A brief analysis of missiles and countermeasures

[endwerk]

Out of curiosity I started to go through the logs of post 1960 engagements to try to make sense of what each part does, how effective things are and so forth. I did a bunch of fleet exercises to optimize my ship loadout and then tested it in a real war against a peer naval power.
The results were... surprising. And very concerning when it comes to the balance of it all.

I first looked at missile countermeasures because at first glance I saw very few CIWS entries in the logs and no Medium/Heavy AA and that got me wondering. Keep in mind that this is with mostly maxed technologies, so the results will be far different earlier on.

First, the regular countermeasures that every ship has access to. In my mixed loadout, they contributed to 34.21% of missile intercepts. After I reworked my designs, their contributing dropped to a mere 10.61%. France, my enemy in the war I tested my new designs in and who didn't use an optimized design, relied almost entirely on countermeasures, which made up 74.24% of their missile intercepts.
CIWS underperformed significantly. They contributed a meager 4.39% of missile intercepts despite every ship in the fleet having 4+ CIWS. For an investment of 20 points, that was an abysmal performance.
LSAM did better despite being present on only roughly 60% of my fleet tonnage. Despite only costing 11 points, they contributed to 13.16% of all missile intercepts. Though despite the technology for extending their protection to nearby ships, they never managed to intercept a missile heading for another ship. Either this was a freak string of unlucky results or the technology isn't working as it is intended to.
The runaway winner of missile intercepts was MSAM. They contributed 15.35% to intercepts on the host ship as well as an additional 32.89% to intercepts on nearby friendly ships. And that is just missile intercepts, not even accounting for their other uses.

Speaking of which: 
In a prior war, the end-of-war analysis of aircraft kills told me that exactly 0 had been killed by Light/Medium/Heavy AA, which made me question the use of those things in the age of jet aircraft. And so I did some testing on this as well, running a few fleet exercises where I sent full strikes of 4 large carriers against a small fleet of 8 Light Cruisers with my standard loadout at that time (1 of each SAM, 4 Light and Medium AA, 8 Heavy AA secondaries) to see how each one fares. 
And across multiple simulations, the result of which anti-aircraft system contributed what was always the same.
Light/Medium/Heavy AA did not score a single kill, while the distribution of SAM kills was as follows:
LSAM: 27.3%
MSAM: 40.3%
HSAM: 32.5%

Though it has to be mentioned that with a set of 2 tubes each, the LSAM performed better than the 27% suggests considering that it takes up significantly less points than the other alternatives, which makes it the king of shooting down aircrafts when adjusted for that.
In each test, I sent out strikes against the cruiser fleet until the strikes had lost most of their aircraft, which was after around 3 strikes. After that only a few scattered remnants of the air groups remained. After 3 of those exercises the conclusion was fairly obvious: 
Aircraft are completely pointless. I didn't sink a single ship despite using 4 large carriers against 8 cruisers who each costs about as much as a single aircraft group in maintenance. I didn't even get a result which was better than a lightly damaged cruiser. In one exercise, the aircraft scored zero hits while losing 78 of their number after just two strike missions. The highest damage result I managed to get was, again, light damage on one cruiser after landing a heavy bomb hit. 

This test convinced me that carriers are a complete waste of money and time. I tried to incorporate Light Carriers into my fleet to act as scouts, but the battle setup always puts the light carriers into their own carrier group and completely messes up my force structure, so they aren't really worth the hassle of suddenly having to do carrier battles in the middle of the pacific where ships runs out of fuel before even reaching the enemy fleet.

The last part of my analysis was on the offensive capabilities of the various missile systems. The result of that completely transformed the way I design my ships past a certain point.
In my tests, I put somewhere between 4 and 10 HSSM on my ships with one reload each. 
I honestly didn't bother to combine the data after my first test since the second only confirmed the findings, so the sample size might be somewhat small-ish yet suitably represents the lessons I learned from them.
23.9% of launched Missiles were HSSM, yet only 13.16% of hits scored came from those. The second test had 19.22% of missiles launched and only 8.73% of missiles hit. 
The overwhelming amount of missiles launched and missiles hit were from HSAM and MSAM batteries, firing 76.1% of missiles launched and scoring 86.8% of hits in the first test, and 80.78% of missiles fired and 91.3% of hits scored in the second test. 

