I heard someone reference a new-ish weapon in another thread called QuickSink and wanted to look it up. Seems pretty simple, really. Strap an updated seeker to a JDAM and drop a big ass bomb on a ship. The video of it being tested is pretty fricking metal if you ask me.
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My question, though, is wouldn't something like this be really easy to intercept? It's nothing more than a free-falling bomb, so at best it's going at terminal velocity, can't really make any evasive maneuvers and can't fly at a low altitude to evade radar. How are they going to effectively use this? Is it going to be a s
Somehow missed the rest of my post. I'm not having a good day here. I mean to ask if they are going to use this in a swarm attack since it's cheap and easy to deploy. Otherwise I would think that any anti-missile system could easily take them down in small numbers.
this type of weapon cant be used on anything other than shipping
like you said , dumb bomb requires a close approach putting the aircraft in danger.
Also the bomb can be shot out of the sky with CIWS or missiles
>cant be used on anything other than shipping
Yeah I guess that makes sense, but is going after commercial/civilian shipping even part of US war doctrine anymore? I would think the only country we would think about doing that against would be China.
attacking shipping is the primary role of a navy
China wont be able to do anything if we frick their merchant boats up. thats why they are doing the belt and road thing
>attacking shipping is the primary role of a navy
On paper, at least. How long has it been since the US attacked anything that wasn't a warship or land targets? 40 years? I'm not trying to say you're wrong, I'm just curious as to why we developed a weapon that hasn't been a need for decades.
attacking shipping is an act of war and we have not been at war with a country with real shipping since korea
>the US will never be in a near-peer war again
where did i say that
unironically yes, not in our lifetimes, who the frick is surpassing the US? Russia just got exposed as the paper bear they are, China's got the exact same institutional issues as Russia with better gear. China would get fricking mugged if they tried.
So who else? The other possible contenders are all deeply allied with the US.
China is only getting better, and their demographic issues are no worse than ours.
>and their demographic issues are no worse than ours
Their overhang looks a lot worse to me.
IIRC they vary how much they close down internally. (How much that matters seems like something you'd want to learn too.)
Their demographic issues are comparatively catastrophic you absolute dunce.
Bombing a country's infrastructure should ALSO be an act of war, but we've done that numerous times since Korea as well, right?
>My question, though, is wouldn't something like this be really easy to intercept?
Yes, but it's not meant for taking out major warships. It's designed for killing lots of small shit that countries like Iran and China have where their only AA is MANPADs and ZU-23-2s. Vastly cheaper than launching harpoons at missile boats, submarine chasers and transports and undeniably more effective.
>this type of weapon cant be used on anything other than shipping
it can be used on vehicles so i don't know what you're crying about.
assuming it's laser guided or GPS guided, you could lob it quite a distance from a high altitude, high speed aircraft - I mean even a drone would suffice.
But yes - probably a lot easier to knock out of the sky than a tomahawk, though that's not my wheelhouse.
Although if it's optically guided the ship probably won't be getting spiked. If you could make a low observable one it'd be pretty effective
You would have to fly high - way above the radar horizon - and drop it relatively close. It's suicidal against an armed ship.
This is also a pretty big consideration. I wonder what the maximum range is for a JDAM dropped from an F-18 or F-15 is based on their max safety speed.
Fair point, kinda, about me forgetting the speed of the aircraft. Having said that, can you really drop a bomb while moving that fast? Surely there is a max speed before things start to get risky.
>probably a lot easier to knock out of the sky than a tomahawk
I've been thinking, we've seen a lot of mortar fire defeated by CIWS, or rockets getting shot down by the iron dome in Israel. bombs should be similarily easy to defeat against, no?
>My question, though, is wouldn't something like this be really easy to intercept? It's nothing more than a free-falling bomb, so at best it's going at terminal velocity, can't really make any evasive maneuvers and can't fly at a low altitude to evade radar. How are they going to effectively use this? Is it going to be a s
Likely AShM to cripple the ship and occupy everybody with firefighting. Then drop a bomb on it
Most large vessels hit by AShMs take hours if not days to sink
This idea has some promise. I could see us hitting a task force up with a wave of LRASMs or something and then finishing them off with QuickSinks.
The purpose of this weapon is that it's cheap. The entire package is probably less than 100k$, and it's more convenient than dropping a laser-guided bomb on the ship.
This is not a weapon for contested airspace as you have to get in range to drop a regular old bomb, if you were to intercept this you would shoot down the approaching plane instead. There's very little interest in intercepting air dropped bombs in general because denying the bomb drop with a SAM is a much saner option.
Also, as a DCS gay, it's funny how this thing comes back to the Walleye, thanks to the optical seeker it's fire and forget instead of having to stick around to lase the target.
This. Need to sink an unarmed, disarmed, or lightly-armed ship? This will do the trick nicely, is absurdly cheap compared to ASCMs, and fits to existing bombs, so you can "share" BLUs with your JDAMs. This is an idea that should have been around as long as JDAM, but there just hasn't been a serious need for it (yet).
Ships *can* be a lot harder to sink than most people realize. Sahand is an excellent case study: only 1100 tons, but she ate 3 Harpoons and 4 Skippers, and technically only sank when the resulting fires reached her magazines. Sheffield sank while under tow because her crew had been removed just in case her magazines caught fire and therefore weren't available to find and patch the remaining leaks. Going back to WWII, there are cases of ships surviving absurd amounts of damage--look at what it took to finally put Yorktown on the bottom (A destroyer-load of depth charges going off under her keel). Moskva survived being hit, only to burn to death (thanks in part to incompetent design and damage control procedures). Even Swift--by no means a warship--failed to sink when hit by a C-802. Again and again, ships have survived being hit by missiles and bombs, and those that *did* sink, typically did so because of fire; and you can't always rely on fire to finish the job for you.
Heavyweight torpedoes, of course, are another matter (witness the carnage inflicted by Long Lance--and by US torps, when the detonators worked). But, heavyweight torpedoes are expensive, and difficult to employ from aircraft (which is the whole purpose of QuickSink). So, there's a reasonable requirement for a cheap guided bomb for finishing off damaged ships, FACs, merchants/support ships, etc.
tl;dr it's a niche weapon but very useful for that niche.
> How are they going to effectively use this?
This is for sinking supply ships after everything with actual defenses is neutralized (with more expensive ASHMs), or for sinking surface combatants if they're mission incapable but still floating.
Ships can be pretty hard to take out quickly, and Quicksink replicates the very powerful effect of heavyweight torpedo in a weapon that can be carried by most aircraft and dropped enmasse.
That's sort of like designing a weapon specifically for killing people who have had their hands blown off but haven't died yet.
watch some Sinkex videos, the target ships in them have had their watertight integrity intentionally compromised and they still take a long time and a lot of weapons to sink. this is a valuable capability for relatively low cost.
>had their watertight integrity intentionally compromised and they still take a long time and a lot of weapons to sink
I thought it was the opposite? The targets had their fuel, weapons, and other flammable materials stripped and all the hatches closed so they were able to take a beating a normal ship wouldn't.
those ships are empty steel hulks. living vessels are filled with fuel, maybe weapons and lots of combustible shit. so we'll see.
Sounds like a meme. US have JSOW, LRASM (updated JASSM) and Tomahawk block V which can be either air-delivered or (for the last two at least) can be VLS launched for AShM requirements. I mean it's cheaper then a Stand-Off wpn but seekers are always the most expensive part of a bomb kit, so how much are you really saving if you need to use in salvo? Further, if it's only GPS/INS guided, doesn't really match the accuracy req's for modern AShM engagement (talking CE/LE), esp if en ship is outfitted with gps jamming tech. Plus you'd ideally want to throw a wpn at beyond the range of say, a YJ-18 to avoid being in the en threat range, so Stand-Off is the answer. Not saying they won't develop this, just that it sounds like a moronic solution to a problem that has existing answers. But the military is moronic so it'll probably get adopted, who knows. Probs go good against AORs though.
all of those weapon systems you listed are extremely expensive compared to a vietnam era dumb bomb with GPS fins on it
And if you look at how things fared in Operation Praying Mantis, probably the most relevant example of modern USN doctrine and weapon efficacy, there are multiple examples of US missiles slamming into an Iranian ship and leaving it helpless, but afloat under it's own power. Being able to cost effectively sink it with a cheap bomb is much more preferable then trying to close to guns distance to finish the kill like the USN had to do then.
Seems like a cheap way to knock out those militia navies countries like china and iran have. Why waste expensive standoff weapons to sink a skunk operated by some militia?
I'd guess it's for trade interdiction and other low value targets.
>You have total air control
>Want to sink a bunch of low value targets
>The crews might have MANPADS or the like so you don't want to use dumb bombs
>They're still LVTs though, so you don't really want to deplete your inventory of high end anti ship weapons
>Climb above their likely MANPADS range and dump a few of these
All you really need is some okay-ish guidance and a big ass warhead. The aircraft and gravity provides the propulsion.
>terminal velocity
>dropped from an aircraft moving at over mach 1
Bruh.
Sure, but quick sink is just a mk82 with a sensor kit. It's got half-inch thick steel walls and is filled with insensitive filler. It may be dumb, but it's moving, relatively tough and cheap to employ in large numbers.
So basically this is designed either to kill unarmed merchant ships or be the killing blow for ships already disabled by higher tech weapons. Seems like a fairly cheap and reasonable use for it.
Yes, but breaking the back of a ship used to be a torpedo-only trick. Since Quicksink is a sensor + software upgrade, it's conceivably a testbed which can be expanded to heavy antiship missiles like LRASM with a software upgrade.
I bet that something like a B2 could fly over an area undetected and drop them on warships. And since B2s can carry something like 80 JDAMs they could wreak havoc on a fleet before they knew they were in danger. It’s hard to launch aircraft from a carrier if a couple bombs hit it first.
If they had enough anti air capability to need a stealth bomber the US would almost certainly just opt to load the B2 with LRASM
bruh 10 minutes of B2 flight time probably cost more than the bomb in question
load it in an f-35 instead
b-2s are a first strike/first wave system. they go in before f-35s. if you're trying to sink the chinese navy in port in a suprise attack then you're probably using b-2s or b-21s when they become available. whether you're using jdam or lrasm depends i guess. jdam will be harder to detect and intercept and can be used to target port facilities as well.
the more vertical the flight path the harder it is to shoot down. the aircraft itself is at greater risk. however, jsf, b-2 can launch jdam, and i'd assume b-21 will be able to as well. so that should mitigate risk somewhat.
It’s pretty much just for unarmed ships and (mainly) partly disabled ships that are still able to operate
>really easy to intercept?
Sure
At 1/10th the cost of said interceptor missile