Friday, April 22, 2022

For The Slow Learners

 

If this is what you see every morning in your bathroom mirror,
this post is for you. Anyone else, go ahead on with
whatever you were doing.














Literally out of sheer pity, and so as to not be seen kicking retarded kids, is today's tutorial on maritime search.

We bring this up because of the globally stupid (and largely anonymous) commentary regarding recockulous assertions that the US was fingering Russia's Moskva cruiser for the Ukrainians, who then shot gaping holes in it with a couple of their Neptune AS missiles, which would be their second or third time being used ever operationally, AFAIK.

For those with military, engineering, or DoD expertise, who already realize how unlikely and improbable that scenario sounds, my sincere condolences. I feel your pain.

So, by the numbers:

I. The Pigeon








Russian Federation Cruiser Moskva. Originally the lead ship and namesake of the Soviet Slava class of cruisers. Launched in 1979, 611 ft long, about 10,000 tons, with a top speed of 32 knots. Recommissioned as the Moskva (121) under the re-organized Russian Federation in 2000, after sitting idle at dockside for 10 years, and the flagship of their Black Sea Fleet. Originally designed as something to go after Americanski aircraft carriers, it's armed with air, surface, and subsurface search and attack capabilities, which included 6 Russian CIWS anti-missile gatling gun-style defensive systems, and manned by about 475 officers and crew.

II. The (likely) Hunter


The Ukrainian-developed R-360 Neptune missile is a rocket-assisted subsonic anti-ship cruise missile, derived from the Soviet-era Kh-35 (which was nicknamed the "Harpoonski", being a pretty close copy of the USN Harpoon, in size, weight, configuration, etc.). 

The Uke design added a rocket booster to get increased range, in this case, out to about 190 miles, but the basic missile still hums along at about 30' above the waves. At a programmed point, the active radar-seeker head turns on, locking onto the target at about 20 miles range (at the horizon), whereupon it drops to about 12' over the water, and bores straight in until it hits the target with a 300# penetrating high-explosive fragmentation warhead. (The American Harpoon pops up, and does a terminal dive down into the ship it hits, by contrast.) It's only designed to kill ships up to 5,000 tons, (about half of Moskva's size), which would explain why two of them would have been fired, to ensure sufficient damage for sinking the target.

The Ukes first deployed it only in March of 2021, and it's designed to be fired from heavy truck launchers from up to 15 miles inshore, and out to 175 miles out to sea.

III. The Unlikely Bird Dog (?)










As introduced yesterday, the P-8 Poseidon, USN's land-based ASW/maritime patrol plane, since 2020.

Based on Boeing 1994 upgrade of their 1969 design 737 jetliner, flies to a service ceiling of 41,000', with a working range of about 1300 miles.

It took off from Italy, proceeded to the Romanian Black Sea coast, and could be presumed to be doing long slow racetracks of that 100 miles length, safely within NATO airspace, observing the Show to the east and northeast.

It can spot a sub periscope with its surface search radar at 29 miles, and see targets the size of a full container cargo ship (radar cross section of 10,000² meters), or the supercarrier USS Nimitz, at 220 miles. The Moskva, with an RCS about 1/3rd that size, would have to be commensurately much closer in to be identifiable, probably something more like 65 miles, under best conditions (i.e. search a/c at max altitude, and Moskva broadside). Degrade either or both those conditions, and the detection and tracking range to the target gets shorter still.

If radar abilities were a simple line graph (and they're not) the graph for the P-8's abilities would look like this:











But they're not, and that line is a curve. not a flat plot, meaning it's even worse than that, even with the new high-speed low-drag whizbang radars now deployed by Poseidons.











The actual plot of that curve, i.e. how deep the fall-off is and what ranges, I leave to practical physicists: Raytheon is looking for you.

If you can and do name the actual plot for the Poseidon's AN/APY-10 radar, the FBI, DIA, and CIA would like to have a chat with you.

The other problem is those ranges are based on max altitude; the lower the flight, the worse the capabilities of the radar to see anything. And the P-8 operates anywhere from 1000' to 41,000', and everywhere in between. Lacking a MAD boom, it doesn't need to get down in the surf spray like the P-3 Orion did, but at some point, like certain weapons or sonobouy deployments, lower than 41K' is going to be their go-to choice.

Which degrades the radar's visibility. Which also pushes the detection zone on the earlier graph down as well.