It didn't really matter whether the target was a heavily armored BC or some lightly armored CLs, they all succumbed to the sheer number of missiles fired from SAM launchers.
Because unlike SSM, they are not limited to a single reload. Instead of being able to fire 8 missiles, they can fire more than 40 without increasing their number of reloads, or more than 70 if you do. And compared to SSM, HSAM and MSAM have a 360° firing arc which makes them perfect for the close ranges missile duals are usually fought at. 
Combined with their ability to reliably massacre aircraft and also intercept incoming missiles, MSAMs are the undeniable king of the late game naval engagements. They do everything and they do everything well. After I concluded my tests, I re-designed my cruisers and destroyers, kicked out all the carriers and prepared for another war to see the results on the battlefield. 
In the redesign, I focused on adding only a single set of HSSM for the initial, long-ish range salvo. All the other points were taking up with SAM of different sizes. No Light/Medium/Heavy AA at all. An assortment of 3-8" main guns depending on the ship to deal with leftovers without having to waste missiles. I will put the designs at the end of the post.

The results were fascinating, to be honest. Before the rework, I managed to intercept 75% of all incoming missiles. After the rework, that rate jumped to above 95%. Only accounting for the ones that would have hit the ship, of course. The engagements were completely one-sided. 

Another interesting thing that I noticed while going through the logs was what ultimately caused the enemy ships to sink:
15.38% from straight up structural damage caused by mostly Medium Missile hits.
5.13% from fires raging out of control. 
79.49% from progressive flooding.

While almost all ships hit by missiles were set on fire, good damage control usually got that back under control almost no matter how many hits impacted the ship. It doesn't look like additional fires started contribute to the ongoing fire, so it almost never spiraled out of control. Aluminium Superstructes also had almost no negative impact. I didn't do a full analysis on this, but from a brief glance through the logs of a handful of engagements I only saw the notification that a fire had gotten worse from the Aluminium Superstructure twice, with some of my log analysis batches having no such cases at all. 
The real killer is the flooding damage caused by the missiles, and this is mostly from the Medium Missile hits. Armor does absolutely nothing against that, even heavily armored Battlecruisers succumbed to this after only a handful of hits. 
Some lighter ships also sunk from just the structural damage caused by the impacts of the missiles and I was sufficiently surprised to see that happening more often than fires raging out of control. Going into the tests I was convinced that fires would be the main cause of ship loss since this has been mentioned a few times in this forum already, but it turned out to be dead last. 

I know from experience that in earlier carrier battles, fires caused by ASM contributed to a lot of the damage since the ships had a lot of time to slowly go up in flames. In the much more hectic and short range engagements of most fleet battles, however, ships simply succumb way before fires raging out of control ever become a factor. If you have a screen of 10 Destroyers in a good formation opening up on a single enemy vessel with 4 MSAM missiles each, enemy ships simply go down in a single turn.

Ultimately, SAMs are completely overpowered. They are too strong against aircraft. One could argue that they are good enough at intercepting incoming missiles - and considering the sheer volume of missiles fired, a 95% intercept rates still leaves a lot of burning and sinking wrecks. That SAMs are also the best at massacring enemy fleets is where this is going way too far. Up to 35 reloads on double launchers for a volume of 70 missiles per battery is simply too much. After the initial barrage has died down, this is what is annihilating the majority of the enemy fleet. Fire Salvo -> Pick a single enemy ship -> Select up to 10 of your ships -> Launch all -> Watch 40 missiles obliterate a ship -> Repeat with the next visible enemy on the next turn. 

As mentioned earlier, here are the designs I came up with after the initial batch of tests and oh boy did they perform better than I thought they would.

A Heavy Cruiser to anchor the fleet. 8" gun to mop up the remaining floating ships. Enough armor to safely sail through the burning wrecks of enemy destroyers and CL that may or may not have enough juice in them to fire back with their 3-6" guns. 

5 LSAMs in the Forward and Aft positions, simply because they are the only SAM system which has a firing arc. Not sure if that makes a difference for LSAMs since they don't have to aim at other ships, but it's not like I need those slots for anything else.
4 MSAM because it is just the best system, really.
2 HSAM mostly for good measure, both MSAM and HSAM fire the same medium missiles, so it's almost impossible to tell which scored more hits. But since their missile stocks aren't drained by missile intercepts, they act like a reserve stock of missiles.


