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- Newsgroups: sci.military
- Path: sparky!uunet!psinntp!ncrlnk!ciss!law7!military
- From: Henry Spencer <henry@zoo.toronto.edu>
- Subject: scrubbing topsides
- Message-ID: <By0tKI.911@law7.DaytonOH.NCR.COM>
- Sender: military@law7.DaytonOH.NCR.COM (Sci.Military Login)
- Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
- References: <Bxx23p.MvB@law7.DaytonOH.NCR.COM>
- Date: Fri, 20 Nov 1992 15:26:42 GMT
- Approved: military@law7.daytonoh.ncr.com
- Lines: 29
-
-
- From Henry Spencer <henry@zoo.toronto.edu>
-
- >From "Edward J. Rudnicki" (FSAC-SID) <erudnick@pica.army.mil>
- >#a scenario might be for coast defence artillery to fire
- >#DPICM (cluster) and try and scrub the topsides. while
- > ...
- >On the topic of "scrubbing topsides", I was discussing this sort of thing
- >with a gunner's mate on I believe it was USS YORKTOWN. He said that if
- >they (for Lord knows what reason) were engaging a ship with the 5 inch
- >mounts the tactic they would use is to fire prox fuzed rounds targeted
- >just above the ship to strip her of her fire control sensors, and then
- >engage with delay fuzed HE to inflict substantial damage. Anybody run
- >into this sort of thing?
-
- The USS Worden (I believe it was) ran into it in a rather spectacular
- way off Vietnam, when an air-launched Shrike anti-radar missile homed
- in on it by mistake. The missile did a prox-fuzed air burst just above
- the ship. Now, Shrike is Sparrow-sized, with a puny 66kg warhead,
- and it exploded 30m above the ship... Shouldn't be that bad, right?
-
- In fact, it made a godawful mess. The ship was dead in the water for
- half an hour, a number of men were injured (some fatally), and 60% of
- the ship's combat capability was wiped out until it got shipyard-level
- repairs done. The USN was most unhappy.
- --
- MS-DOS is the OS/360 of the 1980s. | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
- -Hal W. Hardenbergh (1985)| henry@zoo.toronto.edu utzoo!henry
-
-