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More on the Swedish Stealth Ship
Dr.Knackerator writes "The BBC is running a story on Sweden's new carbon fibre stealth ship, the Visby. As well as being the first stealth ship, it is controlled by 'state-of-the-art computers using a Windows NT operating system'. 'But Kockums and the Swedish Navy deny it could be sabotaged by hackers and say that even if it did they could fall back to traditional steering and navigation'." We had a previous story about this as well.
I remember seeing a US stealth ship in Wired I think, it's black and it floats on two pontoons, so that it's sonar signature is reduced... ANyone else know what I'm talking about?
Sea Shadow
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This is not the first stealth ship., this is./ ships /ship-sea.html
http://www.chinfo.navy.mil/navpalib/factfile
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Actually, cryptic paint schemes go back as far as the early 1900's in war ships designed to conceal edges and make it difficult to determine which direction a ship may be traveling in. They have been used on and off for years, but most commonly on smaller littoral combat platforms rather than larger ships.
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As well as being the first stealth ship,
No, I'm afraid that that honor goes to Sea Shadow. True, it was only a technology demonstrator, but it WAS the first stealth ship. This Swedish upstart may be the first PRODUCTION stealth ship, but it certainly ain't the first.
That said, lessons from Sea Shadow were incorporated into the Burke class Destroyers. So this isn't even the first 'stealthy' ship out here.
What if it is just turtles all the way down?
Finnish Hamina-class. Maybe not as radical as this ship, but stealth-ship regardless. And packed with high technology.
So what makes this Swedish ship "first stealth-ship", when there are already stealth-ships in use in Finland? And they have been in use for quite some time already.
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The headline is not quite right. First off, the first stealth ship was the U.S. Navy's Sea Shadow, but it is only a technology testbed and demonstrator. This is the first stealth ship to see operational service.
Ignorance is the root of all evil.
Boot Kuckooms und zee Svedeesh
Germans say 'und' for and, whereas swedes say och, and would have no reason to use that word. You fail!
if you can see it, you can sink it. radar is how a lot of guided weapon systems (missiles primarily) acquire a target lock. smaller signature = longer ship life. however, some military scientist or sailor will probably weigh in (weigh anchor?) to explain in greater detail just how important this really is on the modern battlefield.
ed
In the US Navy, at least, all crewmembers are trained in fire and damage control, for good reason. One ship's entire damage control crew was wiped out in a blast, and nobody else was trained in damage control. The ship survived the experience, though.
Again, in the US Navy, the standard firefighting gear includes an oxygen mask, so the fumes shouldn't be a problem. Treating crewmembers caught in the fumes before they could get their equipment on will probably require some additional training for the medical personnel, though.
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It's not about replicating Swedish, you bafoon. It's the Swedish Chef from dialectizer... You know, as in the FUCKING MUPPET, which did say 'und'?
No, NT is the most likely OS. Military hardware takes years of design and testing to be put into service. If you look at the computer specs for the newest USAF fighter prototypes, you'll see they have about the computing power of a 486. Once things are certified and stress tested, you don't go changing the design on something that works.
Visby is the capital of Gotland, which is an island off the east coast of Sweden where the (historic) Goths lived. In case you wondered.
"Stop failing the Turing test!" -- Dilbert
No F-16's here, we use our own developed fighter.
www.gripen.com
...on this. The US Navy did experiments with the Sea Shadow in the 80's (see previous posts), but it was determined that too much everyday utility would have to be sacrificed to acheive true stealthiness. However, some of the features of the Sea Shadow were integrated into new convential ships-of-the-line (like the Arleigh Burke-class guided missle destroyers) such as "secret angles" (LOL) that reduce radar signatures. This Swedish ship isn't much more than a large patrol boat. That's not to say that it can't do it's job effectively; however, it's not designed for long-endurance blue water operations. IMHO, the stealth moniker is for public consumption more than anything else. The best seaborne defense is not stealth, but good defensive weapons such as Sea Sparrows and CIWS (Phalanx)
Don't be a looter...and yes, I know that it's spelled with an "A" instead of an "E".
> Then again, I'm sure the Sweedish air force might have a few F-16s or C-130s; but how many American jets, planes, tanks, and boats have Swedish software running them?
Sweden has its own military aircraft manufacturer in SAAB Aerospace (SAAB actually stands for Svenska Aeroplan Aktiebolaget, freely translated Swedish Aerospace Inc).
The newest aircraft is the hightech Gripen, which btw rumour has it runs an VisualBasic-app to control the steering...
SAAB Aerospace Gripen
But I agree with your point, it really seems odd that the military doesn't love the control they can have over the sourcecode in opensource-OSes.
A submarine isn't a ship, it's a boat.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
The sea shadow was publically revealed in 1993...the prototype for Visby, the "Smyge", was uncovered in 1991...
1986, designstart of "Smyge", publically showned in 1991. it was a testbed/prototype and a smaller littorial craft.
U.S Secretary of Defense William Cohen was demonstrated to it in 1997.
pic
1996, designstart of the Visby class... as of 2004 two of these ships have been delivered, the HMS Visby (2001) and HMS Helsingborg (2003). after 2 years of sea trials they are ready to enter full service.
pic! pic
Actually, having been in the defense industry, I can say with the timeline this warship was developed that it's entirely probable that it does run Windows NT 4.0. You dont change specs like that on a project of this scope lightly. NT also has been rated C2, in certain specific configurations.
Good? Bad? Evil? Not my argument.
meh.
Hopefully this is the writers silly notion rather than something he was told. A stealth ship 100km away from any navy ship, but running its radar, is just broadcasting its position. (Naval vessels do have radar receivers you know).
