with helicopters? 
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Dec 15, 2011 00:09
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Phanatic posted:When would those times be? Libya comes to mind depending on the number of sorties that are required. An LHx with escorts and an embarked air group isn't exactly lacking in fire power when you are talking a backwater country. Especially if we aren't expected to provide a poo poo ton of air support. Would we do this? Maybe, depends on the number an types of flare ups combined with CSG availability. It's not like we have a billion of those and it's only going to get worse in the coming years.
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Dec 15, 2011 00:27
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Yeah it's essentially we want an airplane on our mini-carrier. There really isn't any cost/benefit way to end up with a positive outcome unless you're using MCM (Marine Corp Math). Ok so I just made that up but it's true!
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Dec 15, 2011 00:31
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Totally TWISTED posted:Yeah it's essentially we want an airplane on our mini-carrier. There really isn't any cost/benefit way to end up with a positive outcome unless you're using MCM (Marine Corp Math). Haha, pretty much.
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Dec 15, 2011 00:49
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Tremblay posted:Libya comes to mind depending on the number of sorties that are required. An LHx with escorts and an embarked air group isn't exactly lacking in fire power when you are talking a backwater country. Especially if we aren't expected to provide a poo poo ton of air support. If all you're doing is beating up on a third-world nation with no capability to fight back, no navy to speak up, no credible air defense network, no submarines, and no air force worth a drat, you can park yourself right offshore and use helicopters. If you can't bring your LHAs and such close enough in to shore to do that because you'd be worried about it getting torpedoes or missiles shot at it, or if the guy's got enough of an air force to preclude your helicopters from being able to do anything, or if he's got enough SAMs that you'd want support against those, then no way are we sending an amphib group in by itself without a CVBG backing it up.
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Dec 15, 2011 01:54
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Tremblay posted:Libya comes to mind depending on the number of sorties that are required. An LHx with escorts and an embarked air group isn't exactly lacking in fire power when you are talking a backwater country. Especially if we aren't expected to provide a poo poo ton of air support. Not really. Libya is quite large, and harriers have smaller payloads and shorter ranges than other USN or USAF or NATO aircraft. There's a reason they flew a pile of ground-based aircraft across the Mediterranean rather than fooling around with a bunch of handicapped STOVL aircraft.
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Dec 15, 2011 02:01
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Handicapable, you insensitive clod 
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Dec 15, 2011 02:14
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Phanatic posted:So basically, what are you referring to? When you have a fixed wing, like with a harrier or the Osprey, you have to transition between two different sources of lift. You can do it, obviously, but doing that while the aircraft is in the sky is, well, tricky. If the pilot screws up, suddenly they are in something that a hundred feet off the ground with no lift. It's why the Harrier is(was?) the most dangerous aircraft in the western arsenal, having killed more of its own pilots then any other. But yeah, "when nether system is working" isn't quite right.
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Dec 15, 2011 02:21
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priznat posted:Handicapable, you insensitive clod Altitude impaired. Fake edit: They have bad attitudes 
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Dec 15, 2011 02:34
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Nebakenezzer posted:When you have a fixed wing, like with a harrier or the Osprey, you have to transition between two different sources of lift. You can do it, obviously, but doing that while the aircraft is in the sky is, well, tricky. If the pilot screws up, suddenly they are in something that a hundred feet off the ground with no lift. It's why the Harrier is(was?) the most dangerous aircraft in the western arsenal, having killed more of its own pilots then any other. "The pilot screws up and crashes the airplane" is something that can happen in any airframe, V/STOL or not, tilt-rotor or not, rotary or fixed-wing. A pilot can screw up in a helicopter, put the aircraft into vortex ring state, and be a hundred feet off the ground with no lift. A pilot can screw up in a conventional airplane, be 100 feet of the ground with no lift. There's no point in the Osprey envelope during any part of the transition where it has no lift; it's either got enough lift from the vertical aspect of the nacelles to stay in the air, or enough lift from airflow over the wing to stay in the air, which is why the pilot can make the transition as slow as he wants to take it. The Harrier is the most dangerous aircraft as you describe, but how many of those fatalities have been due to a screwed up transition from vertical to forward flight? A Harrier taking off in pure vertical mode is