Flying a racetrack surveillance pattern from well back inside Romanian airspace, so as not to be misidentifed by either side as a hostile aircraft adjoining an active war zone, the Poseidon's radar acquisition and tracking range would be further degraded, and spotting Moskva would have been iffy in the best case, and simply beyond its capabilities for much of that track.












Open sources pinpointed her (him to Russian ship conventions) on satellite imagery after the explosion, at 45°10'43.49" N, 30°55'30.54" E.

That location is miles away from where the WSJ reported the ship was when it exploded.

And the WSJ report also fits the suggested operating area available to anyone on the internet after April 7th, at the same prior source. (Which would rather obviously include the entire Ukrainian military and intelligence establishments.)

This information is provided so that people who read one sales brochure and stay at a Holiday Inn Express once, and then think that a P-8 can detect troops in the open and sub periscopes at 250 mile ranges, can helpfully pop their heads out of their asses, and unfuck themselves. Surface search radar doesn't work like that.

This is the difference between IRL, and your XBox and PlayStation games.

To date, Russia maintains that the Moskva had an unexplained fire and explosion in a ship's magazine space, and sank while being towed back to port in a storm, which all worldwide weather reports have failed to identify as ever existing. (Two Neptune AS missiles up your ass will bring about a similar result, btw.)

And the Neptunes could have been aimed out to sea "to whom it may concern", or using drones to relay targeting information, or even just nothing more timely than that Naval News open-source report, and simply locked onto the biggest target out there, sailing around fat, dumb, and happy, and totally oblivious that they were meat on the table.

Apparently, the chaff decoy launchers and 6 CIWS mounts on Moskva performed just about as well in actual combat as any other component of the Russian forces have done since this war began. Sux to be Vlad. Or worse yet, one of his military minions. "Russian Warship, go f**k yourself!" turned out to be rather prophetic, in the event.

Thus obviating any need for the US Navy to see things beyond its ability, explaining why they had no explanation for a sea-skimming missile attack, or what happened to make Moskva explode, and therefore absolving the entire US chain-of-command from the command-and-control and liaison nightmares inherent in trying to get real-time maritime surveillance intel captured, verified, downlinked, translated, and funneled to the guy in the truck pushing the red button on those missiles, which task is one helluva lot harder than it sounds. Ask anyone who's ever done anything in the actual .Mil that's even 1/10th that complicated, or anyone who's ever worked with the government at pretty much any operational level.

16 comments:

  1. All modern war is a mix of kinetic actions and propaganda. This one is no different. We will likely never know for certain what really happened. Maybe the ship self destructed due to shitty design, bad luck or gross incompetence...or a mix of those. Maybe the Ukrainians got lucky and actually hit the ship. Maybe that Neptune plane was involved, maybe it wasn't. NOBODY in a position to know for sure is likely to say what happened, at least not while hostilities are still involved.

    Some truths regarding this however is that IF Putin is willing to pay the price in terms of men and equipment Russia will win. The Ukrainian have fared far better than most expected. They can't win but they are exacting a price. NATO is involved. To what level we will never know. This insanity could easily lead to a TRUE WWIII and that would almost certainly lead to use of nuclear weapons eventually. And the criminal left in power here WANT a war, they NEED war. So war is almost certainly what we will get.

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  2. I only disagree about the Russia "winning" part, unless you define that low enough to include ruling over literal scorched earth and skeletons from the Dnieper to the Slovak border.
    And only if Vlad is willing to completely destroy his entire military, to the last man, to get there.

    I think long before that, Putin gets pancakes and Makarov slugs for breakfast.

    But the idea of His Fraudulence trying to manage information in his addled brains under nuclear standoff conditions is enough to turn black people white.
    Anyone with a back yard should be digging right now.

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  3. Saw elsewhere that the Moskva was built in Ukraine, back when Ukraine was part of Russia. Meaning the Ukes had a set of the build plans and, probably, some people who actually spun the wrenches to make those plans into something that floats and moves.

    I don't know what level of targeting precision the Ukrainian Neptune missile might have, but if it's programmable as to what part of the ship it hits having detailed knowledge of what stuff is behind which bulkhead has value. In any case, a couple 300 lb explosive charges going off between frames 20-30 feet inside and 10-12 feet above the waterline isn't going to improve the ship's operational efficiency.