Kind of like making a perfectly light absorbing black truck for night usage, then looking around with a giant searchlight!
Actually, you have two planes of angles to work with from the top, and two from the side.
The stealth aircraft have little odd angled "mirror rooms" (for lack of a better words - think a house of horrors hall of mirrors) that temporarily absorb signals, bounce them around a bit and let them out at various angles at various times, which is why they have a signature, but it is a lot like a flock of birds, not an airplane. A ship would probably reflect radar coming from the side into nearby waves and use them for the scattering effect and try to redirect deck waves in a direction other than straight back (thus the non-90 degree angle).
this ship is mostly going to be used to patrol their ample coastline and intercept smugglers and drug runners. commerical marine radar is readily available, and because of that the criminals have amuch easier time of avoiding the patrol ships. however, a stealth ship removes that advantage.
As well, these ships would have externally accessable wireless IP-based systems to support strategic and tactical communications. These would also require appropriate protections
You sly dog: you got me monologuing! - Syndrome
You have to remember that the M16 was a weapon made by a private concern looking to sell it to the military. It was a weapon looking for a problem. Vietnam provided that problem. Then the M16 provided a whole boatload of problems all by it's own, when the Army made it out to be less maintenance than a rock. A lot of early M16 adopters are dead because the damn thing wouldn't serve it's primary purpose, discharge bullets at the enemy.
The M16 was not a government project. Political concerns delayed getting the weapon fielded for at least 5 years, IIRC. Which I think was your point.
HAND.
-Chris
The BBC article makes two glaring errors in the first paragraph, after which I stopped reading.
1. The U2 is not of a stealth design, unless you consider all gliders as stealth aircraft. The U2 was disigned to fly adjecent to enemy territory, and not over it... which is why the russians had no problems shooting down Gary Powers in one when he "got lost".
2. The SR-71 is the fastest production plane ever built, and travelled at Mach 3+. It was designed to do one thing - go fast. The faster you go, the hotter you get. Good luck keeping a monsterous semi-molten speeding aircraft off of a radar screen, regardless of it's shape.
The "first" stealth aircraft was the F-117 which entered service in the 70's, followed by the B-2 which joined in the early 90's.
To claim otherwise is to talk out of your ass, which is normal for reporters I guess.
..with KNM Skjold. It's a similar vessel built with a similar material. It has a very low radar signature.
:P
:P
A bullet from the norwegian standard issue AG-3 would go straight trough the whole ship
They've also built mine-sweepers out of similar materials, to aviod magnetism setting off mines.
More info on KNM Skjold here.
Only the sweeds would go with NT
computers let you make more mistakes faster, with the possible exception of handguns and tequila.
The sentiment in Finland during the Cold War was that the Soviets very much wanted to invade and would have done that (WW3 or not), had the Finnish Army not offered enough perceivable opposition to make it not worth the trouble. Would NATO have bothered to stop them?
;) Agreed that everything possible short of voluntary ceding was done to not provoke anything, although occasionally top Finnish politicians got better at playing the Kreml game than their Soviet counterparts...
:) ]
(I served in the Finnish Army a decade back, and ever since WW2, the strategy and tactics up to Battalion level have all been based on essentially guerrilla warfare and exhausting the better knowledge of terrain. It was believed that the Soviets military planners saw sufficient virtue in that.)
So I'm suggesting it was at least a hunting knife in the hands of an agile guy on his home turf, give me that much
[And now I'm extremely happy to be living at a time when some of my best friends ever are from St. Petersburg and Moscow...
I think he meant the F-16, which took three years for the final design to be accepted after the release of the specs requirement. A boat is a much larger structure, but like the F-16, they were constructing the boat using different technologies already available and tailoring a production model to the swedish army's specs.
i wouldn't be so sure about that. the big gunboats were designed to stand up to the equivalent of their own weapons; artillery shells of a couple metric tons apiece, loaded with (oh, i dunno, at a wild guess) maybe a couple hundred kilograms of explosive charge each, coming in ballistically and relatively slowly, without active guidance.
the problem is, there are three major threats to surface vessels today, and none of them look like a big-gun barrage. surface-to-surface missiles come in at supersonic speeds, skimming the sea, and carrying much larger warheads than any arty shell would, with excellent guidance and accuracy - plus they can much more easily use shaped charges.
aerial attack is similar except usually from a higher angle; aerial bombs come in slower than missiles or shells, but again carry more explosives, and are also usually more accurate than arty. (well, okay, the U.S. navy doesn't have to worry about this one, but still.)
torpedoes are still slow (well, except for the supercavitating ones, but there's only one of those in service and the russkis aren't much up to attacking anybody anytime soon). however, they have evolved better guidance, better independent target-seeking, and better warheads than their ancient WW2 predecessors - which were already enough to sink a gunboat, with a couple good hits and some luck. good submarines are expensive, but the smaller littoral subs are plenty effective enough, and have seen at least some proliferation - maybe not to the miserable third-world ends of the earth the U.S. is likely to be attacking, but you never know.
yeah, if you're shooting artillery shells at your opponent's water line, a battlewagon is the thing to have. but modern-day navies, armies, air forces and submariners don't play that game any longer. a big sea-going artillery platform might still be nice to have for supporting amphibious operations and coastal assaults, just as the B-52 is still a very handy bomber even though its original nuclear mission is long obsolete. but it wouldn't necessarily have to be a WW2-era battleship just to lob shells towards land. they might well be just the wrong thing for that use, even, for reasons that might be as simple as economics. how many crewmembers did you need to run one of those things, again...?