> Carriers are very big, very slow moving targets that change their velocity very slowly.
Where did you get that idea from? Carriers are equipped with two nuclear engines to travel at outstanding speeds. Naval doctrine is to have Carriers simply outrun most of their threats while pew pew pewing them from the sky. (Ex: Submarines don't stand a chance against this tactic)
Carriers might be a big ship, but its a big AND fast ship. The biggest source of Navy deaths is people falling off the sides of Carriers, they're that fast.
> With a 1200mm f/8 lens you can detect an aircraft carrier from 300km away.
The horizon at 30m height is only 20km away. Anything beyond 20km is literally hidden by the curvature of the Earth.
To even see 300km away, you need to be 7000 meters in the air (aka: an aircraft). If you're 7000 meters high, you have the issue of surviving against the Aircraft Carrier's airwings (aka: F35 fighters) long enough to do anything useful. Air Superiority is a bitch.
If the lens is in space, you have the issue of predictability. US Navy likely knows that satellite is there, and will either disable it or avoid it entirely.
Speed is counterbalanced by size. Going at 35mph is very slow when you're 300m long.
You need to survive with an aircraft once to get a picture of the carrier. Then the carrier sinks. Air superiority is a numbers game. There is precisely 0% chance that you will catch it every time.
With your strategy you have to win every time. The missile only has to hit once for the entire CSG to sink.
You don't have to survive long enough to do anything except find the position of the carrier and send it. Once that's done, it's game over. Done. Finished.
> You don't have to survive long enough to do anything except find the position of the carrier and send it. Once that's done, it's game over. Done. Finished.
In 10 minutes, a carrier moving at 35 mph will have moved around 6 miles.
That's a 100+ sq. mile radius. How will your missile in fact, lock onto the carrier on the approach? How does the missile know where to go?
If your missile is traveling at Mach 5, what communication system are you using to track and talk with that missile? Is something in that communication chain still alive to constantly tell the missile where in fact, the carrier is? Or does the missile have such an advanced radar system that it can too, magically pick out a carrier in a 100-sq. mile radius?
As I said, a carrier is big. When you're making a guidance system, wether EO or Radar, you're trading off accuracy, senstivity, and range.
In the case of a carrier, you need very low accuracy - in the 10 meter range instead of the centimeter range - very low sensitivity, because the target is positively huge and sticks out like a sore thumb from its surroundings, so you can get range.
Besides, I think you really underestimate modern sensors. A fighter jet can detect a 1m^2 from 100km away almost omnidirectionally. That's around 10 000 sqkm, and that radar is built for very fast targets and requires very high accuracy.
As for communication, you can communicate from a ground station. You don't need to tell the missile where the carrier is constantly. As we've seen before, carriers are big and sensors are advanced. Carriers also can't change course very rapidly. You just need the missile to get a 50km radius of where the carrier will be when it hits it.
These missiles are very fast. From the order to launch until impact you have 12 minutes.
Ummmm... yeah they can. If we're talking about 10-minutes for a hypersonic missile to arrive, that thing's bearings / velocity can be completely different by the time the missile arrives on the horizon.
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I'm still not really convinced that you'd detect a carrier first in most open seas. Carriers would have airplanes of their own, scanning for enemies, and a number of anti-air destroyers ready to shoot down any spy plane. You call it a numbers game, but IMO, its a sensor game.
Any airplane who approaches the carrier has to themselves, survive the Carrier's defense systems (including the defensive spyplanes keeping watch over the carrier group)
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> In the case of a carrier, you need very low accuracy - in the 10 meter range instead of the centimeter range - very low sensitivity, because the target is positively huge and sticks out like a sore thumb from its surroundings, so you can get range.
I'm not sure if the carrier sticks out that much in its CSG. No carrier works alone: there are a lot of other ships floating around it providing support.
>Ummmm... yeah they can. If we're talking about 10-minutes for a hypersonic missile to arrive, that thing's bearings / velocity can be completely different by the time the missile arrives on the horizon.
Sure, at the expense of distance travelled from last detection.
> I'm still not really convinced that you'd detect a carrier first in most open seas. Carriers would have airplanes of their own, scanning for enemies, and a number of anti-air destroyers ready to shoot down any spy plane. You call it a numbers game, but IMO, its a sensor game.
> Any airplane who approaches the carrier has to themselves, survive the Carrier's defense systems (including the defensive spyplanes keeping watch over the carrier group)
Look at exemples of modern warfare. Air defences are made to whittle down and slow down repeated strikes by your oponents. No one has ever managed to completely prevent any intrusion at all, much less from a single carrier's airwing.
>I'm not sure if the carrier sticks out that much in its CSG. No carrier works alone: there are a lot of other ships floating around it providing support.
The surroundings in the context of that comment are the open ocean. Unless you mean that the sensors aren't going to be able to distinguish the carrier from other ships in the CSG.
> Look at exemples of modern warfare. Air defences are made to whittle down and slow down repeated strikes by your oponents. No one has ever managed to completely prevent any intrusion at all, much less from a single carrier's airwing.
Exactly. Now: Does China have the capability to launch these repeated aerial attacks to whittle down the defenses of a US Carrier Strike group?
And secondly: what ships in China's Navy can defend against such an assault (since our Navy is designed to do just what you described to our opponents).
Again, they don't need to whittle down the defences, the CSG is completely unable to stop a volley of Mach 5 missiles. They just need to find the CSG, once. No AD system has every managed anything near a 100% interception rate, even less against surveillance platforms.
There is no ship in the Chinese Navy that can defend against such an assault. But they don't need to, because they largely only care about their backyards. They don't need carriers.
Also the US Navy has no hypersonic anti-ship ballistic missiles. The USN was always very late compared to their oponents as far as AShM go.
What platform is carrying that hypothetical lens? How does it avoid being destroyed before detecting and tracking the target? How does it data link targeting targeting data back to offensive platforms? What is the visible horizon range at its operating altitude? How well does it see at night, or through clouds?
The lens is given as a general example you can easily apply the Rayleigh criterion to to verify. You can use many other types of sensors.
You could carry such a sensor on a satellite, a drone, or even the missile itself.
You need to get within 300km of the carrier once. It doesn't matter if it's the 15th try or if you don't survive either. You really overestimate air defences if you think an airwing can do that. And of course you can make even better sensors, we have the technology and it's been practically done.
The satellites are vulnerable and will likely be the first casualties in any major conflict. Neither side can afford to build enough long range drones with powerful sensors to blanket large areas of open ocean.
Sometimes adversaries will get lucky and have the right platform in the right place at the right time, but it's hardly a sure thing. In the end it will probably come down more to timing and luck than any other factors.
You don't need to cover large areas of the open ocean. Only where you have tracked the carrier to be. You are insane if you think that hiding a carrier is feasible in 2021. Even with cold war tech the US had tracked down most USSR submarines let alone carriers.
With a 1200mm f/8 lens you can detect an aircraft carrier from 300km away.