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.