CH-148 Cyclone Progress

[Baz]

46 is a LW torp. You’re not putting a Mk48 torp in a bird to drop.

48’s are shipkillers, while the 46’s are really just ASW.

The Canadian weapon stock is being upgraded to the Mk-54 standard, which is mostly a guidance package upgrade.

 

[KevinB]

The Cyclone contract has availability statements. The “power by the hour” concept has been hard to manage…

Honestly any developmental contract is going to be tough in that regard as without a full lifecycle test you just won’t know.
Which to me suggests Canada with a smaller force and lower budget shouldn’t be a sole developer, but reduce risk with partner nations on new platforms, or stick to buying allies fielded systems.

 

[KevinB]

The Canadian weapon stock is being upgraded to the Mk-54 standard, which is mostly a guidance package upgrade.

And LocMart appreciates your business

 

[OldSolduer]

Honestly any developmental contract is going to be tough in that regard as without a full lifecycle test you just won’t know.
Which to me suggests Canada with a smaller force and lower budget shouldn’t be a sole developer, but reduce risk with partner nations on new platforms, or stick to buying allies fielded systems.

Elbows up!!!!

There are a few Canadians who want nothing to do with the USA.
Oh we have a new bureaucratic entity to procure defence stuff! That’ll make it all better….

 

[SeaKingTacco]

100-ish pounds of HE, when exploded underwater, is enough to poke a hold in a sub.

If you read Tom Clancy's "Red Storm Rising" from way back when, there is mention in it of trying to aim for the stern of the submarines so that the explosion would pop the shaft seals and cause non-recoverable flooding. ****

I'll observe that just about any flooding caused by an explosion at depth in a submarine is likely to be non-recoverable flooding.



**** Tom Clancy is not necessarily an expert on Naval Tactics and weapons employment, but he made some really good guesses in his writing. I can neither confirm nor deny if this is actually a 'thing' in the tactical employment of ASW weapons.

While speaking in generalities only, given the subject matter, it is not really practical to pick which part of the submarine you are going to try to hit with a torpedo. Once you drop the weapon, it will do it’s thing, on it’s own.

 

[NavyShooter]

While speaking in generalities only, given the subject matter, it is not really practical to pick which part of the submarine you are going to try to hit with a torpedo. Once you drop the weapon, it will do it’s thing, on it’s own.

But....it makes good reading....LOL

 

[NavyShooter]

And....I had to go find it....

https://readerslibrary.org/wp-content/uploads/Red-Storm-Rising.pdf

Page 379

USS REUBEN JAMES
"Drop now-now-now!" O'Malley yelled. The eighth sonobuoy ejected from the side of the Seahawk, and the pilot brought the helicopter around and headed back east. O'Malley had already been up for three long, grueling hours this time, with precious little to show for it. Stop, dip, listen; stop, dip, listen. He knew there was a sub down there, but every time he thought he was beginning to get a line on it, the damn thing slipped away! What was it doing different?

Hatchet was having the same problem, except its sub had turned around on it and nearly scored a hit on Battleaxe. The frigate's violent wake turbulence had detonated the Russian torpedo astern, but it had been close, too close by half. He brought the helicopter into hover.

"Down dome!" They hovered for a minute. Nothing. It began again. "Romeo, this is Hammer. You got anything, over?"

"Hammer, he just faded out a moment ago. Our last bearing was three-fourone."

"Cute. This character's listening for you to stop your sprint, and he cuts his power back."

"That's a fair guess, Hammer," Morris said. "Okay, I got a barrier to the west if he heads that way. I think he's going due south, and we're dipping for him now. Out." O'Malley switched to intercom. "You got anything, Willy?"

"Nothing, sir."

"Prepare to raise dome." A minute later the helicopter was moving again. They dipped their sonar six more times in the next twenty minutes and came up blank.

"Again, Willy. Prepare to lower. Set it down to, uh, eight hundred feet this time."

