USSR and US ASM and missile defense effectiveness question.

[Magnus]

I was fiddling around with the editor. On one end, I pitted a USSR SAG against 8 B-52, each with 12 Harpoons, so 96 missiles.

The SAG was the Kirov, a Kiev, a Kara 2, a Slava, a Sovremenny and an Udaloy.

Get between 3-10 hits out of 96 missiles, depending on my attack tactic.
If the doctrine said 1 hit out 8 missiles fired I guess it's fairly reasonable to get the results I get. Especially given that I am not a trained naval officer :)

Now when I turn the tables and let the USSR attack a US CVBG (the stock one in the editor) with a flight of 12 TU-22s, each carrying 3 AS-4 (36 missiles), it's a massacre. Every single ship is hit and sunk, I tried it 6-7 times and it ends the same way.

I first added 2 more Ticonderogas to the CVBG, no change. Then added another 2, still mayhem.
I then proceeded to add a separate screening group of 4 Ticonderogas. End result is the same, wholesale slaughter.

Is this the norm or am I making some mistakes due to my own ignorance. I am not really trying to design a scenario. Just, like I said, fiddling around.

In the old Harpoon computer games and in the Command games you could and can use F-14s on CAP to help intercepting the Soviet missiles. In Sea Power the F-14s on CAP will not accept them as valid targets and will happily loiter around the TF letting the missiles speed past. This does give me a nice panoramic view of the ensuing mayhem below but does nothing to help prevent it :)

I am feeling that a mere 12 TU-22s should be something a US CVBG should have been equipped to handle as land airpower was a cornerstone is Soviet anti-CV doctrine.

Is it a matter of Early access or more a matter of me not knowing just what the heck I am doing?

incerely,
Magnus

[supersound99ss]

Tico was built specifically with the AS-4 and AS-6 in mind. Those missiles are not that hard to shoot down due to flight profile (unlike the SS-N-19 and SS-N-22), but numbers and early detection are the key. A single Tico should be able to handle 36 of them. Maybe some leakers, but that's what the rest of the escorts are for.

[Thewood]

In the Command tests, the Tico killed 26 of the 36 AS-4s. If an E2 had been present, it would have killed them all.

[Magnus]

The Ticonderogas in Sea power are not the fancy ones with VLS, but rather the original ones using the mark 26 twin launchers. Not sure the VLS (CG-52 onward) are in the game or might come later but at least I couldn't find any VLS Ticonderogas.

I assume that in your CMO test you did have a VLS Ticonderoga Thewood? If so, I can see it being a "game changer".

[Thewood]

I used the Mk 26 Tico. Its the Aegis thats the game changer. Radar range and engagement channels is the key. Yes the ROF on the Mk 26 is slower, but not enough to matter with enough warning.

[Lanzfeld]

Originally posted by whatdoesthisbuttondo?:

It's almost as if soviet doctrine was to destroy US CVBGs with massive ASM strikes and US doctrine was to destroy soviet battlegroups with massive air wings without ever getting in range of soviet ASMs...

Touch

But still.... I am sure 33% of those Russian missiles would malfunction. IRL.

[whatdoesthisbuttondo?]

That might work in CMO, in SP you have to use your units according to doctrine, or you're going to have a bad time.

You have aircraft to intercept or at least thin out those TU-22s, why didn't that happen, and where was your ECM?

The point is to see the Soviets early, and make them disappear before they even launch their missiles, not face tank them.

Also, check out the Ticonderogas in SP up close, those are the 5 OG Ticos without VLS. They are the best air defense unit in the game, but they do lack the volume to realistically handle large uncontested salvos.

Just for the laugh I've tested this scenario, the Ticos intercept the missiles quite well, but they unsurprisingly lack the RoF to handle that many incoming supersonic missiles.

[whatdoesthisbuttondo?]

Originally posted by Thewood:

I used the Mk 26 Tico. Its the Aegis thats the game changer. Radar range and engagement channels is the key. Yes the ROF on the Mk 26 is slower, but not enough to matter with enough warning.

You are wrong, the AS-4s are simply too fast for the Mk 26 to keep up. I've just tested this, you don't ever get anywhere near the channel limits.

Not even close, not by a long shot.

[Thewood]

I subbed in the Leahy for the Tico. Lost two CGs and a DDG. The CVN was at 30% damage. Put the Tico in and not a scratch in Command/CMO.

[patton610]

I've never had issues with soviet attacks. I wonder if there is something about the settings that effects things. I had better luck with dong Hoi misson by breaking apart the battle group. I suspect but have no proof that saved assemblies Ie template battlegroups are subject to bugging because they are generated with old code and thrn the game gets updated but thr code with the cvbg template isn't and it results in weird stuff.

