Bunch of kids
By the way, do you have any idea about how much a Barak 8 may be going for these days??
And why the heck are you sounding like a customer asking his drug dealer!?
What is the shortest possible time in which we can sink every PN navy vessel given that IN uses all its might.
I ask this because I want to know if there is an option to sink entire PN instead of doing balakot Drama next time.
If we do a preemptive strike then under 15-20min everything would be gone. If a retaliatory then few hours may be.
Ab khush na!?
I think a single MKI squadron could turn the entire PN surface fleet into diver attractions in just one sortie.
Achha achha, aur!?
Nah, Karachi should be a double penetration (Navy and Air Force).
Ahhh, getting naughty I see...Navy and Air-Force both
Bit much... You may be underestimating Chinese EW & AAMs.
Sensible guy but let me just draw a completely different tangent here.
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Traditionally a navy was the only option one had to counter an adversary's navy as everything else lacked the endurance of ships to voyage that far. Then came the era of air power (Blood's idea) and we saw dedicated aerial platforms to take on naval assets; Anti-Submarine Planes, Strike Fighters, Air Launched Ballistic Missile and things like that. And this is pretty much the current norm where an air-force would open the attack by acting as the shock troops followed by the navy sustaining it.
But there's a small niché exception to it; countries that share land border. Because now interestingly and rather embarassingly for the adversary, the Army too can engage the Navy.
Made this quick overlay
> BrahMos are fired from near Bhuj and Shaurya are fired from near Rajkot
> The range of BrahMos is considered to be just 600km instead of the theoretical maximum of 800km just to keep things fair
> Even if they detect the missiles at launch they'll have hardly 15min to react for the slower BrahMos; even less for ballistic Shaurya
> But realistically we all know how good they're at intercepting BrahMos
> There's no plane involved here, so there's nothing to trigger the early warning systems.
(Kisi aur din uda lio MKIs Blood, aaj Tatra waalon ka din hai)
> You can fire an exponentially large salvo of missiles by land based launchers compared to both ship based and air launched. So even intercepted, you've more missiles leaking through the net
> For land based launchers, it's almost impossible to detect the launchers before launch. Not so much for ships or planes. Video from Ukraine are a good example; HIMARS just casually emerging from an intersection, launching and then vanishing in the traffic.
This scenario is considering we do a preemptive strike and catch most of their fleet off guard chilling in the harbour. But in case of a retaliatory strike they would have anticipated it and would have moved. But then again this consideration was using two of the shortest ranged missiles we'll be having; there are multiple missiles with more range.
Also you don't need to destroy each and every ship in this first land based missile attack; just those that have good air defence like those Tughrils. Everything else can be taken care of by a second wave of planes (including P-8I hunting fanatically without the fear of any air-defence) who can engage the ships from well beyond the short engagement range of their SAMs.
Like the max a Zulfiqar class can engage with its FM90s is just 15km...heck even a JDAM-ER has 50km+ range. Just drop 4x 2000lbs and see the magic
Which missile in service or development is small enough to fit for quadpacking, assuming they would do it?
Only VL-SRSAM and that too would require a slight modification; the mid-body wings getting either shortened or even deleted. If you compare Astra to the newer gen of BVRAAM then you'd find that almost all have done with mid-body wings and now have just small fins to reduce drag while turning and more importantly, for fitting into the internally weapons bay of stealth fighters...AIM-120 to Meteor to PL-15 to AAM-4; all of them. But Astra was developed with R-77 as the only reference point so you still have few carryovers. You can definitely fold the wings of Astra (as already done on VLSRSAM) but you'll never get the packing efficiency. For example :
Barak 8 - only if we go for bigger VLS cells like the Mk-57 system of USN. (It may come as a surprise, but Barak 8s actually have smaller diameter than ESSM but since the former has fins, it'll
Well both have different roles with ESSM having almost half the range of Barak-8. It's the last layer of missile based AD (not every ship has RIM-116) so it needs to have bonkers level of thrust to counter missiles doing S-maneuvers and that too in as little time as possible.
But going for a quad-packed Barak-8 would be bit too much because then you'd be wasting valuable space when you won't be having those quad Barak-8s. The cell would be way larger than a BrahMos but won't be large enough to have quad-packed BrahMos.
This is what I have been saying as well. It is more practical to have two types of UVLS strike missiles AShM & AShBM... Other for smaller platform like various SAMs & BMD.
We'll be needing AShBM & BMD onboard our ships very soon. Have no doubt. Anti-sub Kamorta Class platform may be expanded to an Air-defence escort as well.
Yup, the best option is to have a single VLS dedicated to all the Air Defence Missiles and 4x erectable launcher in the mid-ship position with 4x missiles each that can be reconfigured for BrahMos/Nirbhay/BMD/AShBM based on the mission. By having erectable launcher in the mid-ship position you'll get the whole beam of the ship (10m on even the smaller corvettes) to play with.