A Light Cruiser, which makes up the bulk of the fleet in terms of tonnage. 

It has almost the identical loadout compared to the CA, just some smaller guns and one fewer LSAM tube. It's the main workhorse of my fleet, really.


And lastly my Destroyers, which follow the same design concept.

Since they are the most numerous ships in my fleets, they represent the weight of the initial HSSM salvo at longer ranges. These destroyers are what's swarming around the enemy and absolutely covering them with MSAM salvos, which is why I decided to put two of those launchers on the damn thing. 


I considered building a BC, but it is purely a vanity project. Sure, it can fit a bunch more HSSM but those don't really make up a whole lot of the missiles launched and an even smaller percentage of missile hits. Because HSAM and MSAM can only be mounted in centerline positions and SAM slots are limited in general, they can only fit a single additional launcher onto their hull compared to a CA, so their firepower isn't really much higher. The big gun is somewhat obsolete, the armor is useless against missiles and topside points don't really scale well with tonnage. So why invest into a BC when you can instead get 3 CA who contribute more to a fight and can soak up losses better. No matter the size, a missile in the right spot can sink a ship no matter whether it's a 50k ton BC or a 3800 ton DD. 


I am very curious to hear whether your experience matches mine.

[dia]

I don't have the data to back it, but my experiences fall in line closely to yours regarding missiles in general. I can't say the same for SAMs vs SSM, but in my limited experience having SAMs allows you to keep going after the enemy after all the SSM's are filed off. There does seem to be a small window in the late 50's/early 60s where you can overwhelm the enemy with aircraft, but other than that missiles seems to be king.

[t3rm1dor]

My experience is broadly similar, in that once SAM get anti ship capacities they become king, although I have mostly seen fire out of control from then. Gun ships surprisingly remain useful until this tech, bc they can mop up very effectively after the missile barrage. MAA R is also from experience useful in intercepting missiles, but there is no arguing that SAM systems are more versatile. Finally aircraft only work in concentrated strikes against isolated targets, and cost a ton; SAM and Cap are very effective in countering air attacks.Late game I would recommend minimal investment to retain CAP and recon capacities, but to not expect much from aircraft. I haven't tested helis + long range guns, radars do allow for some very long range hits which can cripple a ship.

[aeson]

Jun 16, 2023 13:53:52 GMT -6 endwerk said:

CIWS underperformed significantly. They contributed a meager 4.39% of missile intercepts despite every ship in the fleet having 4+ CIWS. For an investment of 20 points, that was an abysmal performance.

Assessing CIWS performance or value solely on the basis of percentage of total missiles intercepted is badly flawed. CIWS is essentially your ship's last line of defense against an incoming missile; any missile that it intercepts is almost certainly a missile that would otherwise have hit your ship. This is not something that can necessarily be said of any other anti-missile system; just looking at hard-kill systems, a missile that penetrates your MSAMs might still be intercepted by your LSAMs while a missile that gets past your LSAMs could still be stopped by your CIWS, so ten missiles intercepted by your MSAMs don't necessarily represent the same number of hits prevented as 10 missiles intercepted by your LSAMs or 10 missiles intercepted by your CIWS, and if you want to assess the "value" of each system you have to account for this somehow.

Say, for the sake of argument, that LSAMs have a 50% chance of stopping any missile that isn't intercepted by MSAMs while CIWS has a 50% chance of stopping any missile that isn't intercepted by LSAMs; if your MSAMs intercept 50 missiles, how many missile hits did they actually prevent? Well, according to the numbers used for this example, 75% of missiles not intercepted by MSAMs should be intercepted by LSAMs or CIWS, so even though your MSAMs intercepted 50 missiles they're in some sense only preventing 12 or 13 hits (with some caveats regarding defense saturation that we're ignoring because it makes everything easier). If your MSAMs intercept 50 missiles, preventing 12 or 13 hits, while your CIWS intercept 5 missiles, preventing 5 hits, which system is more "worth" the cost of having it?

