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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.
First off, I am not sure I would call an NT system "state of the art".
Well, the article says the computers are state-of-the-sart, not the operating system.
However, I doubt they're running NT 4.0 in any case. Windows 2000 or Server 2003, most likely, and those are simply not operating systems to be laughed at.
The coolest voice ever.
Why does every new thing have to have a X in the name? Being in parenthesis, its almost like an after thought.
Maybe it signifies that this ship will also be run by Microsoft software... A Beowulf cluster of X-Boxen!!!
In most cases, the reporters are refering to the monitoring/ high level control software (SCADA). It should not be that bad as long as NT is not controlling anything lower level and not connected anyhow to the outside...
If they really use windows for this kind of operation, I am not that surprise they are using NT rather than win2k/xp. The reason is simple. The ship was commissioned a while ago... At that time, winxp may not even come out, and win2k was not that stable. They need something that have an okay track record and reasonable stable. NT is a rational choice (although I would probably state away from MS OS for this sort of thing)....
The US has a stealth ship. I read about it in Wired and saw something on TV awhile back on it. The ship is black, floats on 2 pontoons, travels pretty quick, leaves no wake, is black and uses the same stealth technology as the stealth fighter and bomber.
It is housed in the San Fran area and is inside a large barge that can open up to let it out for testing but no one can see it coming and going.
Evolution or ID?
Well, the security of poorly administrated Windows systems is dubious. But none of the 25 Windows 2000 machines in this office has ever gotten a virus in the past three years...basically, since I took over as administrator.
Why? First thing I did was install a firewall. Second thing I did was disable unneccessary services. Third thing I did was patch them regularly.
And that's it. I am the only admin for the company and I spend maybe two hours a month working on Windows (most of which is spent convincing the Exchange server to run a little bit longer). Why is Windows security so bad? Because most Windows administrators are lazy and would prefer to let things go for a few weeks than test the effects of the patch themselves.
And as for Windows systems NOT being state-of-the-art...would you like a list of hardware that had Windows support YEARS before Linux got it? You probably don't, it's quite long and includes such obscure technologies as "USB." Not dissing on Linux overall (and I realize support for new tech has gotten MUCH better), but if you're a company that needs support for cutting edge technology and you don't want to write your own drivers, sometimes Windows is the only option. All that bloat? Yeah, some of it is Minesweeper and that retarded dog, but some of it is also features.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
Exactly what USE would these people get out of building such a ship? This seems to me like a completely waste of money. Can you name any recent naval battles in the past 20 years or so that warranted having a stealthed ship that would not be picked up on radar?
And please, i'm not talking about deploying troops or anything like that. This serves basically one purpose for the swedish navy R&D guys = We're bored, look what we did with your money!
Carbon fiber too.. all they need now are some vinyl stripes, a big fartcan muffler, and TYPE-R on the side, and I bet somebody in the states would buy it.
http://www.reserve-info.de/marine/schiffcz/visby.h tm
j pg
http://homepage.tinet.ie/~steven/images/visby3.
Ships made out of aluminum are hugely vulnerable to damage from a relatively cheap cruise missile, as proved in the falklands (was that the sheffield? One of you brits or argentines help me out here).
carbon fiber, although lighter and etc etc with the article, will not be able to take much damage at all before it is ineffective, it just won't. I know the *idea* is to be stealthy so you don't take damage, but as soon as you release one shot of anything, your position is out there.
Navies in general are becoming less and less relevant with the advances in air warfare. They are OK until you really have to fight, they are good as offensive platforms with an enemy that has little in the way of ordance they can shoot back with, but as soon as it approaches some sort of even-ness, ships start to lose. The carrier battle group is the last effective sort of naval enterprise for actual *fighting* on any realistic scale, and that is primarily because it has it's own aircap and satellite remote sensing and protector subs set out in a perimeter. And only because they haven't been used in a nuclear environment, once nukes start getting used, well, missiles and nukes are still hard to stop, you lose. Right now, a large enough swarm of much cheaper sea skimming cruise missiles can overload any defenses and inflict significant damage, that is why they are trying hard to get the laser weapons operational. It's interesting to see where this will go, sucks they are doing it though. The planet (very generally speaking, applies to all nations and peoples) is still run by at best a few hundred seriously intelligent and seriously insane megalomaniacs, and all these other millions of people still "follow their orders".
