Russian military intervention and aid to Syria #14

JohninMK wrote:

George1 wrote:BEIRUT, LEBANON (10:00 P.M.) – The Russian Navy was photographed on Monday transiting the Bosphorus Strait that links the Black and Mediterranean seas.

According to maritime observer Yoruk Isik, the heavily laden ВМФ Project 775 of the Black Sea Fleet 197th Landing Ship Brigade’s Ropucha class LSTM (tank carrying landing ship) Novocherkassk 142 entered the Mediterranean on Monday to deliver more equipment to the Port of Tartous in western Syria.

https://mobile.almasdarnews.com/article/russia-transports-massive-amount-of-equipment-to-syria-after-turkish-attack-photos/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=facebook

She wasn't particularly 'heavily laden' as she was running at her normal depth in the water. They have run these ships deeper in the water than this.

Thanks for posting this George, these ships are the unsung heroes of the Syrian War. I am pretty sure that the workload they have achieved was never in their original design specification. Wars are won on logistics and this one is no different.

in addition to some old LST they used also several cheap old civilian ships to carry goods to the ports of Tartus and Latakia.

But yeah, for sure they need new amphibious ships. They have a decent number of Ropucha class LST, however they are getting long in the tooth... the newest of them is s from 1991. In the northern fleet there are still some LST from the 70s that probably need to be retired soon...

The second ship of the Ivan Gren class will be really needed, and also the larger (8000 tons) second serie (11711M?).

If they are a successful ship possibly they would need to produce more landing ships in a large serie.. like they did for the Ropucha class (4000tons), even if probably not in the same number since they have twice the displacement...

AMCXXL wrote:F-16 from Turkey attached a group of 3 Su-24MK of sirian air forcé
one ran away and was safe, another was hit but could land, the third was shot down, the two pilots safe

What is this image? It's a Su-20/22 so its not related to the Su-24 shootdown.

You're like the Ukrainians, refuting a claim that had never been made.

Well to be fair FP.... you just compared big gazza to an orc and therefore you are doing what you are accusing him of doing aren't you?

What I am interested in is flares distracting an AIM-9X... that is amazing if true... I mean if you have a PIR heat sensor and you fool it with a road flare that is no big deal... it is what you would expect to be honest... a heat sensor being set off by heat is exactly what you would expect, but the IIR seeker on the AIM-9X is supposed to be an imaging sensor that sees an image of the space in front of it of the target... they made claims it was so wonderful you could select a part of the aircraft for the missile to hit... ie if you were a real bastard you could select the cockpit canopy to ensure a literal kill, but clearly these flares generate heat in the right frequency to get a big enough bloom to render the IIR on the AIM-9X useless...

It doesn't surprise me to be honest... in the 1980s HATO was all up itself about how wonderful its AIM-9L and AIM-9M missiles were, but when tested in the 1990s against east german MiG-29s it was found the flares it used as standard were effective in defeating the missiles easily enough... of course they also found the AA-10 missiles it used were better than Sparrow against an F-15 but like Sparrow they could be spoofed by the sophisticated ESM suite of the F-15 but they thought they could compensate with the F-15s dogfight performance only to find the helmet mounted cueing system and high off boresight R-73 and actually not mentioned but the IR guided model of the R-27 also has high off boresight capacity too, but lacks the thrust vector control to use it off the pylon but in air to air combat it was pretty good too.

Funny they didn't know about the passive radar homing missile that would have been devastating especially to the British aircraft... their interceptor Tornados were optimised for long range missiles rather than dogfighting so they would have been in real trouble. (the passive radar homing versions of the R-27EP homed in on the target marking signal from an enemy plane guiding a Sparrow. A Sparrow is Semi Active Radar Homing, or SARH so it needs the launch aircraft to get a radar lock on the target before it can be launched... the lock consists of a thin radar beam that reflects off the target like a laser shines on a tank with a laser homing weapon like Copperhead. The R-27EP can detect that radar beam and flys up to the launch platform... it is faster and longer ranged than Sparrow so it will hit first. Turning off the radar will result in the Sparrow missing, and the R-27EP hitting first will also result in the Sparrow missing... so western aircraft except the F-14 with the Phoenix can either use Sparrow (or the British Sky Flash variant of Sparrow) and be shot down with EP model Alamos... which east germany didn't have BTW, or get in close against helmet mounted sights and R-73s and get slaughtered... and while some would argue training and tactics would mean HATO would prevail... I believe the feeling was similar just before WWI... they have machine guns and artillery and so do we but our training and tactics will mean we will prevail... and what a blood bath that turned out to be... for all sides.

The result was an enormous boost in funding for AMRAAM which had been neglected up to that point because they didn't think they needed it.

I mean, let's be honest here. It doesn't matter what A2A missile you're talking about. AIM-7, AIM-120, AIM-9, K-13, R-27 etc, etc... They all have pretty abysmal shoot-to-hit ratios in proper combat, where statistics are available.

Well there is a reason why the word Miss starts the word missile... much the same as anger backwards appears in the word pregnant, but while there was an enormous gap in missile performance from pathetic for BVR missiles to acceptable enough to want to keep using them for progressively better and better IR guided WVR missiles, the AMRAAM did seriously improve BVR performance from F'ing useless to OK against unaware poorly equipped enemy targets... 40% kill rate against a target who is not aware they are being attached is OK because they have thousands of AMRAAMs and most enemies don't have thousands of planes...

