Comment by dm2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dm2 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

A CIWS will kick in at about 3 miles and has a 100% kill radius of over 1 mile. This will increase when the system has been upgrade to use lasers (soon).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close-in_weapon_system

The CIWS is only used if the SeaSparrow missiles (which have a 40+ mile range) and RAMs do not hit their target.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESSM

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIM-116_Rolling_Airframe_Missil...

Those would only be used if the jamming equipment/planes failed.

Don't forget that carriers always have several ships traveling with them with even more anti-missile firepower.

It would literally take a nuclear missile, severe incompetence, or numerous malfunctions on multiple well-tested systems to hit an aircraft carrier with a missile. Plus balls, the US will come after you hard if you mess with one of it's carriers.

But yeah, shooting a missile with multiple nuclear warheads is about the only thing that can be done to take out a carrier, and that's a pretty awesome claim.

Oh, I guess a railgun would work too, those would be the real carrier killers. The US DoD should definitely assign some extra IT security personnel to the contractors working on railguns.

Just wondering, why do you think the U.S. military seems so paranoid about China's research into this? Everything I know about carrier killer missiles comes from mainstream media coverage in response to various U.S. generals sounding the alarm about China's progress in this technology, and its potential to end the U.S.'s dominance of the Pacific. Is it just budgetary saber-rattling?

Also, what happens if China fires, say, a few dozen of those missiles at once at a carrier group? After all, those missiles are a hell of a lot cheaper than a carrier.

This is just something I picked up and reasoned out, but you will probably want to verify this for yourself.

America fields the world's largest number of carrier task force in the world. The other Western countries have maybe one each. Apparently, it required not only technical skills, but also a certain culture and discipline of the crew manning the carriers. As such, the Soviets were unable field effective carrier task force and ended up building a submarine fleet instead.

With the Soviets gone, that left the US Navy as the undisputed power on the high seas, at least, if you are going by numbers of carrier task force. It's the primary offensive power of the US Navy.

... and if there is technology that renders it obsolete, it would be a major concern.

Note, in my original post, I was not talking just about carriers. I was talking about entire carrier task forces, where escort ships (like the cruisers fielding Aegis) are centered around the single carrier.

CIWS can't intercept a ballistic missile on a downward trajectory. It might work against a subsonic cruise missile in the Harpoon/Exocet class, but isn't expected to be effective against DF-21.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com