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Sonic Torpedo Defense
dylanduck writes "How do you defend a ship against torpedoes? According to the US Navy, you line the hull with loudspeakers and blast the incoming missile with such a devastating blast of sounds that it explodes." When asked about the possible ecological effects on marine life the military had no comment.
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When asked about the possible ecological effects on marine life the military had no comment.
We care... why? My guess is that a large sonic blast is going to be a lot less harmful than a torpedo detonating. But that's just me.
We need to be cautious, as Britney Spears at 200db could have a devistating effect on the entire oceanic ecosystem.
Same thing happens to my brain whenever I hear some people speak.
Speaking is NOT communication
as if the explosions, leaking fuel, strong currents, and risk of nuclear waste exposure weren't enough, now marine wildlife have to deal with loud sounds! oh, the humanity!
Everyone on the ship will have all you can eat seafood for weeks.
Bonus if you get some giant squid.
2 years and no mod points. Join reddit. Because openness is good.
When asked about the possible ecological effects on marine life the military had no comment.
Who cares? Fish vs. people, and not in an abstract, "this could hurt the environment long term, for mere economic benefit" way. Either a few fish will die, or a ship full of hundreds or thousands of sailors could be damaged or destroyed.
And then theres the ecological damage from a sunken ship (petrol fuel, nuclear reactors possibly) that would also harm the environment long term, plus the explosion itself will be pretty darn loud.
-- My Sig is a P228.
To get best results they need gold power cables at 1000 for each speaker :)
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I predict 3 types of comments
1. "Won't someone please think of the Whales!!??"
2. "I bet they'll be playing *insert flavour of the month popstar here* LOLS!!"
3. "REPOST!!!" (Regardless of whether this is a repost or not).
Cus there's no way that a torpedo exploding against the side of an Aegis cruiser might be a tad on the loud side too.
They should train dolphins and manatees to ram the torpedoes head on far enough away from the ship that no damage is done. Oh yeah, and some sea turtles to clear the way through mine infested waters!
"Well, they die....you stupid liberals..."
OEÉæÁÄZÝÈA OEÉæé_CX
When asked about the possible ecological effects on marine life the military had no comment.
:)
I think the whole point is to protect the lives of the marines on the ships.
RandomAndInteresting.comdefending the world from stupidity since 1979
Of course they had no comment, because the intention is to stop the dolphins with dartguns on their head!
"Scientists have proof without certainty; Creationists have certainty without proof" -Ashley Montagu
Would this damage submarines sonar or other listening devices?
Of course, as you say, the Navy would rather avoid having lots of sailors killed also, and sunken ships are a toxic mess, but the amount of sound it takes to trash a torpedo is a lot more than the amount you get from the torpedo's explosion.
Bill Stewart
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The last attacked ship I can remember was the General Belgrano during the war in the Falklands or "Malvinas" in Spanish.
"We all know Linux is great...it does infinite loops in 5 seconds." -- Linus
Because nobody at Slashdot ever bothers to read the article or know anything about the various issues involved before commenting, let me point out that the system is NOT for submarines, but for surface ships.
Also, the impact of high energy sound waves is significantly greater than most people here seem to think. They carry for miles underwater, and can cause severe problems in all manner of marine life. It's something to consider.
Actually, being an acoustician, I would be willing to bet that they would use a phased array of loudspeakers. With the correct phasing of the speakers, some pre-determined "point" in the water could be driven to very high sound pressure levels, while the remaining ambient noise, while still loud, may not be all that dangerous. This would occur as a transient excitation from the various loudspeakers propagates away from the source and coalesces at the point in the water where the torpedo is located, the point where a very large pressure spike is generated. There are plenty of smart researchers in the navy and I have my doubts that they would use anything other than a phased array. And by the way, this is the same methodology that they use to destroy kidney stones.
Name: Mr. Anon E Mouse; SSN: 555-55-5555
A runaway nuclear reactor from a sinking vessel is NOT good at all. That's one of the reasons for SCRAM switches. (also because such runaway reaction would melt a big hole in the keel on the way down)
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
The possible ecological effects? Only liberal leftist red-commie gay pinko tree-hugger types would ask such a rediculous question, or even care. We're talking about saving the lives of human beings, but of course humans serve no purpose other than polluting and ruining the ecosystem of an otherwise perfect world, so they should be killed, right? Especially those red-blooded patriotic American military humans -- they're the worst kind, you know!
Never mind that the torpedo exploding would make a lot of noise, too, but so long as we can kill some humans in the process, that's an acceptable trade-off, right? Yeah, we get it: animals good, people bad.
You people are sick. My better idea is to strap together a bunch of liberals and line the perimiters of the ships with them to server as a cushion/barrier. Let the libs give their lives in the process of "saving the wales" if they really believe in that so much. If the libs think its such a good idea to sacrifice human beings in order to save the precious ecosystem, let it be the libs who are sacrificed!
They aren't trying to trick the torpedoes into thinking they've hit the ship. The article suggests that the shock wave is supposed to be so strong that it'll cause actual physical damage to the incoming torpedo. They figure that the damage will be sufficient to either destroy the torpedo outright or at least cause enough damage to break vital components.
-GameMaster
Rules of Conduct:
#1 - The DM is always right.
#2 - If the DM is wrong, see rule #1
...we use the Britney on 'em this time Capt'n
So did you wake up today saying "I'm going to proove myself to be an idiot today - not once but twice over!"
I hope that was your goal because otherwise you really didn't get much done today.
On "Shiny missiles". How do you make a perfect mirror? Oh you can't? The mirror material has to absorm some percentage of the energy coming from a laser whcih thus vaporises said material (an dmissile skin), not to mention teh issues with keeping the object perfectly shiny in flight?
On your "Nerf Missile". At what point do you tell you've hit somehting if you're behind enough layers of foam to pad yourself against running into something that feels like a brick wall? What wall is real and what is not when the impact of hitting it is the same? Do you just simply not explode ever and hope the ship you were aiming at becomes Rather Alarmed at the hurling of nerf objects at it? I guess that's cheaper than real torpedos.
And tehre are at least two moderators out there that can hang thier heads in shame as well. I'll see y'all in Metamod along with the rest of the people that udnerstand basic physics.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
> This is like shooting down missles with lasers; just make a shiny
> missile and the light bounces off without damaging it.
Utterly ineffective. At intensities high enough to be useful the electric field of the laser pulse rips electrons out of the surface of the target. This creates a plasma which absorbs more energy from the pulse, explodes, and blows a piece out of the surface. It makes no difference at all what material the target is made of or how it is polished. This effect has been experimentally verified.
It's also how LASIX works.
> You can probably render the sound blast torpedo killer worthless
> just by skinning the torpedos in cheap appropriately sound
> absorbing material. Perhaps a derivative of foam or rubber.
Failed freshman physics, did you?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I bet those of you making the "but what about the animals" comments would care less about the animals if you had friends or relatives serving on a ship that could be a torpedo target.
I love animals, I'm all for ecology and protecting wildlife, etc etc. I own a big chunk of land, and I don't cut a bush or move a bolder without thinking about what it might do to the animals...and 99 percent of the time, I let the animals win. But when the choices are limited to 'humans live but animals die' and 'humans die but animals live', I'll take choice number one every time, and with no regrets what so ever.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
The torpedoes in the next war won't be WWII slow: Supercavitation or Warp Drive Underwater
(||) Nehmo (||)
As a former naval submarine lieutenant, this is pretty interesting... Indeed, our modern torpedoes (ADCAPs) travel at high speed, track on both passive and active acoustics, and rely on active ranging to detonate at an ideal distance under the ship. That's right, under -- torpedoes do the most damage by detonating a small distance (on the order of a couple dozen feet) below the center of a hull. The void formed from the detonation causes the target's hull to buckle/crack/shatter inward due to its own weight. A single ADCAP can in theory sink an entire carrier, but sub captains typically shoot two b/c the carrier is typically the primary objective. The kind of acoustics described in the article would be tough for even an ADCAP to work around, not to mention it takes our contractors many years to turn around software upgrades to the weapons that would filtering to increases its chances. Then again, good this is a DARPA project, meaning it'd take 5+ years to see any deployment in the fleet anyway.
The most cost effective anti-torpedo weapon a surface ship can have is the nixie. It's a towed (inflated, I believe) thing that trails the ship with ship-signature acoustics running on it, sucking up any torps on the ship's trail. Given their low lost, low maintenance, and (extremely!) high effectiveness they're the best deal in town.
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I am a former sailor in the US Navy, my particular job was working with the Aegis weapon systems. Just because the system is installed on board doesn't imply that it gets used during a simulation or exercise. We have missiles and guns but very rarely ever fire a live round during training. We have electronic counter measures but those do not get set off either. Why waste the equipment and materials if they can be simulated via computer instead? But then how do you know the stuff works? Every bit of equipment has a planned maintenance schedule that is closely followed. This includes tests based daily, weekly, monthly, yearly etc. They are also very aware of the potential dangers, more so than you that is clear. The Navy is very careful about operating withing specific guidelines when it comes to the environment, they observe all of the whale habitats along the US costal waters and any other environmentaly sensative areas.
I've asked him about how powerful the sonar was and to give you an idea how dangerous it is he told me about some standard submarine procedure. Basically, if a submarine comes under threat from enemy frogmen or divers, the defence the sub has is to turn the active sonar on and start pinging. If a diver is underwater and within a couple hundred yards, he will die from the intensity of the sound under water. In other words the sonar is VERY powerful. Trust me a 200db blast will likely give someone a very bad day if they are near by.
and currently stationed by iraq. While I say the more defensive weapons the better, if we have to do it at the expense of making all the whales extinct I say its not worth it. This isnt about saving plankton here, this is about not accidently blowing away the eardrums and thus killing thousands of whales and other marine creatures. There have been experiments with this technology and coincidentally there were massive beachings as the marine mammals could no longer navigate correctly. There are billions of us, I can't say the same for the whales.