Additionally, shorter-range defense systems do not have the opportunity to engage as many missiles as longer-range defenses do. Say CIWS can intercept 95% of missiles that reach it while other anti-missile systems have a 35% chance of stopping an incoming missile, but an incoming missile has to penetrate five layers of other defenses before it can be engaged by CIWS; less than 9% of incoming missiles would be engaged (and thus less than 9% of the total number intercepted would be accounted for) by CIWS, yet removing CIWS from your ships would increase the number of missile hits your ships receive by a factor of about 20 whereas removing every other anti-missile system would only increase the number of missiles hitting your ship by a factor of about 10. Is CIWS underperforming, or is it a highly-effective anti-missile system whose performance is being concealed by the shear number of less-effective defenses that an incoming missile has to penetrate before it can be engaged by CIWS? You cannot simply look at the raw percentage of total intercepts and go "well that isn't useful."

Beyond that, how many missiles penetrating your defenses is "too many" missiles penetrating your defenses? If CIWS is intercepting missiles, it's clearly doing something, and every missile that it intercepts might represent a ship that wasn't seriously damaged or sunk; if you include ripple effects (which I'd usually rather not since counterfactuals can be very difficult to assess, especially once you start making them dependent on other counterfactuals), it might represent several ships that weren't badly damaged or sunk, because damage and losses have ways of compounding into even more damage and losses, and especially against a peer opponent securing an early advantage can often determine the outcome of a battle or even the war.

(Also, I will reiterate: the numbers I am using here are for the sake of argument; they are not necessarily reflective of any numbers the game actually uses.)

[endwerk]

Jun 16, 2023 19:33:07 GMT -6 aeson said:

I appreciate the counterargument and in some sense I can see the validity of that. I am not sure whether I can agree on the conclusion though. 
A couple hours ago I did another analysis batch of a pretty large missile battle fought (1748 missiles fired) where I had no LAA/MAA/HAA of any kind, while my enemy sometimes overstocked on those (some designs of theirs had 13 CIWS for example). Out of the 520 missiles I managed to put on target (the rest missed entirely, a rate which seems to be consistently between 40 and 60 percent), they intercepted a fairly meager 45.38%. And yet despite the incredibly large number of missiles that made it through their other layers of defense, CIWS accounted for exactly zero successful intercepts. By far their biggest contributor to intercepts were the standard countermeasures. 
I am pretty sure that if I ran a test where I stripped all the other missile intercept tools and relied entirely on CIWS, the number would still be absolutely abysmal. Not just because of their raw missile intercept performance, but because they lack the versatility of the MSAM launchers. CIWS cannot shoot down aircraft and they cannot engage surface targets. Yet they still take up a similar amount of topside points. I think I will indeed run a test with MSAM vs. CIWS of equal points up to the stated soft cap of 6, I believe. I don't think I can strip the standard countermeasures from the ships, unfortunately, since those seem to trigger after the LSAM/MSAM but before the CIWS, which will likely skew the results again. Still, the overall numbers will probably tell the story, though I might have to use MSSM to make up for the sheer volume of output the MSAM can deliver. 


As for the fires burning out of control versus flooding:
I ran a few more tests and it seems to be a pretty simple split: Larger ships and especially carriers tend to go up in flame while everything the size of a cruiser and below tends to sink from flooding. Even when I knocked out a carrier with a 62 missile barrage in a single turn, it sunk because of the resulting conflagration while a BC who received the same treatment sunk through flooding. Almost all carriers destroyed in the recent war sank through fire instead of flooding. 

I found CAP to be unreliable and honestly not worth the effort. I recently had a large invasion battle against a carrier force of 4 60k+ ton carriers and 2 CVL of close to 16k tons each. They did not manage to land a single hit on my clump of 3 CA, 12 CL and about 20 DD while running out of aircrafts to send after about the second strike. Fielding own carriers, on the other hand, turns them into floating VP targets for the enemy since they tend to be unable to keep up with the rest of the fleet and get isolated naturally. 
The entire point of the HSAM/MSAM spam is strength in numbers, and being able to field a ridiculous number of ships on even a tight budget due to the low maintenance costs. The more MSAMs you have in your formation, the tighter the anti-missile screen that has to be penetrated first. In lower numbers, friendly MSAMs barely outweigh the MSAM of the targeted ship, while in high numbers it can sometimes contribute to around 80% of all intercepts. 


Edit
I concluded some tests and while the sample size is still not immense (4182 missiles fired), I think the results are more than conclusive. 

