Honorverse Sensor Capability

Still anoys me that Australia went with French submarines and didn't strike a deal to build diesels as a joint US/Oz operation.

The US might be behind on diesel tech, but the electronics are right up there, and the US is the people we are most likely to be teaming with if any shit happens.

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Annachie wrote:Still anoys me that Australia went with French submarines and didn't strike a deal to build diesels as a joint US/Oz operation.

The US might be behind on diesel tech, but the electronics are right up there, and the US is the people we are most likely to be teaming with if any shit happens.

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The French electronics are vying for the top spot as well so not really a downside, and very importantly, the French never black box their tech, and that´s a HUGE advantage, you wont ever sit there with a system not working and not have a clue how to fix it beyond ordering spare parts that might take a day or a year to aquire depending on current benevolence(or lack of it) of the US military industry towards your nation.


Also, unless i misrecall, USA was never even considered as an option for these new subs, which is good because USA and conventional subs does not mix very well.
They´re pretty much equally as bad at hunting them as they are at building them.


Essentially, right now the best you can get is either French or the Japanese Soryu that you also looked at, with the German option not far behind.

Once politicians here get their asses in motion and we get on with our own next generation we might take back the #1 position again, but the other high end conventional sub builders have evolved greatly in the last decade so that´s no longer assured.
(other builders have essentially quit being so lazy about it, hehe)


Still though, i think it would have been MUCH smarter to just straight off BUY subs from either France or Japan, because considering how much you managed to mess up the Collins, i can´t say i have the greatest confidence there.

Especially with how this new sub is going to include a bunch of tech Australia has never dealt with before. There´s basically an endless number of ways for your people to screw something up even if you manage to keep any incompetent people away from the project(and that´s not always so easy).

Also, trying to stretch the design and construction period as is being done, usually a BAD idea. Lets hope for the best eh?

Somtaaw wrote:..

I'm unsure if Hiroshima even had defense batteries, let alone if the bomber delivering the payload was flying higher than any defense guns could reach. If there were defenses, and the bomber delivering was out of range, that sort of actually helps my point that a ship up in orbit using airburst nukes has it far easier than trying to get physical contact with its target.

That's also excluding the relatively minor issue that in the days of the Hiroshima nuking, we kinda didn't have radar guided CWIS guns. Airburst flak guns that were pretty much aimed by eye were the air defense weapon of choice, and I'd pay good money to see you use one of those old WWII flak guns and pick off individual bombs on a reliable basis.

B-29s flew higher and faster than any fighter in the Japanese inventory, and their AA guns couldn't reach that high either. When Curtis Lemay realized this the AAF removed all of the defensive armament and the crew that manned them so they could fly further and carry more bombs.

Of course, then they did a complete 180 and started doing low-level bombing with incendiaries...

US was never considered because they don't make diesels.

The Collins wad a Swedish sub with US electronics shoved in it iirc, and built under licence.
Nearly every way you can fuck up a sub I think.

Essentially an SLN sub


A big, political, part of the process was the local ship building industry, which is why I think we should have gone out of the box and done a deal with the US.

Bah, topic drift.

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[quote="Louis R"]all those numbers depend on how good your beam-forming is.

1/r^2 is only exact for an isotropic radiator or one where the beam diverges as if coming from one. [for the layman, a spherically symmetric source assimilable to a point]

Diffraction guarantees 1/r^2 at most ranges, though the effective point source can be well to the rear of the source. You can cheat by having a converging beam out of the source, but that only works to some multiple of the radius of the source.

no, diffraction guarantees that divergence is never less than lambda/aperture. for sufficiently high-gain antennae, that number can be much less than the 4xpi^2 of an isotopic radiator.

admittedly, engineering such a system is, as they say, non-trivial.

phillies wrote:

Louis R wrote:all those numbers depend on how good your beam-forming is.

1/r^2 is only exact for an isotropic radiator or one where the beam diverges as if coming from one. [for the layman, a spherically symmetric source assimilable to a point]

Diffraction guarantees 1/r^2 at most ranges, though the effective point source can be well to the rear of the source. You can cheat by having a converging beam out of the source, but that only works to some multiple of the radius of the source.

pnakasone wrote:IIRC they have said the weak link is the person monitoring the sensors not the sensors themselves. How well trained, experienced,and/or alert are they?

Which is the reason that I thought the RMN got away with being invisible to the Peeps under low power and distance -- without a Foraker at tac.


Newbie Hour!

Just out of curiosity. Let's say a LAC or two stumbles onto a stealthed MAlign fleet of Lennys, Sharks etc., but the LACs are out of missiles. Can Apollo target off of their location? Could the LACs sacrifice themselves? Would they need to? Let's say the MAN fleet needs to be targeted immediately. Being stealthed they cannot be locked onto and LACs going in w/o missiles and w/o grasers would be suicide. It seems there'd be a way to "paint" targets.

cthia wrote:Which is the reason that I thought the RMN got away with being invisible to the Peeps under low power and distance -- without a Foraker at tac.


Newbie Hour!

Just out of curiosity. Let's say a LAC or two stumbles onto a stealthed MAlign fleet of Lennys, Sharks etc., but the LACs are out of missiles. Can Apollo target off of their location? Could the LACs sacrifice themselves? Would they need to? Let's say the MAN fleet needs to be targeted immediately. Being stealthed they cannot be locked onto and LACs going in w/o missiles and w/o grasers would be suicide. It seems there'd be a way to "paint" targets.

The LAC should be able to use their grav comms to squirt back general target possessions to the other system defense forces. But I'm less sure if they could handle terminal guidance for MDMs.
Even if the geometry works out the Doppler frequency shift necessary to talk to those missiles via lightspeed links is almost certainly far in excess of what a LAC is designed to handle (unless they are specifically speced to act as forward missile controller).