[whatdoesthisbuttondo?]

Originally posted by patton610:

I've never had issues with soviet attacks. I wonder if there is something about the settings that effects things. I had better luck with dong Hoi misson by breaking apart the battle group. I suspect but have no proof that saved assemblies Ie template battlegroups are subject to bugging because they are generated with old code and thrn the game gets updated but thr code with the cvbg template isn't and it results in weird stuff.

There definitely are some issues with formations, but that isn't the case here.

The problem is the expectation to somehow intercept 36 supersonic missiles in the timespan that allows the Tico to fire 16-20 missiles at most.

There is no reasoning with math, it's a cruel mistress.

[whatdoesthisbuttondo?]

Originally posted by Lanzfeld:

Originally posted by whatdoesthisbuttondo?:

It's almost as if soviet doctrine was to destroy US CVBGs with massive ASM strikes and US doctrine was to destroy soviet battlegroups with massive air wings without ever getting in range of soviet ASMs...

Touch

But still.... I am sure 33% of those Russian missiles would malfunction. IRL.

You can have that in the game if you want, set difficulty to "relaxed" or "cheesy" and those missiles you don't intercept just miss on their own.

Still looks pretty.

[Julhelm]

I just tried 4 B-52s coming from slightly different vectors with 12 Harpoons each, so 48 missiles against the same SAG as the OP. Kara, Kirov, Slava and the Kiev were all struck and sunk. The Udaloy and Sovremenny did the best. So much for Soviet bias.

[Squash]

Well, you said it yourself, IRL USN would have fighters which would knock out a lot of those missiles well before they were engaged by ship-based air defense. AS-4 is a beast and was a major threat to US Navy. Of course, real life isn't a game so tracking that CVBG and deploying all those missiles wasn't an easy task, as they wouldn't just line themselves up nicely for you to execute a killing blow, and those F-14s wouldn't be flying circles doing nothing.
Soviet fleet you built is late 70s/early 80s Soviet technology. Harpoons are subsonic sea-skimmers. They might be deadly to older Soviet ships but not to the ones you deployed, which had advanced anti-air systems installed (for that time).
Ultimately it's a game. Someone referred to Moskva, and on paper Moskva should've defeated that attack 10 times out of 10. But maybe some hardware malfunctioned. Maybe guys at radar screen failed at their duty. Maybe it wasn't even a Ukrainian missile that sank it.
Real life warfare is far more complex than any game can simulate.

[Thewood]

First off...I had a Leahy, not a Virginia. Clicked the wrong button.

The biggest difference is two fold between the Tico and the Virginia.

1) The Mk26 mod 5 on a 1987 Tico ROF is about 2 every 10 seconds. VLS is one missile every three seconds.

2) The Aegis system and has 24 guidance channels. 24 guided missiles in the air at once regardless of launching system.

That means the Tico Mk 26 takes 120 seconds to put 24 missiles in the air. The VLS Mk 41 72 seconds. A large difference...yes. But against only 36 AS-4s with 100nm warning, its shouldn't be enough to overwhelm any Tico with a DDG and another old CG in the mix.

The Mk 26 Tico fired 32 SM-2s on the AS-4 run in. The Leahy fired 20. There were 12-15 from other ships. And that difference was mostly because of datalink channel with ROF being a slight factor. In that same time a VLS Tico would have fired about 40. Again, a difference, but really not a factor in this contrived test. If the number of AS-4s was 48-50, the ROF between a Mk26 and a VLS would have started showing.

[jamison]

Originally posted by Thewood:

First off...I had a Leahy, not a Virginia. Clicked the wrong button.

The biggest difference is two fold between the Tico and the Virginia.

1) The Mk26 mod 5 on a 1987 Tico ROF is about 2 every 10 seconds. VLS is one missile every three seconds.

2) The Aegis system and has 24 guidance channels. 24 guided missiles in the air at once regardless of launching system.

That means the Tico Mk 26 takes 120 seconds to put 24 missiles in the air. The VLS Mk 41 72 seconds. A large difference...yes. But against only 36 AS-4s with 100nm warning, its shouldn't be enough to overwhelm any Tico with a DDG and another old CG in the mix.

The Mk 26 Tico fired 32 SM-2s on the AS-4 run in. The Leahy fired 20. There were 12-15 from other ships. And that difference was mostly because of datalink channel with ROF being a slight factor. In that same time a VLS Tico would have fired about 40. Again, a difference, but really not a factor in this contrived test. If the number of AS-4s was 48-50, the ROF between a Mk26 and a VLS would have started showing.

I'm just curious, where is the number of 24 guidance channels coming from? Is that the amount coded into Sea Power/a different game? Is it the speculated number of channels per Cold War-era Aegis?

Thanks.