OK, tell me how Sea Sparrows and CIWS will help you sneak up onto a suspected smuggling vessel?
This ship isn't built for offense. Heck, with a fibre glass hull it's not even built for defence. It's a large patrol boat, just like you've theorised. When you're a politically neutral country, with nothing but peaceful nations around you, why would you need anything more?
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Not only is the predated (by a long shot) by the US Navy Sea Shadow program in the mid-80s (as pointed out by another poster), but also by the French 'La Fayette' stealth frigates (circa 1988). Modified versions of that ship are also in use by both Saudi Arabia and Taiwan.
Okay, point taken. (I'm the grandparent.) Agree about Sweden's position. What with the Whiskey on the Rocks and everything...
:)
About the blue swastika (note, not placed diagonally like the Nazi variant), it was in use ever since 1917 when Finnish Air Force was founded. IIRC, it came from the coat-of-arms of the Swedish count von Rosen who donated the first aeroplane. (Remembering that swastika is an ancient Germanic symbol.)
The alliance with Nazi Germany is indeed a sad fact. (Then again, there wasn't any other help to choose from. By the time the Soviet Union attacked, Great Britain and France, who had actually been making real arrangements to help Finland in the imminent attack, were more than busy with Germany.)
However, there was an occasion when the Germans (was it Goebbels on a visit to Finland?) demanded comphrehensive information about Jews in Finland. They were tactfully denied any; instead the documents of the visiting German delegation were intercepted, and families potentially in danger were warned and even relocated out of Helsinki. IMHO this incident is a faithful portrait of how Finland reacted to the "Nazi" part of Nazi Germany.
Okay, I have to be off now... Thanks for your kind compliments (I'm hopelessly patriotic), I apologise for my grumpiness in the grandparent, and hope you get something useful out of this quick response.
And, the USS Ranger became "The Danger Ranger";
Kitty Hawk became "The SHITTY KITTY"
USS Brooke was nicknamed "The Broke-dick Brooke", since she reputedly was always having problems getting underway...
Ahh, the affectionate names we came up for our ships.
My first ship was the USS Flint (AE-32), an ammo ship, named after Flint, Michigan. Many ammo ships have names like Pyro, Haleakala, etc. We nicknamed ours "Flexible Flint", since our then-CO, a Commander, was charging hard for Rear Admiral. Seems we got volunteered for almost anything ServGru One in Alameda had going.
My second ship was USS John A. Moore (FFG-19), nicknamed "The Jammin' John", since we seemed to charge hard for stuff. Our main space seemed to be spiffy, and that might be why, when as a NRF (Naval Reserve Force) ship, we were selected for advanced deployment to the Gulf in Nov 1987, from a pool of several other FFGs. But, we were given official notice maybe July. We got there.
But, remember the Yorktown, which, while using winbloze NT, went broke-dick in the Atlantic and had to be towed in disgrace, thanks to a divide by zero error. Has to STILL be embarassing for the USN.
As for finding the stealth ship... Just fly some RPV (drones) that drop or spew their own dronelets. Build a mesh over the target area. Anything that moves is going to be found, even small wave caps. Same principle as to how the stealth planes over Iraq were detected years ago: A bunch (or few) innocuous cell phone towers were built in strategic locations. The towers were sort of like inverse radars: Always on, but any aircraft passing thru created disruptions in the "mesh", giving away the location of the low-flying aircraft.
If enough "mesh-making" dronelets are spewed over an op area, NO navy, not even the vaunted USN would stay invisible except in the presence of extremely foul weather and the absence of aircraft or RORSAT. Maybe the subs would be the only hard-to-detect ships, but blue-green laser and other improvements might upset that advantage in some scenarios.
David Syes
"TAO" (not the real one, just the nick-named one, due to my on-the-spot scenarios, such as: "Why do the Russians need to TORPEDO a carrier? Why not just swarm-lob low-yield nukes in the direction of the carriers, warp the flight deck, and make it tough for aloft birds to land. A CV without a flight deck is almost USEless..."
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
The link referenced in the /. article seems to be dead, but Google found it's new location.