Posted on 07/15/2006 3:20:15 PM PDT by Jeff Head
Here are the first pictures I am aware of of the damaghed IDF Naval vessel, the Saar 5. Fron these pictures, it is clear that the ship was hit at an angle that would have allowed the CIWS to engage if it was active. I am now leaning towards the systems not being engaged at the time of attack.
IMHO, if true, as some reports have indicated today (buit that I did not want to believe), it would be a fatal and inexcusable mistake in the environment the vessel found itself in...defending other IDF gunboats against air attack during shore bombardment.
Please see the following FR thread for much more discussion and assessment:
Initial assessment of C-802 missile engagment against IDF Saar 5
yeah the engine(s) were damaged it had to be towed, the fire might have been in the back and came out that port
The latest mods of Phalanx can be optically guided to take surface contacts. The older models are strictly air defense. They will not even track surface contacts.
I think he also forgot that you can even program one to make a big loop out to sea and come back at the target from the seaward side, thus rendering the decoy useless.
"Israel does not have a naval history and thus are inexperienced."
Maybe some ex-USN can help them out.
They *would* track sea skimming missiles, though - and IIRC there's at least one case where someone left a Phalanx system on and it shredded a truck driving down a dock.
Do we know for sure that the ship sustained damage on the right side of the ship? I see no pictures of the left side of the ship? The soot we see around the blow-hole may be a result of fire inside?
"...Um, and how exactly do you propose to match the IR signature of a real ship, without building what is essentially a second ship?..."
I don't. If the decoy is close enough to the ship, it shouldn't matter for missiles fired at the waterline. In any case, it should be possible to build an emitter that replicates the signature of the main ship. Spread a dozen or so of these in the area, and it should confuse missiles.
Just had a mental image of somebody turning the Phalanx on during a swim call, and some poor schmuck diving off of the motor whaleboat...
some serious carpet bombing of the missile origin point might be helpful also
perhaps a few square miles?
Actually, I doubt that he ever knew that.
If one other poster is right the hole is a discharge port and the soot a belch. The fwd hole to me looks like typical underway Discharge. The aft one may be for the emergency generator and as such would not be discharging unless it was in actual use. I don't know enough about the ship except to guess. It generally takes looking at piping plans to say what is where. Speaking from experience on tracking down discharge ports on a ship I can say sometimes even that isn't a simple task either.
I was thinking the same thing. Thanks for the pic!
The Harpoon is particularly nasty. If it is headed for a target at 20 miles, and you are at 15 miles and try to jam it, it will remember you. If it can't find the ship at 20 miles, it will turn around, come back, and slam you in the #$%. Some missile engineer with a really sick sense of humor thought that one up. LOL.
You should think about removing the tinfoil cap.
How many of these does Iran have lining the Straits of Hormuz?
Somebody screwed up and forgot the skyhook in port.
Well, somehow I did 24 years in the Navy without hearing about that one, so I'm gonna raise the
flags on that one.
BUMP!
Thanks for the ping.
obviously, he knows nothing about anti-ship missiles.
Beyond the obvious that he missed, like terminal homing maneuvers, dog-legs, etc, he also obviously doesn't know that AS missiles are designed to NOT detonate at impact, but several seconds later, after they've penetrated the hull, and explode INSIDE the ship.
I remember one harpoon vs target shoot onboard the USS Harold E. Holt, we weren't the firing ship, just the observers, but the target ship had been gutted, and was basically just a steel shell. The harpoon went through the ship, about 10 ft above the waterline, and exploded about 100yds, on the OTHER SIDE.
All that precious decoy would have done, is ensure that the warhead would have exploded closer to the real target.
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