Under the assumption that this indeed layered like SAM-Decoys-CIWS intercepting incoming missiles in that order, the results were as follows:

For Team CIWS, the decoys intercepted 53.3% of incoming missiles, after which CIWS stopped 8% of the remaining missiles. The overall missile interception rate was a 57.01%
For Team MSAM, the MSAMs stopped 66.5% of incoming missiles, after which the decoys stopped 36% of the remaining missiles. The overall missile interception rate was a disappointing 78.66%

I blame the bad performance of Team MSAM on the fact that the AI is absolutely terrible at keeping their ships together and with the vast majority of MSAM intercepts coming from surrounding ships, their scattered and isolated ships were easy targets. 
For the battles themselves, I switched back and forth between each team to account for the AI mishandling the engagement and then combined each team's result from all the battles. 

Prior tests with me exclusively controlling the MSAM fleets resulted in a much more pleasing 92.45%, 95% and 93.75% interception rates with primarily MSAM and decoys. Though maybe the LSAMs of prior test are that missing piece to bring the design to an above >90% rate. 

Either way, accounting for the topside points required, 2 MSAM absolutely beat 5 CIWS in terms of missile interception rates. And that is the area of missile intercepts, which is the only thing CIWS has to offer compared to the offensive and AA capabilities of the SAM. 
I suspect that the full order in which incoming missiles are engaged is MSAM-LSAM-Decoys-CIWS, which would explain the low rate of Decoys appearing in the logs of my latest ship designs. 

As a fist line of defense, MSAM intercept somewhere between 58.22% (lowest I have seen when the AI was using my design) and 83.75% (highest I had when using that design myself) depending on how well you manage to group your ships together, and how large your fleet is. 
Next are LSAM and Decoys who filter out around 40-60% of the remaining missiles each. The low sample size due to them being only the second and third line of defense makes this somewhat hard to guess, though at least their performance is not reliant on other factors like fleet size and spread since each one only protects their own ship.
And lastly CIWS is probably around 10% of what is left. Perhaps 20% if we are being very charitable here. 


Oh, and I used the opportunity to check for the cause of the sinking again.
In all except 1 case, the ships sunk due to progressive flooding. There were 2 ships sinking due to structural damage, but that was just the main gun on the destroyers finishing off crippled ships before the flooding could get them. This is for DD and CL. 
CA between 16k and 20k tons had 14% structure damage, 16% fire raging out of control and the remaining ~70% from progressive flooding. I didn't get to check any sunk BCs since they simply disappeared from my playthrough in the later years. All carriers, however, sunk through fires raging out of control. 
In all the logs I analyzed, there were exactly 7 cases of "Aluminium superstructure worsens fire". Considering the sheer number of ships set on fire and sunk for the sake of science, I think using it to should be an absolute no-brainer. 

[generalvikus]

I don't think that this will be news to anybody here, but just in case anyone is not aware, SAMs of the era covered by the game's tech - up to 1970 - had generally much higher minimum engagement altitudes than the Sea Darts of the Falklands War. Hence, their net effect was to force enemy aircraft down to within range of the defender's guns. The Sea Darts used in the Falklands War, with their (theoretical) minimum engagement altitude of 30m, were (as far as I'm aware) superior to anything fielded up to 1970. The Goblet, introduced in 1969, had a minimum engagement altitude of 100m.

As far as I know, the universal approach to attacking warships in this period was the one demonstrated in the Falklands War - fly as low as possible and pop up only at the last second to release bombs (the Argentine pilots often pulled up too late and thus wasted a lot of bombs.) SAMs, as such, would not be expected to claim a very high rate of attrition against attacking aircraft. I assume that at some point in history, the lethality of SAMs at relatively low altitudes might have been inferior to the lethality of guns, and maybe at that time, bombing runs might have been started from higher altitudes; but I am sure there are people here who are much more knowledgeable on the subject than I. 

[generalvikus]

As for the relative effectiveness of various defences - of the Argentine aircraft losses in the Falklands War, two were apparently attributed to AAA, 14 to various SAMs excluding Stingers, and 21 to Harriers.

[wlbjork]

Did modern CWIS systems exist before 1970?

Up to that point, as far as I know, light and medium AA guns were still manually aimed, albeit with radar assistance. As a result, they should have abysmal performance against missiles etc.

