Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login
VA-111 Shkval (wikipedia.org)
12 points by wanderingmarker on March 8, 2014 | hide | past | favorite | 5 comments



In honor of military hardware week on HN — some naval technology instead of aviation, though.

I'm pretty sure a motivated non-state actor can arrange to buy a few of these. A surface ship is a sitting duck against something so fast.


How much more so a sitting duck compared to slower but still rather fast torpedoes?

Especially depending on the quality of the newer terminal guidance, per the article, the initial version used inertial guidance and a nuclear warhead. Also, is the newer guidance and fuzing system able to do a under the ship keel attack?

As for "siting duck", our naval ships can be outfitted with Nixie decoys: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AN/SLQ-25_Nixie Don't think, well, any of these weapons have been put to the test outside of techno-thrillers; the history of early WWII torpedoes prompts a bit of skepticism.


Well, the Japanese WWII torpedoes should prompt a lot of fear. They were the best Naval torpedo of any world power during the entirety of WWII, and were part of the reason for the massive damage at Pearl Harbor; U.S. Naval officers assumed torpedoes couldn't operate in a harbor that shallow, but the Japanese had developed a way around it.

Likewise once the Americans fixed their own multiple torpedo flaws by summer 1943, American submarines became very deadly in the Pacific.

However your questions regarding the VA-111 are valid. The flow noise generated from moving so fast (and with a gas bubble to boot) means that the VA-111 should not be able to hear the target to move in on it. This would require guidance from the launching platform's sonar, but I don't know of any guidance wire that would survive that trip.

Instead the torpedo seems to require a very good firing solution before the shot is made, to allow the INS to bring the torpedo to the target before they can evade. Even then you'll likely miss, which seems to be why the nuclear warhead option was chosen.

With modern non-nuclear versions it would seem that terminal guidance would require a separate (much slower) phase of operations, which might very well be susceptible to acoustic countermeasures.

Additionally it was created as an ASW weapon, not ASUW, so the warhead capacity seems to be too small for a high probability of kill against a surface ship, unless they can indeed detonate it right under a keel. On the other hand it would be easier to get a good target solution for a surface warship since it's a 2-D geometry instead of 3-D.


I'd imagine a torpedo on its own does you very little good without the targeting & launching systems.





Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: