heavy bombers vs ship

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tkobo
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Post by tkobo »

Heres a good one,that includes hits from mavericks and hellfires,in addition to hits from other weapons.

Seems to suggest it would take a lot of either to get the job done.

http://ussjohnpauljones.org/NewsLetterSpring2001-2.htm
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Post by Lightbringer »

:D Gotta love Tkobo... if noone presents any challenging arguements, he sets out to prove himself wrong. :P
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Post by Feltan »

tkobo wrote:Heres a good one,that includes hits from mavericks and hellfires,in addition to hits from other weapons.

Seems to suggest it would take a lot of either to get the job done.

http://ussjohnpauljones.org/NewsLetterSpring2001-2.htm
tkobo,

You might also note that no military power on earth currently uses heavy bombers with dumb bombs in an anti-ship role. There is a reason for this: it simply hasn't proved effective.

The heavy Soviet/Russion TU-22 bomber has an anti-ship role, but its role is to deliver mamoth anti-ship missles.

However, of interest & to prove anything is possible, during the first Gulf war US navy planes returning from a mission intecepted an old Iraqi LST full of mines. Out of ordanance, the navy planes "bombed" the LST with nearly empty external fuel tanks and sank it.

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Post by tkobo »

If no ones doing it, how can they say it is/or isnt effective ?

And yes, even the B52 has an anti-ship role using missiles.BUT what happens when those missiles are for whatever reason not avilable to the bomber, and yet ships need to be sunk by it.

I mean, youve got people trying to talk the military into re-introducing blimps back into wars.AND doing tests to show cause.Thats a far more unusual thought that seeing if bombers currently can sink ships with iron bombs.

Im gonna keep looking.
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Post by Feltan »

If you haven't seen this, it is worth a look.

http://archive.gao.gov/t2pbat5/149360.pdf

This is what happens when you take a force and change its mission quickly. And, consider, this is what the Air Force was willing to tell congress -- I suspect the actual truth is a bit more negative.

I found one reference to B-52 CEP during Desert Storm, but the actual number had been deleted -- it was in the context of a negative comment.

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Post by Noble713 »

Have you tried loading your B-52s with a full load of freefall bombs and seeing what damage they inflict?

One of the things I've done while reworking SR2010 is to remove all iron-bomb based ground attack values and use the freefall bomb ordnance instead. All of my strategic bombers have attack values of 0. I always found it odd that bombers could both drop bombs and launch a full load of missiles. Realistically, loading up on one should cut into the ordnance capacity of the other....
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Post by tkobo »

Felton, ill give it a read, i hate adobe though, so i have to go out and get their reader.

Noble, you might want to rethink that.
My understanding is that a B52h can carry eight AGM-84 Harpoon missiles, four AGM-142 Raptor missiles, 51 x 500lb bombs, 30 x 1,000lb bombs, 20 AGM-86C Conventional Air Launched Cruise Missiles (CALCM), 12 Joint Stand Off Weapons (JSOW), 12 Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAM) and 16 Wind-Corrected Munitions Dispenser (WCMD) all at once,per aircraft.And that this is the current standard full load.

A unit of 17 B-52hs can in the game only carry 755 points in missiles, which is only the equivilant to 75 agm-86c.
But in real life that same 17 b-52hs would be able to carry a combined 340 of the same missile, plus a huge amount of other weapons.
So in short, the game VERY short changes the B-52H on what it can carry.

I think this is a picture of a B-52Hs full load, before its loaded.
Image

Almost forgot.No i havent tried them with the free fall bombs loaded,because that would use up the aircrafts missile load points.But its something pewrhaps i should try, and see if there is any difference in damage done.
Last edited by tkobo on Apr 25 2007, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Draken »

tkobo wrote:My understanding is that a B52h can carry eight AGM-84 Harpoon missiles, four AGM-142 Raptor missiles, 51 x 500lb bombs, 30 x 1,000lb bombs, 20 AGM-86C Conventional Air Launched Cruise Missiles (CALCM), 12 Joint Stand Off Weapons (JSOW), 12 Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAM) and 16 Wind-Corrected Munitions Dispenser (WCMD) all at once,per aircraft.And that this is the current standard full load.

...

I think this is a picture of a B-52Hs full load, before its loaded.
Image
Those are different loadouts! The Buff cannot carry everything you mentioned at once...

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http://www.cdi.org/nuclear/database/usnukes.html#b52
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Post by tkobo »

Im pretty sure, the loadout you have there Draken is Nuclear.
Not the standard conventional load out.
Which actaully(the max nuclear) would be something like this : 12 AGM-129 Advanced Cruise Missiles (ACMS), 20 AGM-86A Air Launched Cruise Missiles (ALCM) and eight bombs

You have the internal bay, 4 hard points on the wings and rotary launcher in the bay.The combined payload for the standard coventional load is something like 70,000lbs
If you do the math on the payload given in the above post, you'll see it comes out to circa 70,000lbs
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Post by Balthagor »

Noble713 wrote:...I always found it odd that bombers could both drop bombs and launch a full load of missiles. Realistically, loading up on one should cut into the ordnance capacity of the other....
It does. When you load missiles it decreases the supply cap for the unit. This is why some subs when loaded with tridents loose the ability to engage ships/subs. The weight of the tridents pushes supplies to zero.
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Post by Feltan »

tkobo,

You are overstating the capacity quite a bit.

http://www.af.mil/shared/media/document ... 26-020.pdf

The bombers can carry a vast array of ordinance, but the numbers on page 20 will max the load by themselves, not all together.

It is not just weight, it is configuration and racks that take up a lot of space too.

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Post by tkobo »

Hmmm....
That cant be right.Your saying that if a B-52H has 8 harpoons loaded on it its full ? Its unable to carry any more ordinace than those 8 harpoons ?

I dont think thats right.
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Post by Feltan »

There is an asterik after the number 8, which states the internal bay is available for ordinance. In this case, 8 Harpoons max out the external hard points.

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Post by Noble713 »

Balthagor wrote:It does. When you load missiles it decreases the supply cap for the unit. This is why some subs when loaded with tridents loose the ability to engage ships/subs. The weight of the tridents pushes supplies to zero.
Damn, clearly making big, sweeping changes to the equipment file with an incomplete knowledge of the game mechanics is dangerous. :oops:

Still, that seems like an odd mechanism to me. It's not like an SSBN keeps extra torpedoes tucked away in its missile silos. It only carries so many torps, which is constant regardless of how many SLBMs are loaded.

I could kinda see the rationale for VLS-equipped surface ships. Burke DDGs, for example, use the same cells for SM2 air defense missiles as they do for Tomahawks, so loading Tomahawk missiles on the ship will reduce its ability to engage air targets.

Is there a lower limit to the amount of supplies a fully-loaded unit will still have?

I might keep my Freefall Bomb-based system, but be more careful when I start editting fighters. I could treat supplies as the A2A missiles, and tweak the stats so that an aircraft with a "normal" payload of ordnance has just the right amount of supplies remaining to represent the proper amount of A2A firepower as well. Hmmm.......
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