    Elrod

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  4. Russia is winning. If you define winning as completely retreating back across their borders from Kiev, Sumy, and Chernihiv. They have just announced the liberation of Mariopul; well mostly except for the several thousand Ukrainian troops and civilians still holed up in the Azovstal metals plant.

    The Russians have begun the offensive to fully liberate the Luhansk and Donetsk Oblasts /Provinces. The Russians will liberate the Russian speaking Ukrainian towns and villages and farms by bombing, shelling, shooting and generally destroying them.

    The DNR and LNR rebel armies are drafting every Russian speaking Ukrainian male citizen in Donetsk and Luhansk they can get their hands on so they can replace the rebel soldiers they have lost fighting the Ukrainians since their insurrection went hot in February. The Ukrainians are finding Syrian and Libyan soldiers amongst the Russian unit casualties. IOW, Russia is putting individual Syrian and Libyan replacements for Russian soldiers in Russian units, and damn the language and cultural issues.

    https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-april-21

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  5. As someone who worked on and operated a radar system in my long ago former life, I can't speak to the capabilities of the newest radars. (As Aesop said, if I could, I'd have several alphabet agencies giving me a serious prostate exam...and not in a good way.)

    The system I worked on was built in the late 50's or very early 60's. It still ran mostly on vacuum tubes, not transistors and computer chips. It was a tracking radar vs a search radar, with a degree and a half beam width. With known longitude and latitude of a specific target, it still had a CEP of about ten feet at 200 miles from the radar. (This was an analog system) The radar site would get the altitude of the bomb run and the ordinance being dropped, ie. mark 84 low drag, 750#, and using ballistic tables, plot the bomb run on the plotting board, which was hooked into the radar. They would also know the true air speed of the plane, ie. 450 knots, and whether there were tail winds, cross winds of head winds, what the ambient air temperature was to lay out the flight path required to drop the ordinance on target.

    The track is already laid out on the board. When the A/C is acquired by the radar at it's IP, ( Initial Point), the radar tracks it and the radar site communicator directs the A/C to keep it on track, speed up or slow down and to raise or lower elevation.

    That's it in a nutshell.

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  6. @ Elrod

    RADAR guided Anti Ship missiles are designed to bias toward the brightest return from the target, which tends to be toward the center or front of center of the superstructure.

    As a general rule you don't expect a complete K-Kill from a couple of ASM strikes (although sometimes you get lucky).

    But anywhere you hit a modern warship with an ASM is likely to get you at least a partial F-Kill (Firepower kill, i.e. they can't shoot anymore) or M-Kill (Mobility Kill, i.e. now a sitting duck)

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  7. I saw the post over at Western by Mr. Bracken, and I was surprised that he fell for it. He's usually much better informed on military matters than this, although I don't think naval affairs are his strong point.
    I did some manual writing for the P8 some years back, and while it is at least an order of magnitude more capable than the P3, it is not a magical weapon, as some people have asserted.

    Slightly off topic: am I the only one who thinks that WRSA has gone deep into the Putin as savior swamp? Granted, I don't care for some of Zelensky's fans, but some of Putin's cheering section have their own problems, such as Vox Day, Barnhardt, and a lot of the GAB crowd.

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  8. Wonder what the "cone of acquisition" is for the radar on those Ukrainian "Harpoonskis"?

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  9. This is not intended as a disagreement, but the figure cited that a sub's extended periscope can be detected by radar at 29 miles is conditional. This detection range is correct under ideal circumstances, and assumes that the periscope has not been modified to minimize the radar signature. Similar to stealth technology, and I'll leave it at that.

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  10. I think it far more likely that the DoD has a IMINT satellite over the Black Sea, saw the Moskva, and fed the Ukrainians its coordinates, speed, and general direction of travel.
    The Ukrainians fired a couple of their Harpoonskis into the area, and the missiles got lock on the Moskva and hit it.

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  11. Their damage control is probably just as bad as their propaganda and logistics.

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  12. Just a quick note regarding radar range equation: the signal emitted by the radar drops off as inverse square of the distance. And the reflected signal returns to the radar at an inverse square of the distance as well. So the radar receives a signal proportional to the inverse *fourth* power of the distance. When a radar's range is specified, it's unlikely to exceed that distance by much as the transmit power, antenna gain, receive sensitivity (limited by thermal noise) or some combination will have to improve to account for that fourth power. For instance, a 10% increase in range requires a 46.4% increase in performance to achieve it.