very rare, the airplane can do it but not really carry much in the way of payload, most takeoffs are rolling ones where you're getting lift from the wings, not just the vector of the nozzle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Harrier_Jump_Jet_family_losses That's just a partial list, but you'll see a lot of crashes in there that had nothing to do with it being V/STOL, the fact that it's V/STOL isn't necessarily why it's the most dangerous aircraft. A significant number went down during the Falklands war, which was basically an entire little war that a bunch of combat aircraft in the western arsenals didn't even see action in. Again, *none* of the Osprey crashes had anything to do with the transition from vertical-to-horizontal flight, so what has the Osprey showed us in that regard? Phanatic fucked around with this message at 03:38 on Dec 15, 2011 |
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Dec 15, 2011 03:31
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MetaFilter link-pile regarding the P-3 Orion and its upcoming retirement: http://www.metafilter.com/110509/The-Night-of-The-Hunter
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Dec 15, 2011 07:16
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Ygolonac posted:MetaFilter link-pile regarding the P-3 Orion and its upcoming retirement:
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Dec 15, 2011 07:34
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The F-35 is such a joke of an aircraft. It's trying to fill too many roles. CAS in a single-engined supersonic fighter? Really? There's a reason that the A-16 project was cancelled (mainly because the 30mm cannon they tried using tended to set the airframe on fire) I really really really wish the Canadian government would get it's head out of it's collective rear end and realize that this plane will be MORE expensive to buy now, than to buy new block F-18's, and then replace THOSE down the road with something more capable.
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Dec 15, 2011 08:01
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Phanatic posted:When would those times be? One of the first responders to evacuate US citizens during the Lebanon/Israeli war a couple years back was a Marine fleet. Incidentally I only remember this since its the last half of the Lebanon No Reservations episode with Bourdain.
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Dec 15, 2011 12:57
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Ygolonac posted:MetaFilter link-pile regarding the P-3 Orion and its upcoming retirement: That's sad. My dad was a pilot back in the 80s.
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Dec 15, 2011 13:25
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mlmp08 posted:Not really. Libya is quite large, and harriers have smaller payloads and shorter ranges than other USN or USAF or NATO aircraft. There's a reason they flew a pile of ground-based aircraft across the Mediterranean rather than fooling around with a bunch of handicapped STOVL aircraft. It depends on what you need to do is all I'm saying.
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Dec 15, 2011 15:17
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Tremblay posted:It depends on what you need to do is all I'm saying. Oh. Well in the event you need to do exactly what we did in Libya, they'd be a bad choice.
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Dec 15, 2011 15:25
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Party Plane Jones posted:One of the first responders to evacuate US citizens during the Lebanon/Israeli war a couple years back was a Marine fleet. And did they need fixed-wing VSTOL to do it?
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Dec 15, 2011 15:39
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Phanatic posted:And did they need fixed-wing VSTOL to do it? If the Syrian air force decided to interfere then yes we would have needed the harriers.
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Dec 15, 2011 15:57
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Flikken posted:If the Syrian air force decided to interfere then yes we would have needed the harriers. Is the Harrier a credible way to achieve air-superiority in this era? Will the VTOL F-35 be? Is it time to consider drones for CAP launchable of off small decks? Going back to the Iranian ground-effect flying circus, could this class of vehicle be the rebirth of the torpedo bomber? Do modern torpedoes have enough range to allow a reasonable chance of these getting close enough to launch? Would the be effective for strewing the Iranian version of CAPTORs across a fleet's projected path? Am I abusing the question mark as a form of punctuation?
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Dec 15, 2011 16:11
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Harriers are pretty piss-poor for air-to-air combat. IIRC, much of their success in the Falklands was due to training and the AIM-9L. edit: I'm pretty sure there was a Harrier pilot in here or ask/tell saying that about the only plane they could wax with any sort of regularity was the A-10 when they were swapping in and out of the gunnery range.
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Dec 15, 2011 16:25
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mlmp08 posted:Harriers are pretty piss-poor for air-to-air combat. IIRC, much of their success in the Falklands was due to training and the AIM-9L. They are still better than helicopters if there is no CSG nearby and they are only planning on sticking around long enough to evacuate people from a third world country.