[endwerk]

Jun 16, 2023 22:27:46 GMT -6 wlbjork said:

Did modern CWIS systems exist before 1970?

Up to that point, as far as I know, light and medium AA guns were still manually aimed, albeit with radar assistance. As a result, they should have abysmal performance against missiles etc.

I cannot speak for real world cases of medium AA guns being used against missiles, but in RTW3 they don't seem to engage incoming missiles at all. They did not show up even once in all the logs I analyzed and up until this point, this has been a couple dozen fleet exercises and two entire wars. 
The tooltip on this seems to be incorrect. Or late-game missiles are simply immune to those MAA guns, I didn't really test that in depth at an earlier stage. Though considering that the radar-guided version of the "late" game didn't shoot down a single jet aircraft either, they might simply not work at all. 
Similarly, LSAM offer no protection to nearby ships; that technology is a not working. It didn't pop up once during all those tests. I assume that it they accidentally swapped LSAM and MSAM in their code somewhere, or made that mistake in the technology description. 

In any case, I updated my second post with the CIWS performance from the recent test.

Ultimately, these are probably balance issues and bugs stemming from the the fact that the game was just released and those things are to be expected.

[dman1791]

Jun 16, 2023 22:41:18 GMT -6 endwerk said:

Jun 16, 2023 22:27:46 GMT -6 wlbjork said:

Did modern CWIS systems exist before 1970?

Up to that point, as far as I know, light and medium AA guns were still manually aimed, albeit with radar assistance. As a result, they should have abysmal performance against missiles etc.

I cannot speak for real world cases of medium AA guns being used against missiles, but in RTW3 they don't seem to engage incoming missiles at all. They did not show up even once in all the logs I analyzed and up until this point, this has been a couple dozen fleet exercises and two entire wars. 
The tooltip on this seems to be incorrect. Or late-game missiles are simply immune to those MAA guns, I didn't really test that in depth at an earlier stage. 
Similarly, LSAM offer no protection to nearby ships; that technology is a not working. It didn't pop up once during all those tests. I assume that it they accidentally swapped LSAM and MSAM in their code somewhere, or made that mistake in the technology description. 

In any case, I updated my second post with the CIWS performance from the recent test.

Ultimately, these are probably balance issues and bugs stemming from the the fact that the game was just released and those things are to be expected.

I have seen radar MAA engage missiles, though it was in the mid or late 1950s in my case, so pretty early missiles.

[endwerk]

Jun 16, 2023 22:42:42 GMT -6 dman1791 said:

Jun 16, 2023 22:41:18 GMT -6 endwerk said:

I cannot speak for real world cases of medium AA guns being used against missiles, but in RTW3 they don't seem to engage incoming missiles at all. They did not show up even once in all the logs I analyzed and up until this point, this has been a couple dozen fleet exercises and two entire wars. 
The tooltip on this seems to be incorrect. Or late-game missiles are simply immune to those MAA guns, I didn't really test that in depth at an earlier stage. 
Similarly, LSAM offer no protection to nearby ships; that technology is a not working. It didn't pop up once during all those tests. I assume that it they accidentally swapped LSAM and MSAM in their code somewhere, or made that mistake in the technology description. 

In any case, I updated my second post with the CIWS performance from the recent test.

Ultimately, these are probably balance issues and bugs stemming from the the fact that the game was just released and those things are to be expected.

I have seen radar MAA engage missiles, though it was in the mid or late 1950s in my case, so pretty early missiles.

That could be, I did pretty much all my tests from the mid 60s into the late 70s. 

[cwemyss]

There's precious little real world examples of shipboard defenses engaging a missile attack, and as far as i can recall none in the game time period. The Falklands (12 years after game envelope), the USS Stark (17 years) and Gulf War (21 years) are all I can think of, until the recent fireworks in the Black Sea. In only one of those was the attack stopped entirely, and that's the only cae I know of where one ship protected another (HMS Glasgow shooting down a ground-launched AShM bound for USS Missouri).

That said... my gut feel based on OP results is that SAMs are overpowered as an anti-surface weapon, and that their defensive results sound more like what you'd hope for with modern-era Aegis type systems and VLS launchers.

[srndacful]

LOL!  Good to know Aurora's 'sandpapering' is viable here, too.

[cwemyss]

I'm not sure what Aurora's sandpapering means...

