LFASS

[Molon Labe]

LFA does not appear to be very much in use. You can't even google it without being swarmed with environmental activist crap. As far as I know the USN only has it deployed on one T-AGOS ship and it's purely experimental at this point.

Would it make other systems obsolete? I'm guessing no. I would imagine ranging data isn't all that accurate with this system, and filtering out false returns would be a headache. You're also going to have several minutes between pings, as much as 15 minutes, so you're going to need to rely on other sensors for a 'good enough to shoot' solution. And due to environmental or EMCON concerns, you're not going to have it on all the time. My take on it is that it is an underwater AWACS to be used in wartime, and that other assets would be sent to investigate contacts at long range to see if it really is a sub or something else. Sort of like a datum-prosecution type thing... and perhaps not all that different from cold-war style convergence zone prosecutions that we've all read about, from back in the day when the threat came from noisy SSNs.

Unless it turns out you can accurately model the likely drawbacks of such a system in DW, it might be better off just using it as a mission design tool, give a platform a message that LFA platform might have detected something in X area, go investigate.