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Dec 15, 2011 16:31
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That is true. I'm just not sure how often that really comes up.
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Dec 15, 2011 16:34
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Frozen Horse posted:Going back to the Iranian ground-effect flying circus, could this class of vehicle be the rebirth of the torpedo bomber? Do modern torpedoes have enough range to allow a reasonable chance of these getting close enough to launch? Would the be effective for strewing the Iranian version of CAPTORs across a fleet's projected path? Am I abusing the question mark as a form of punctuation?
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Dec 15, 2011 16:34
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Flikken posted:If the Syrian air force decided to interfere then yes we would have needed the harriers. If Syria decided to attack the group, they'd have needed more than the Harriers. So if we thought there was a chance of Syria attacking the force, we'd have sent a CVBG (or we'd have been dumb.) Flikken posted:They are still better than helicopters if there is no CSG nearby and they are only planning on sticking around long enough to evacuate people from a third world country. Syria has something like 40 MiG-29s. Unless the guys at the controls are complete muppets (which is possible), Harriers aren't doing much about that. Meanwhile the Osas are launching a bunch of SS-N-22s towards your LHA. Phanatic fucked around with this message at 16:38 on Dec 15, 2011 |
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Dec 15, 2011 16:35
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mlmp08 posted:That is true. I'm just not sure how often that really comes up. Take subsaharan Africa, not exactly the most stable region of the world, and we have nowhere nearby to fly landbased air for cover.
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Dec 15, 2011 16:43
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Subsaharan Africa remains a place that doesn't come up much when it comes to America wanting to get militarily involved to the point of using strike and fighter aircraft.
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Dec 15, 2011 16:45
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The F-35B may be six kinds of stupid but it does a lot of things better than old-rear end Supercobras. Those things are done far, far better by a cat-launched jet fighter, but again y'all are making a huge assumption that in 15-20 years we'll have the money to keep more than 3 or 4 CVBGs at sea. The F-35B also does a lot of things better than the jack diddly nothing the USMC would've gotten if they'd passed up their turn at the taxpayer feed trough. Our completely dysfunctional military procurement process breeds over-extended and over-budget monolithic omnipurpose systems like the (completely awesome) Seawolf, Raptor etc when a larger number of less expensive, more specific solutions might make more sense. It's like idiot parents who buy their son a pony for Christmas when he'd be happier with a bunch of little lego sets. My understanding is that a lot of the dangers of both the Harrier and conventional helos are mitigated in the F-35B via greater automation electronics. That may sound flippant but it's the same as between the deathtrap F-104 and the conceptually similar but reasonably safe F-16.
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Dec 15, 2011 16:58
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Crossposted from the news thread: What was old is new again:
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Dec 15, 2011 17:53
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Cyrano4747 posted:Crossposted from the news thread:
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Dec 15, 2011 18:43
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Floating aircraft carrier school, so the Chinese can train up carrier crews who will teach future crews, while exploring the pros and cons of carrier design so they can build there own, and already have competent crews. This one isn't scary but in a decade or two they will have a bunch of them. And back to the aircraft carrier and fighters vs amphibious assault ships with some harriers: if you're expecting a fight and you want to put a few marine battalions on a beach pronto, but whoever you're fighting has some kind of theater ballistic missiles, or shore to ship missiles, an AAS with helicopter ops or a few harriers is far more expendable then a flagship. Flight ops are secondary to vomiting marines onto your coastline, they are going to be close to shore. a little bit of organic air support makes the beachhead more survivable, but the AAS will be in harms way, no matter what, while landing craft disembark. The more fight they can bring along, with them, the better. In this scenario any limited precision sorties to attain air dominance can go down with real fighter/bombers via a carrier a safe distance via in air refueling, in the opening hours of conflict.
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Dec 15, 2011 19:21
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LavistaSays posted:
There is no, repeat zero, chance that we would attempt to put a few marine battalions on a beach in the face of a credible ASM threat without at least one CVBG in support. None. In a world in which 18 American KIA *in a successful mission* results in a withdrawal from the theater, that is simply not going to happen, and a 'phib with 1000 guys on board is in no way "expendable" in this political reality; the loss of as many troops in a single missile strike as were lost in years of combat in Iraq would an abject, unmitigated political disaster. Even at al Faw in 2003, where there was no ASM threat, there were about half a dozen frigates for NGFS, a Tico for air defense, and, oh yeah, the Constellation, with a bunch of Tomcats and Hornets.