In any case I built a quick and dirty 1970 scenario in Command: Modern Operations. Two forces, 500nm apart on courses 45 degrees off direct closure, an hour or so before dawn. On one side, eight guided missile Cruisers (Chicago, Truxtun, Bainbridge, and 5 Belknaps and Leahys) against 4 CVAs (Coral Sea and 3 Forrestals) with their air wings.

First impression #1: holy crap there's a lot of planes on 4 carriers in 1970!!! 40 A-6s, 96 A-4s and A-7s, 96 Phantoms and Crusaders, a whopping 22 E-2 Hawkeyes, and a host of RA-5Cs and EKA-3s.

First impression #2: damn, theres a lot of SAMs on the other side. 500+ Terrier, Tartar, and Talos.

Set all EMCON on both sides to "blaze away" and the cruisers to Weapons Free... kill enything that comes within 260nm. Set the doctrine choice for the cruisers to "Use SAMs in anti-surface mode". Then I took over the carriers and hit "go".

Set up CAP, AEW, and ELINT/Jamming patrols, then aunched 8 RA-5s on a WW2 style search pattern. Two of them hit pay dirt, picking up the cruisers emissions and immediately triangulating all 8 ships. And then one of them died, too close to a Talos.

Since I had a fix I launched 32 A-6s with support. 24 of them carryong a mix of iron bombs and Bullpups (LAShM in game terms?) and 8 of them B-models flying Iron Hand, with a mix of AGM-45 and AGM-78 Anti-Radiation Missiles (ARMs). They also had one EKA-3 for offensive jamming.

Things got weird.

First, the Chicago expended all it's ready Talos missiles to take out a pair of RA-5s, then entered a lengthy (though historically accurate) reload cycle, leaving the Terriers approximately 30nm range as the longest reach weapon on the SAG.

I went lazy on the strikes and did zero mission planning or tweaking of mission parameters. I also didn't use CMO's mission planner to get simultaneous strikes, which was a mistake. The result was a gaggle of A-6s cruising toward their initial points at 415 kts and 36000 feet... and those IPs were inside Terrier range. Commence SAM-Spam! Shockingly ineffective SAM Spam...

I played it through rhe initial round of ARM strikes, and none of the bomb or Bullpup A-6s had even begun an attack run, they were too busy dodging SAMs. Results after the first 10 minutes of action:

- Over 120 SAMs (approx 20-30% of the group's total loadout) fired at the recon element, the strike element, and the incoming ARMs, for a grand total of 2 RA-5Cs and 5 A-6s downed

- 32 ARMs fired at the cruisers... none even scratched by defensive fire. Not all the ARMs hit, but every cruiser is damaged to varying degrees, and three of them have fires on board.

And there's about 150 more strike aircraft waiting to launch once the range between forces closes a bit.

Notes for the next run-through.

1) Adjust Weapons Release Authorization for the Talos missiles, to slow down the spamming at the search planes.

2) Set up semi-intelligent EMCON for the cruisers, so they aren't just ARM-magnets.

3) Play with the strike planner and flight plans of the first strike, to be sure the Iron Hand jets go in first and make sure the strike planes aren't joyriding at high altitude inside SAM range.

4) Don't bother with the Bullpups (LAShM), just go with min-altitude iron bombs. The missiles limited range and typical release parameters make their employment suicidal against SAM-armed ships.

5) Put an appropriately ranged loadout on the A7s and A-4s so there's another 100 strike planes for the cruisers to deal with at the same time.

It was definitely a fun scenario to play through, if completely unrealistic. :-)

[generalvikus]

Jun 18, 2023 8:48:06 GMT -6 cwemyss said:

I'm not sure what Aurora's sandpapering means...

In any case I built a quick and dirty 1970 scenario in Command: Modern Operations. Two forces, 500nm apart on courses 45 degrees off direct closure, an hour or so before dawn. On one side, eight guided missile Cruisers (Chicago, Truxtun, Bainbridge, and 5 Belknaps and Leahys) against 4 CVAs (Coral Sea and 3 Forrestals) with their air wings.

First impression #1: holy crap there's a lot of planes on 4 carriers in 1970!!! 40 A-6s, 96 A-4s and A-7s, 96 Phantoms and Crusaders, a whopping 22 E-2 Hawkeyes, and a host of RA-5Cs and EKA-3s.

