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#Drones - the Sterenn - of the (Black Star in breton) is a 17 m long aluminum catamaran, 7.50 m wide, with a displacement of 24.5 tons.
It is an Unmanned Surface vehicle (USV), a surface vehicle without crew for the mine action.
The purpose of this program, intended to replace the current tripartite mine hunters, is to have gear without crews, staff work remotely on boat-mother - Credits: A.Monot / Navy (Translated by Bing)
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Sunday, November 23, 2014
French Unmanned Surface Vessel (USV)...
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i see a man inside this unmanned ship lol..
ReplyDeleteAwww.. I wanted to make that joke.
DeleteI assume an MCM ship needs a tug boat's worth of torque to pull a large sled trawl am I to understand that this does the same or is it fact the actual system itself with the variable gauss amplifier, pressure wave generator and acoustics mimic capability built in?
ReplyDeleteI kind've thought they had decided to go with UUVs because they could take blue light lidar and high frequency sonar to the depths needed while also having a remote unit to place charges?
The reason I ask is that the more kit you put on a craft (the higher the engine package value etc.) the more you have to conserve it and let the expendable portion be what it drags or sends out.
Which begs the question: what does a mine countermeasures platform do when you have long-line sonar transducers hooked to a buoy or even an ejectable transmitter cluster so that when a ship passes by, the sonar raises an FO mast and 'if the silhouette matches the Lloyd's catalog' fire an AShM from something like a CAPTOR container, miles away.
While the sensor portion of the system is still going to be exposed, it won't look like a mine while the valuable missile is conserved and both together can fire at ships 'en passant' (10-20nm further down the seaway), without any telltales of direct contact or influence detonation to cue the followon search with.
This could be particularly nasty for ships entering and leaving harbors but even more so, imagine the overlap you get from a mine cluster that looks like this-
http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/17r780ff8x23ijpg/original.jpg
With the AShM in a ring around a central buoyancy chamber, fuel tank and a PEM cell which draws oil to get the hydrolyzing effect for station keeping motors in a global gimbal (top and bottom) and gradually replaces it with salt water for neutral buoyancy.
A small surface buoy takes passive broadcast data from a satellite which in turn receives that targeting from again, long line sonar (10-20-30 miles of baseline).
Now your MCM robot has to not only be capable of hunting threats well beyond it's sensor graze footprint but also able to transit rapidly between detections perhaps 20-50nm apart. And survive a blue water environment in doing so.
With preemption (i.e. catching the layer, itself likely a submersible barge) the best defense, I just don't see the utility of a surface craft for where we're going to end up fighting in the next 10-20 years.
The Chinese want to kill carriers. They want to survive doing so with heavy SSK/SSN platforms and shore based ICD. The best way to do that is to saturate the pickets with 'as you come' missile shots and then work your way in, through the ASW screen gaps.
We need to serious think what it means when they get the initiative call on something like Taiwan as -weeks- in advance deployment of robotic mine layers that simply don't have the mass, acoustic or RF signatures to show up on our grid.