"Ready, sir."

"Down dome." O'Malley squirmed in his seat. The outside temperature was moderate, but the sun made a greenhouse of the cockpit. He'd need a shower when he got back to the frigate.

"Searching at eight hundred feet, sir," the petty officer said. He was hot, too, though he'd brought a pair of cold drinks along for the flight. "Sir, I have something … possible contact bearing one-eight-five."

"Up dome! Romeo, Hammer, we got a possible contact south of us. Going after it now."

"Hammer, we have nothing anywhere near you. Be advised Bravo and Hatchet are working a contact. Two torps have been launched with no hits."

Nobody ever said it was easy, the pilot thought. He moved three thousand yards and dipped the sonar again.

"Contact, this one's for real. Type-two engine plant bearing one-eight-three."

O'Malley checked his fuel. Forty minutes. He had to get this one in a hurry. He ordered the dome up again and went another three thousand yards south. His shoulders flexed against the seat straps. It seemed to take forever for the sonar dome to get down to search depth.

"There it is again, sir, north of us, bearing zero-one-three. Bearing is changing. Zero-one-five now."

"Set it up!" Thirty minutes' fuel. Time was their enemy now. Ralston punched up the Master Arm and Select buttons.

"Willy: hammer!" The sonar sent out five ranging pings.

"Zero-one-nine, range nine hundred!"

Ralston set search depth and pattern. O'Malley brought his thumb across the stick and dropped the torpedo.

The submarine went to full power and turned left away from the helicopter while the torpedo plunged to eight hundred feet before beginning its search. O'Malley growled to himself that he'd launched from a bad angle, but it would have taken too long to reel in and reacquire. He held the aircraft in hover and listened over his headset as the whine of the torpedo screws chased after the deeper thrum of the Charlie's powerful twin screws. The nuclear sub maneuvered frantically, trying to turn inside the pursuing torpedo.

"They're on the same bearing now," Willy reported. "I think the fish has him—hit!"

But the Charlie didn't die. They heard the sound of blowing air, then it stopped. A wild cacophony of mechanical noise followed as the contact moved off to the north, then faded as the submarine slowed. O'Malley didn't have enough fuel to pursue. He came around west and headed for Reuben James.

"Hammer, Romeo, what happened?"

"We hit him, but he's still alive. Stand by, Romeo, we're coming in skosh fuel. Five minutes out."

"Roger that, we'll be ready for you. We're vectoring another helo onto the Charlie. I want you to join Hatchet."

"How come we didn't kill him?" Ralston asked.

"Almost all Russian subs have double hulls, and that dinky hundred-pound warhead on the Mark-46 isn't gutsy enough to give you a kill every time. You try to attack from the stem if you can, but this time we couldn't. If you get a stem hit, you pop the shaft seals and flood his engine room. That'll kill anybody. They didn't tell you to go for a stem shot in school, did they?"

"Not especially."

"Figures," O'Malley growled.

It was good to see the Reuben James after four hours. It would have been even better to visit the officers' head, O'Malley thought bleakly. He brought the Seahawk over the port corner of the frigate's stem and paced the ship. Aft, Willy opened the sliding door and tossed down a messenger line. The frigate's deck crew attached a refueling hose to the line and Willy hauled it in, plugging the hose into the fuel tank. The procedure was called HIFR, for helicopter in-flight refueling. While O'Malley fought his helo through the roiled air behind the ship, fuel was pumped into his tanks, giving him another four hours' endurance. Ralston kept his eyes on the fuel indicators while O'Malley flew the aircraft.

 

[SeaKingTacco]

Yes, but no.

 

[Lumber]

Yes, but no.

What, are you saying I can't aim a Harpoon right at the Ops Room?

 

[Baz]

Yes, but no.

I want to say something, but I can’t remember which book each thing I want to say comes from, so…

I was talking about sub signatures as it applies to the museums passive processor last week at DEFSEC. How do you ensure that random numbers you pick out of your @&& have no basis in reality?