First impression #2: damn, theres a lot of SAMs on the other side. 500+ Terrier, Tartar, and Talos.

Set all EMCON on both sides to "blaze away" and the cruisers to Weapons Free... kill enything that comes within 260nm. Set the doctrine choice for the cruisers to "Use SAMs in anti-surface mode". Then I took over the carriers and hit "go".

Set up CAP, AEW, and ELINT/Jamming patrols, then aunched 8 RA-5s on a WW2 style search pattern. Two of them hit pay dirt, picking up the cruisers emissions and immediately triangulating all 8 ships. And then one of them died, too close to a Talos.

Since I had a fix I launched 32 A-6s with support. 24 of them carryong a mix of iron bombs and Bullpups (LAShM in game terms?) and 8 of them B-models flying Iron Hand, with a mix of AGM-45 and AGM-78 Anti-Radiation Missiles (ARMs). They also had one EKA-3 for offensive jamming.

Things got weird.

First, the Chicago expended all it's ready Talos missiles to take out a pair of RA-5s, then entered a lengthy (though historically accurate) reload cycle, leaving the Terriers approximately 30nm range as the longest reach weapon on the SAG.

I went lazy on the strikes and did zero mission planning or tweaking of mission parameters. I also didn't use CMO's mission planner to get simultaneous strikes, which was a mistake. The result was a gaggle of A-6s cruising toward their initial points at 415 kts and 36000 feet... and those IPs were inside Terrier range. Commence SAM-Spam! Shockingly ineffective SAM Spam...

I played it through rhe initial round of ARM strikes, and none of the bomb or Bullpup A-6s had even begun an attack run, they were too busy dodging SAMs. Results after the first 10 minutes of action:

- Over 120 SAMs (approx 20-30% of the group's total loadout) fired at the recon element, the strike element, and the incoming ARMs, for a grand total of 2 RA-5Cs and 5 A-6s downed

- 32 ARMs fired at the cruisers... none even scratched by defensive fire. Not all the ARMs hit, but every cruiser is damaged to varying degrees, and three of them have fires on board.

And there's about 150 more strike aircraft waiting to launch once the range between forces closes a bit.

Notes for the next run-through.

1) Adjust Weapons Release Authorization for the Talos missiles, to slow down the spamming at the search planes.

2) Set up semi-intelligent EMCON for the cruisers, so they aren't just ARM-magnets.

3) Play with the strike planner and flight plans of the first strike, to be sure the Iron Hand jets go in first and make sure the strike planes aren't joyriding at high altitude inside SAM range.

4) Don't bother with the Bullpups (LAShM), just go with min-altitude iron bombs. The missiles limited range and typical release parameters make their employment suicidal against SAM-armed ships.

5) Put an appropriately ranged loadout on the A7s and A-4s so there's another 100 strike planes for the cruisers to deal with at the same time.

It was definitely a fun scenario to play through, if completely unrealistic. :-)

I presume you know this already, but aircraft on strike missions won't conduct pop - up attacks, (as far as I know,) so strike missions against ships are very ineffective, no matter how you slice it. As far as I know, you have to manually micro your planes to get good results against ships - and turn off automatic evasion (more planes will survive.) Bullpups against ships was not a particularly smart idea. I don't know if it was ever doctrinal to use ARMs in the anti - surface role - perhaps someone here can enlighten us. Obviously it's not pointless, but then again, aircraft with bombs are pretty damn effective at killing ships, so the opportunity cost of loading a plane with ARMs which could otherwise be carrying bombs is pretty high; I don't think I'd ever see reason to do it.

Retarded bombs are by far the most effective munition for killing ships, since you don't even need to pop up - as such only the enemy's guns can engage you, and they're pretty damn ineffective against fast jets - which is probably accurate enough for this time period. If you don't have any retarded bombs, there's a good argument to be made for going for the lightest bombs you have available, because they have the lowest release altitude and they'll probably kill the ship anyway, but I haven't tested that systematically. Again, perhaps someone here can enlighten us on the historical doctrine. Either way, the A-6 can carry 22 Mk 82s out to 500 miles, and with a bomb load like that, you really don't need to worry too much about the specifics. Realistically, I think you can expect about one 'dead' ship (whatever that means in Command) for every two or three sorties in this era, but there's nothing wrong with overkill.