Is a Maritime Patrol Aircraft good at Anti Surface Mission?

[Bayu Pamungkas]

1. Besides sub hunting, taking photos, or picketing (promoting link), is a MPA good at ASuW? It only has a few missiles (especially Viking), and attacking a surface ship with lightweight torpedoes is an easiest way to get SAMed.
2. Does in real life an MPA still be used to attack surface ships?

[ET2SN]

The P-3 could launch Harpoons to good effect. :up:

Think about the big picture, you're not going to launch an F-15 to fire AIM-7's at an aircraft carrier. That would be a waste of time and resources.
Rather, instead of hoping for "one platform, one shot, one kill", focus on a multi-layered attack using a mix of aircraft and missiles. :yeah:

In LWAMI 3.11, they included the B-52 as a US air asset. This sounds odd at first since DW is primarily a Naval sim, but the B-52 could carry (and launch) up to eight Harpoons. P-3's and B-52's could be a very effective strike force when they worked together. Both planes had tons of loiter and search time and they carried enough Harpoons to get your attention. :o

[Bayu Pamungkas]

Thank you. Once ago, I played some campaign missions with P3 (forgot the name) and for the ASuW part I just promoted the link and let the friendly ships did the dirty job. I played that mission when my game was vanilla, I am recently using RA.

[tAKticool47]

I know I am very, very late on this post but wanted to throw in a link

https://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/confessions-of-a-pilot-behind-the-us-navys-airborne-sub-1598415741

This is an AMAZING article of an interview with a career P-3C Orion pilot who goes into GREAT DETAIL about all the P-3s strengths, weaknesses, missions, even some comparison and info vs. the new P-8 Poseidon etc.

The P-3 was an absolutely amazing platform for maritime patrol and grew into a multimission, long-endurance, highly effective piece of military kit. And as the article explains, it was capable of unmatched versatility and endurance... I forget the exact example it used but it could load up with like 8 torpedoes, a bellyfull of sonobuoys, and do 8+ hours of antisubmarine warfare (using various sonobuoys, air and surface search radar, magnetic anomaly detection, etc.) -- prosecute the subs they found, then suppose an enemy surface action group is detected inbound, they could land, rearm with Harpoons, get back into the air as an anti-surface warfare platform, -- then the next morning they could rearm with AGM-65s (precision/ laser guided) and SLAM-ERs ( inertial, infrared, precision-guided land-attack missies) and go conduct ISR / Land-attack / command and control etc. over land.

Anyway it's a great article, that author now operates "The War Zone" at

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone

if you're unfamiliar, it's one of the best military news and info websites on the net (although increasingly extremely bleeding-heart liberal, but hey, that's very popular these days too lol.)