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Dec 15, 2011 19:41
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LavistaSays posted:Floating aircraft carrier school, so the Chinese can train up carrier crews who will teach future crews, while exploring the pros and cons of carrier design so they can build there own, and already have competent crews. This one isn't scary but in a decade or two they will have a bunch of them. China dumping tens or hundreds of billions of dollars into pointless white elephants instead of more effective weapons systems isn't scary at all.
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Dec 15, 2011 19:42
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theclaw posted:China dumping tens or hundreds of billions of dollars into pointless white elephants instead of more effective weapons systems isn't scary at all.  
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Dec 15, 2011 19:46
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theclaw posted:China dumping tens or hundreds of billions of dollars into pointless white elephants instead of more effective weapons systems isn't scary at all. On the other hand, the American reaction (oh god, they're building up one old-rear end Soviet surplus carrier, we have to commission a new class of superdupercarriers at prices even grover might describe as "a bit excessive") is frightening as poo poo. Isn't this exactly the tactic that people love to praise Reagan for using against the USSR?
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Dec 15, 2011 19:47
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theclaw posted:China dumping tens or hundreds of billions of dollars into pointless white elephants instead of more effective weapons systems isn't scary at all. Well, it does indicate their desire for a blue-water navy. As has already been pointed out the training hurdle is a HUGE loving Thing, and the fact that they are addressing this with even a lovely carrier indicates which way they're thinking about the future. Even 3 or 4 of these things in 2020 wouldn't be a big deal, but 7 or 8 of them in 2030 would effectively mean that you would have an actual credible threat to the currently unopposed force-projection capabilities of the USN. The whole training issue is also why the Brits decommissioning their last carrier was taken so seriously by defense analysts. It essentially signaled their at least semi-permanent retirement from having any pretense of being able to project force on a global scale without aid from another power. Something like the Falklands, for example, simply wouldn't be possible for the Brits without US support now. It's also worth noting that China doesn't have to be able to take on the USN at sea in some kind of Pacific War 2.0 for their having carriers to be something that we need to take very seriously. Even having 3 or 4 relatively crappy carriers would give them very significant force-projection capabilities in areas that are laughably outside their sphere of influence right now. African politics could get pretty interesting, for example, if a "valued trading partner" of China was able to call on a non-US CVG in a time of deep crisis (civil war, revolution, etc). Not only that, but it also presents a way for them to get involved in discussions that they're currently not a part of. Things change a LOT when someone is able to put warships in an area. Imagine Libya, for example, if the Chinese had parked a single crappy carrier with a couple dozen aircraft on it plus a few escorts off the coast. At the very least they're now part of the discussion over whether NATO should be aiding the rebels or not, and there is always the possibility for them flat out saying that they don't want other people interfering with Gaddafi's civil war (or outright aiding the government forces). It just makes things a lot stickier, and requires a lot of high-level talks to make sure things don't move in directions that no one wants. In the case ofs omething like Libya, where the crisis is very quick moving and situations are changing day to day, that alone can be enough to tip the balance of power and lead to a different outcome. tl;dr - even having a couple really garbage grade carriers would make the Chinese government party to a lot of talks they're not involved in today, and would really end the US/NATO's ability to simply act unilaterally with regards to smaller nations.
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Dec 15, 2011 19:58
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MA-Horus posted:The F-35 is such a joke of an aircraft. It's trying to fill too many roles. CAS in a single-engined supersonic fighter? Really? quote:I really really really wish the Canadian government would get it's head out of it's collective rear end and realize that this plane will be MORE expensive to buy now, than to buy new block F-18's, and then replace THOSE down the road with something more capable. I can see it now, circa 2028: Air Force: "We should start preliminary planing to replace or at least compliment our fleet of CF188E/Fs in the coming years as we originally planned in 2011." Defense Minister de jour: "But we just ordered them 16 years ago! Everything else we've bought since the 60s has lasted us almost 30 years!"
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