Edited to add: so, in addition to have the real voice calls for Sea King procedures, should we have the capability to switch to the Tom Clancy version. If so, we’ll need to find someone much cooler than me to write the scripts.

 

[Baz]

What, are you saying I can't aim a Harpoon right at the Ops Room?

The historical penchant for the RCN to do all practice shots against targets held on the firing ships radar is concerning… to my knowledge the Sea King never targeted for a validated shot.

 

[Kirkhill]

I don’t consider accountants relevant to Military requirements.
If the SOR/SOW is written correctly it will have the requirements for availability into it. Thus the decision on which system can best be determined. Which is why I hate lowest price technically acceptable contracts, and prefer best performance or best value to the government.

Military do not make money. The key is how does one manage all the government requirements for effects with the least risk to personnel and equipment.

I agree with you that RAMD (Reliability, Availability, Maintainability & Durability) should be a fully developed section of every SOR, but, in my experience - very, very out of date - it was rarely even mentioned. The two exceptions were the CPF (RAdm Ed Healey wrote the SOR) and the CF-18 (BGen Murray Ramsbottom). My memory says that it was barely mentioned for the MCDVs or the MOWAG Vehicle (now the LAV) until the projects reached RAdm Healey's desk, then he sent the engineers back to the books to consider the "basics." My sense - again, I stress from decades ago - was that the "operators" who were the project sponsors and wrote the initial SORs hated, RAMD because it was complex and unfamiliar. My sense, also, was that there was little difference between Canadian, American and Brit "operators" in that regard.

The problem that I have encountered, though, is that everything is a competition for money. And money is manged by accountants and they want to use that money as efficiently as possible.

Hence just in time contracts, empty warehouses and sharing one live missile around the navy.

I am hopeful that Ukraine has schooled them in some other realities. I fear that they still percieve Canadian exceptionalism and believe that we are special and it can't happen here.

 

[Kirkhill]

During GWOT the US Army pushed the Combat Developer Course to a lot of E-5 through E-7’s and O-4 and O-5’s to try to emulate what JSOC units had been doing in their CDD shops.

The intent was to make users with current experience requirement writers, however it also left a lot of gaps in knowledge levels as a lot of items where specifically focused for COIN, rather than looking at what the Combat application was. Which led to a lot of ‘last war’ items being acquired that had limited to no utility in a LSCO against a Peer/Near Peer threat. Also money thrown at GWOT led to a lot of buy, try and throw away systems that where never well thought out.

Also I would say that fundamental lack of understanding of what a Near Peer conflict can entail was lacking in most Western Armies from Y2K on, I was the very tail end of the Cold War era soldiers, and folks younger than me most likely didn’t here about one’s job was being to kill Russians and the common threat used was ‘hoarded of screaming Red Chinese’. There where still Korean War veterans around (most retired but not all) and lesson about defenses and OHP quickly became lost with the focus on failed states, Peacekeeping and then Peace Enforcement. 9/11 focused the Armies on COIN and ‘low intensity’ combat (albeit I tend to hate that word as for the folks in combat it’s pretty intense when others are trying to kill you).

Judging from what we have learned about Cold War planning and warehouses stocked for a three week war with inadequate production lines it seems to me that the disconnect predates Y2K by half a century.

The post WW2 desire to study war no more was a very real thing among the civilian population. In a perverse way they seem to have preferred the fear of obliteration to the fear of doing WW1 and WW2 all over again and were willing to trust in mutually assured destruction if it bought them a white picket fence and Chevy. And social security and medicare.

And I am using the American frame because they were a lot more hawkish than Canadians. Canada got to the peace dividend faster and longer.

 

[Baz]

That Tom Clancy passage makes me glad I didn’t fly with them. I’m certain there was no way I could haul in the HIFR hose using a messenger line instead of the hoist, which is conveniently mounted right above the fuel point.