Explosive Echo Ranging

[goldorak]

Ah ha that makes sense.
Like opening a cage, letting the prey enter the danger zone and then zac close the door and start shaking the poor beast.

[SeaQueen]

I think you're being overly dramatic. You probably would use EERs when you didn't even know if a target was present. The high source level of the explosion means you can use it as a wide-area search buoy.

Originally Posted by goldorak

Ah ha that makes sense.
Like opening a cage, letting the prey enter the danger zone and then zac close the door and start shaking the poor beast.

[fatty]

I have been told that some method of EER is used (or will be used) in 'ice-pick' sonobuoys for detecting submarines travelling underneath layers of ice.

[SeaQueen]

That might have been the case, however, these days nobody particularly cares about detecting SSBNs. That might change some time in the near future if Russian continues to behave like it has been, but right now, people in charge of handing out money for R&D are like, "yawn... that's so '80s!"

Originally Posted by fatty

I have been told that some method of EER is used (or will be used) in 'ice-pick' sonobuoys for detecting submarines travelling underneath layers of ice.

[goldorak]

Originally Posted by SeaQueen

That might have been the case, however, these days nobody particularly cares about detecting SSBNs. That might change some time in the near future if Russian continues to behave like it has been, but right now, people in charge of handing out money for R&D are like, "yawn... that's so '80s!"

Why is that ? :hmm:
It doesn't make any sense.

[SeaQueen]

Originally Posted by goldorak

Why is that ? :hmm:
It doesn't make any sense.

The Soviet Union collapsed. Nobody spends a lot of time worrying about nuclear war in the same way they did in the '80s, say. Back in the day, there were people in the Pentagon sweating bullets because they fully expected to get hit within the first few minutes of a conflict. Twenty years ago, everyone pretty much expected a conflict in Europe and it was going to be nuclear almost immediately. That's not really very likely now. Now a days, conventional wars are actually looking passe. Almost all of the thinking is about unconventional warfare, in which nuclear weapons have little role if any.

It's not that it isn't something people think about every now and then, it's just that it's not a major priority for the Navy's ASW programs. Now a days they're more worried about diesel electric submarines in coastal environments. Before, the Soviets planned to use their SSBNs as a survivable deterrent and the US seeked to threaten that, so that in the event of a nuclear war, they'd have the option of undermining the Soviet's most unpredictable threat. Now a days, they're thinking about inexpensive diesel electric submarines in a small, limited, regional conflict, positioned in such a way as to "deny access" to US carriers, amphibious forces, and logistics ships. The strategy is that if they can make it such that US will have to pay such a high price to intervene in a regional conflict that the US public will decide that it's not worth the enormous cost to participate in a conflict in a part of the world many probably can't even find on a map. If a foreign country, managed to sink even one US carrier or big-deck amphib, that'd be an enormous loss. It could be bigger than September 11 in terms of deaths. If that happened, it's not clear whether political support for such a war could be sustained or not. I could see it going either way, honestly. It really depends on what the politics of the time look like. Regardless, it's almost certainly be a blow to the US attitude that we can arbitrarily brush aside foreign militaries with our overwhelming conventional forces.

Back in Soviet days, though, we fully expected to lose multiple carriers in the course of the conflict. It was going to be grim and bloody. I don't think it's really possible for people today to really understand the fundamental shift in mentalities that's occured since the end of the Cold War. Nor do I think the public really comprehends how different warfare is today. Back then, people were talking about a global nuclear conflict in which the national survival of the United States and all of her allies was at stake, and the extinction of humanity was a possibility. Now a days, people are talking about small, regional conventional conflicts as well as unconventional war such as insurgencies, peacekeeping, counterterrorism, etc. Any conventional warfare that might break out is nowhere near the kind of global conflict people used to anticipate.

Actually, what I think is interesting, is that even as the US was preparing for The Big One, most of the conflicts that actually happened look at lot more like the conflicts people plan around today. It always makes me wonder if that's what they really ought to have been planning on back then.

[glmm]

A bit late, but still……

The development of the narrow band analysis was a revolution. Problem was LOFAR buoys were omnidirectional and it was possible to get long range contacts when acoustic conditions were good with no bearing information. At the time there were active sonobuoys, but they were large, expensive, omnidirectional and had low radiated power. The use of an explosive, high intensity source, was a cheap abd efective way to solve the bearing ambiguity with early LOFAR bouoys and also provided range to the target if close enough to the explosive charge. A P-2 or P-3 could carry a large number of SUS charges, which could also be used for communications with submerged submarines. The Emerson AQA-5 sonobuoy analyzer added CODAR, which used paired groups of ommi sonobuoys to solve the bearing ambiguity problem passively , but needed a well trained crew. CODAR was superseded by DIFAR (Directional LOFAR) in the 1960s so the bearing could be solved using DIFAR buoys like the SSQ-53, still in widespread use. Directional active buoys were also deployed (DICASS) and, used in combination, DIFAR/DICASS was the mainstay of VP aircraft well into the 1990s. The development of quieter nuclear subs by the Soviets in the 1980s eroded the passive advantage enjoyed by the West as passive detection ranges would fall sharply. Also, the rise of the moder SSK menace, a very quiet foe by nature, forced a rethink. Biestatic techniques were dusted off, using both an active or explosive source, and became again in use. Surface ships also moved to bistatic long range search using towed arrays mating a powerful, LF active component and a very large passive array for listening. Using modern computer power, long range adquisition against very quiet targets has become again possible, at least on paper.

[Aktungbby]

Originally Posted by gimm

a bit late but still

gimm! ...finlly surfaced after 16 year's silent running' by an errant explosive SUS charge!??