I've actually wondered if one way to make the missile transceivers smaller and cheaper is to handle virtually all the Doppler shift on the ship side of the control link - the ship adjusts it's outgoing frequencies so that after they Doppler in to the missile its still in the much smaller range the missile can handle; and of course on receive side the ship is tunable over a much wider spectrum so it can listen no mater how frequency shifted the data from the missiles is.


OTOH against ships with no wedges (like Lenny Dets, Sharks, Ghosts) your own wedge is an extremely powerful weapons. You'd have to be a bit careful on how you approached to keep the wedge interposed against energy fire, but just brushing a LAC's 40x40 km wedge against even something a big and well armored as a Lenny Det would be devastating to the target and have no real impact on the LAC... (A bubble sidewall could save you from a missile's wedge impact, but I'm pretty sure it couldn't protect against a LACs)

drinksmuchcoffee wrote:

Somtaaw wrote:..

I'm unsure if Hiroshima even had defense batteries, let alone if the bomber delivering the payload was flying higher than any defense guns could reach. If there were defenses, and the bomber delivering was out of range, that sort of actually helps my point that a ship up in orbit using airburst nukes has it far easier than trying to get physical contact with its target.

That's also excluding the relatively minor issue that in the days of the Hiroshima nuking, we kinda didn't have radar guided CWIS guns. Airburst flak guns that were pretty much aimed by eye were the air defense weapon of choice, and I'd pay good money to see you use one of those old WWII flak guns and pick off individual bombs on a reliable basis.

B-29s flew higher and faster than any fighter in the Japanese inventory, and their AA guns couldn't reach that high either. When Curtis Lemay realized this the AAF removed all of the defensive armament and the crew that manned them so they could fly further and carry more bombs.

Of course, then they did a complete 180 and started doing low-level bombing with incendiaries...

That is...imprecise.

The B29's altitude and speed made it difficult to intercept from a ground based scramble, but even the early Ki-44, Ki-46 and A6M had the speed and service ceiling to catch one. The Ki-84, Ki-100, J2M and N1K1-J/N1K2-J were all interceptors with the speed and service ceiling to catch the B29. However, these are all daytime aircraft. The Japanese night-fighter capability was never really developed, hence why the unarmed B29s carrying out low level raids operated at night.

As for AAA, most guns that could reach the B29 could pretty much only do so firing vertically. The "mass-produced" exception was the Type 3 120mm heavy AA gun, which accounted for about 10 B29s - fortunately it wasn't available in sufficient numbers (120 built) to be useful. Far more dangerous would have been the Type 5 150mm heavy AA gun which had an electronic fire control system. 2 of these were built, and they scored 2 kills. They were negated by flying around their position.

Annachie wrote:The Collins wad a Swedish sub with US electronics shoved in it iirc, and built under licence.

The moment the massive design changes started, i think it pretty much stopped being in any way "Swedish".

The fact that the Västergötland class subs were later refit and sold to Singapore(Archer class), where they are apparently doing perfectly fine, despite not actually being originally built for neither tropics nor the Pacific, something that supposedly was claimed as part of the reason for some of the Collins troubles, well...


Essentially, the design Kockums sold was 100% good, we KNOW that because the Archer class appears to be doing well and 2 other subs in the class that were refit with a AIP hull section(became Södermanland class) added are also doing fine right now with NONE of the problems the Collins ran into.

Also, the 1/3 hull parts actually made by Kockums, the parts/material for it was delivered late so the job had to be rushed like crazy, the job orders delivered failed to fully specify how they(Aussies) wanted the welding done(and design specs and blueprints were one very small step from being so subpar that they were useless(this was apparently caused by the redesign made to accommodate the larger sonar added to the project after finalising it, this also caused the stupidly poor acoustic hull signature (along with the post finalised design redesign of the propeller due to adding more engine power etc etc etc)), so the shipyard literally had to guess because requests for clarification did not result in anything but increasing the delay, so they defaulted to do it as on the Swedish origin sub, which ended up not being correct of course(but of course!), as the Collins post-final redesign had changed enough around that it needed to be done differently.


The Swedish origin design had none of the issues of the Collins, neither did either of the 2 refit classes the 4 subs later became, including the ones "fixed up" for Singapore.

The original Collins design PROBABLY also would not have had most of the problems it ended up with. But, after all the changes AFTER "finalising", the sub actually built was simply no longer the sub designed, and for example the people that forced the bow and prop redesigns refused to pay for the hydrodynamic retesting that would have instantly showed the problems caused...

All in all it´s pretty much a parody in how to NOT run a project. You might say it was Australias own version of the F-35.

A big, political, part of the process was the local ship building industry, which is why I think we should have gone out of the box and done a deal with the US.

Nah, you would almost certainly have ended up with a similar but worse end result, except paying 5 times more for it.
Kockums held some patents that you simply could not get from anywhere else at the time.

Which interestingly is another mess, due to how RAN got the props fixed in the USA, breaking the patent deals in a ridiculously blatant and even clumsy manner.

You would have been MUCH better off if you simply made sure no changes were made without ignoring how it affected overall design and actually controlled the project instead of letting every subcontractor pretty much play around as they wanted, or worse, like with Kockum and at least 2 other companies, not give proper blueprints/instructions/requirements, and simply give a SINGLE contractor all the work.

"Too many cooks spoil the soup" is pretty much the base cause of the vast majority of issues.
For example, the Australian shipyards did a decently fine job on the technical side, but the designers and contractors involved behaved like a herd of rabid cats even at best.

Don´t change designs AFTER they´re finalised!