    Radar is simple. Successful radar design is hard. Yes, the AN/FPS-108 COBRA DANE could achieve a blip/scan ratio of 99% for a US quarter in orbit. But airborne radars still have their limits.

    Thank you for your coverage of this issue!

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  13. I am by no means a naval expert, however I have some experience with human nature. People in situations were they are doing repetitive tasks will fall into bad habits, whether it is ignoring safety practices, doing sloppy work or just saying piss on that, its to much trouble.

    From what we are seeing with the Russian army, the same lackadaisical attitude is probably there in the navy to some extent or the other. Under wartime conditions, the ship should be varying speed and heading on a random basis. Was the ship doing this or on a predictable set course and a constant speed. The Ukrainian forces probably have been observing this ship since 2014 or before that. It's likely they can predict position sufficient to put their Neptune missile within its seeker range well over the horizon.

    Other possibilities is observation by drone or surface ship. Whatever the situation was, it is well within the possibilities that one or both of the missiles did indeed strike the Moskova. What I am sure of is someone will have loose lips in the future and we will know or someone will write a book.

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  14. @Plague Monk,
    Yes, that's correct for periscope spotting.
    RE: WRSA
    CA is extremely even-handed. Or I wouldn't get any air-time there.
    As for Matt Bracken, as a former SEAL, maritime topics would presumably and generally be right in his wheelhouse. But not so much for the Daily Mail. Their P-8 fairytale is on the level of Peter Arnett claiming the US used nerve gas in Vietnam.

    @Johnathan H.,
    Agreed. Not everyone is as articulate as your bloghost.

    @T,
    There you go taking the easy obvious solution, and spoiling all the fun of wild recockulous speculation by a Brit tabloid rag.

    @Sentenza,
    Manifestly so. It's long been noted that Russia doesn't plan much for resilience nor survivability; their naval philosophy seems to be "with your shield, or on it".

    @Jim Horn,

    YW. I touched on the Inverse Square Law in yesterday's post, but was frankly too tired of the math and physics to bring it up again today. Which Law is why it takes something the size of Nimitz to show up at 200+ miles away.
    Moskva is the next thing to invisible long before 100 miles away.

    That doesn't even touch on radar-absorbing coatings, and F-117-like deflection angles on some newer ships.

    Both articles were aimed at folks who didn't know any better, and the second one at those who can't even grasp what they read in open-source intel very well.

    @Richard,

    Back in the day, there was a spiffy (for its time) Micropose sub sim game called Red Storm Rising, named after the Clancy novel, which put you in command of a 688-class attack sub, versus any part of the Soviet Fleet. One such canned scenario was vs. the entire Northern Banner Fleet, which you could win, if you could manage to remain undetected, let them pass by, then launch the full complement of VLS Tomahawk AS missiles OTH on the correct bearing, and bag the entire fleet.

    If you biffed it, you'd usually get hammered and sunk by the pissed off survivors.

    That's basically what Ukraine did, minus having the problem of being sunk.

    We'll probably come back to that a bit in the near future.

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  15. I am still surprised that the Moskva dIdn't go dark and become erratic and unpredictable. The small ships (supply and landing force) that the Moskva was "escorting" could have been doing the "shuffle dance" and if the Captain knew That the CIWS was ancient and hadn't been serviced since before Putin's last taxi run, I am surprised that the ship wasn't buttoned up. The ship's picture was on every Ukrainian outhouse door and even on one of their stamps. The crew might have been screw-ups, playing video games and humping one another, but a brief explanation of what a single anti-ship warhead would do should get some cooperation, Instead the explosion, fire and flooding seemed to spread throughout the ship. They weren't even trying. Modern war is brutal but they didn't even seem to be trying.

    That makes it difficult to guess what the Russian reality in the Ukraine really is. This invasion seems more like a suicide run a la Japan 1941.

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  16. Pretty uniforms and gear that looks good at military parades are no substitute for actual training and maintenance.
    Russia, the country that gave us the "Potemkin Village", has a long history of using military training and equipment budgets to pad the pockets of the Autocracy/Nomenklatura/Oligarchs. Then, the poor conscripts get crap all to fight with, and suffer for it.
    Here we are again.

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