The point is that in the 1990s when the performance of the R-73 was revealed it became a bit of a hittile because you couldn't really out manouver it because of its thrust vector engine and high off boresight visibility of you. Older missiles get outside its 12 degree FOV and it lost lock and you were safe... much much harder to do with Archers.

The AIM-9X was supposed to be the solution... their own hittile from which nothing could escape... its seeker was too sophisticated and the missile was too smart... when it clearly isn't.

I mean I know the US Navy likes to talk up the air to air combat performance of Libyan Su-22s, because no one wants to admit to shooting down a largely defenceless plane for dumping its fuel tanks... no honour in that right?

Vietnam was a good indicator of that. I don't think anyone should be surprised that an AIM-9X missed its target. Regardless of what any missile designer says about how fool-proof their design is, or how revolutionary the seeker-head is, at the end of the day, it comes down to the situational elements and the launch parameters.

No, it is more than that... the first IR guided missiles homed in on the hottest thing within their narrow field of view... which meant the target aircraft could manouver to place the sun in the missiles field of view and would be safe... or a single flare would do it as long as it was brighter than the engines... so IR guided missile designers set their missiles to not home on the hottest thing they see and instead of a single hot point they adapted them to guide to patterns of heat in the air, so the plane designers started launching variable heat flares in bunches to create patterns for the missiles to hit... the IIR seeker of the AIM-9X was supposed to deal with that problem... recognise a group of flares as being a group of flares as opposed to the aircraft shaped object it locked on to start with...

The only thing I can think of is like Shtora works with wire guided ATGMs... create a heat signal so intense it blooms the sensor so it can't see anything...

Regarding an AIM-9, ambient temperature becomes a huge player, especially when the seeker would have to discriminate between the aircraft, the flares it is dropping, and the sun-baked, middle-eastern ground. People may say that the 'x' variant has some state-of-the-art FPA seeker which can do A, B and C, blah, blah. Nothing's perfect, and I think this example with the Su-22 re-enforces that status quo. As sure as the sun rises and sets, designers of military equipment while talk up their product like any other business. Ultimately, it means nothing, and no one should be surprised when it turns out that a design claim doesn't align with reality.

You are saying it is no surprise, but people talking up the F-35 and F-22 should now realise that all those aircraft have that could reliably kill an enemy target now is their gun, and while the F-22 isn't a terrible dogfighter... the F-35 is.

I am not going apologize for my post. I initially glossed the photo over, but it was trotted out as some sort of actual Syria today event.
Clearly it wasn't and I am sure that an Erdo-turd fanboi spread it around (not any of the posters on this forum, so don't get
triggered) because he thought those flares were anti-aircraft missiles. They are that dumb.

I don't think you need to, what you said was basically correct for anyone mistakenly thinking these were actual photos of the attack...

I would say we should be asking AMCXXL how the photo he posted is related to the information he posted... was it supposed to be evidence or just entertainment...

Either way I agree... no need for anyone to get upset or need to apologise about anything.

Actually with IIR they moved from pattern recognition to 3D internal libraries of shapes for autonomous target recognition... there have been a few Combat Approved TV shows which show ranges with radar and optical sensors in a big circle around a structure to raise objects up and spin them around so real radar signatures and IR and optical signatures of various items can be measured and recorded... these sorts of things are used to determine what object the sensor is looking at all by itself... this sort of thing is necessary for internal weapons and weapons that are launched without already having a missile seeker lock on the target...

Something like TOR is always launched directly up in the air with side thruster rockets rolling it in the direction of the target with counter thrusters stopping it turning too far and the main engine accelerating it towards its target... the tracking radar will then start tracking both the target and the outgoing missile and flight commands will be sent to the missile to make it fly an interception course... the TOR missile has no seeker.

For something with an IIR seeker like the Morfei (9M100) then you need a datalink to the missile so the missile sitting inside the weapon bay can't see the target but is thrown out the weapon bay and its main engine lights up to accelerate it in a specific direction that will take it closer to its intended target that has been detected by the launch platform but not yet seen by the missile. The missile might have a sensor image of the target passed to it before launch or after launch via an IRST sensor and it could be directed to look at a specific point in space in front of it for that target using a 3D library of IR images that it can rotate itself to match the targets current flight characteristics... it might pick the wrong target within a group but can transmit its target back to the launch platform to allow the pilot to select another target if needed.

As you can probably guess these missiles are going to be hard to fool... current defence choices are DIRCMs or counter missiles... the latter favouring non stealthy aircraft that can generally carry rather more missiles than stealthy aircraft can...

It is not natural for things in nature to emit microwaves, so one thing you look for in war time is something that emits microwaves because most of the time it will be some sort of radar antenna which will be part of something that needs to be destroyed...

In this case you have a superior enemy looking desperately for targets to attack... because of the MANPADS risk they fly high so their optical view of the area is not ideal but if they get a microwave signal they can launch an anti radiation missile at it.

Well normally a microwave signal is coming from some antenna with electronics boxes that are vulnerable to missiles like HARM and ALARM, but if you build an armoured box with the microwave inside it with a small gap for the microwaves to escape but mainly a protected power source plus a heavily armoured box with a few narrow slits in the front to let microwaves out and a microwave inside facing the slits with a big hole cut in the door and you turn it on and point it upwards and then stand well back you should see... over time lots and lots of anti radiation missiles hitting it repeatedly... with good protection it could last quite a few hits and wasting lots of expensive western ARMs...