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...how do you counter nuclear depth charges and torpedoes? Hope the range on this system is decent...these bad boys kill with the same shockwave principle...they don't need to impact a ship/sub at all to be effective.
It takes just a moment and an action to destroy. It takes some time and thought to create.
The only thing you need to worry about is infrasound which can travel long distances and can disrupt the communication signals of many marine animals (after all how do you think whales communicate with each other).
As for the higher range of frequencies (ultrasound) which have shorter range because the energy of the waves is absorbed faster can perhaps theoretically be effective against targeted projectiles. One of the main problems with acoustic weapons is aiming, but with this system the idea is to basically have an array of boom boxes around the ship shooting out sound in all directions.
Also, sound travels faster in water because it dissipates slower than in air so that is why this technology could have some potential underwater, while a weapon above ground would not exactly be a counter to an ICBM nuclear missile attack.
Just about anyone with a relatively big boat has to repaint the hull with antifoul paint every couple years. Not really that nasty, now, it's simply marine paint mixed with a bunch of (correct me if i'm wrong) aluminium dust. The older stuff used primarily copper, which had a few adverse effects on sea life.
Apparently some of the Cajuns down south use cayenne pepper, and they claim it works the best, but hey, to a cajun, cayenne pepper's good for damn near anything.
The navy these days has actually been using some pretty wierd coatings for ships, although mainly subs, in order to reduce friction.
My other Sig is
If this is to blow torpedoes out of the water, I've got one question. If anyone's running sonar, and you blast a torpedo out of the water, wouldn't you tend to alert everyone else around you??
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
When asked the question a second time the military man looked up and said loudly "what, did you say something?"
Oh, right. Because we would *hate* to have a loud noise in the ocean instead of thousands of gallons of fuel oil or a ruptured nuclear reactor from a sunk ship.
Brought to you by the same retards who nixed nuclear power for environmental reasons, forcing the country to depend on burning coal.
All I know about naval warfare, I've read from Tom Clancy books, but...
Isn't blasting the ocean with a massive sound wave a pretty good way to advertise yourself to every submarine and ship within 5,000 km? Obviously, at least one enemy has a good track on you at that point, but we're talking about basically shooting up a flare for any interested parties. Wouldn't that completely compromise any convoy that a navy ship might be protecting, to say nothing of a valuable carrier group? Even sending an identifiable signal in just one direction would be pretty inscrutable behavior from one of todays stealthy ships.
Seems to me that this system is not likely to be used any time soon. Of course, tested is another matter...
To say nothing of the sonarman's eardrums.
I was about to post that there were only two nuclear powered non-carrier surface ships in the Navy (the two my father helped build), but my favorite source indicates there were nine nuclear-powered guided missile cruisers (CGN's), the last of which were decommissioned in 1998.
IIRC, the US built one proof-of-concept nuclear-powered merchant ship (the Savannah) in the 60's, and the Soviet Union built at least one nuclear-powered ice-breaker.
Slashdot: a convenient dumping ground for the trivia that clutters our minds...
P.S. I have to add that pausing to contemplate environmentally safe warfare is laughable; this is a classic case of wanting to treat the symptom instead of the disease.
I guess the environmental whackjobs think it's better to have a nuclear reactor smashed into a million pieces instead. Not the mention the conventional fuel, and all the other non envionemntally friendly material on a ship spilling into the ocean.
Prof. Farnsworth - "Oh a lesson in not changing history from Mr I'm-My-Own-Grandpa!"
I'm 90% sure I know what this is for. I'm not a naval warfare specialist, but I am a scientist with an interest in these things.
In the 1990s, the Russians developed the prototype for what would later be termed the Shkval or Squall supercavitation torpedo. Knowing the Russians, the Chinese probably have them too.
Cavitation is a phenomena where a body moving through the water pushes the water out of the way so fast that it creates bubbles around the object (fast = lower pressure = water vaporization = bubbles). You may have heard of propellers cavitating - that's where small bubbles of water vapor form then burst on the low pressure side of a prop blade, causing lots of noise and even damage to the blade when they implode.
Supercavitation, on the other hand, is an intentional phenomena where a blunt-nosed object is shot through the water, creating low pressure vortices on the sides. Air or exhaust gases are injected into these vortices, creating a static "bubble" around the object that drastically reduces friction - perhaps up to an order of magnitude. You have to fire these things at about 50mph or greater to start the supercav effect going, effectively "handing off" the bubble to the torpedo, which then sustains it.
The numbers on these torpedoes are incredible: we're talking about a 300mph torp carrying a 460lb warhead with a range in excess of 7000 yards. That's the tame version - others carry nukes. In other words, carrier-killers.
Supercavitation torpedoes, as you can imagine, are incredibly noisy and easy to detect - you just can't get away from them because they're so fast. This sonic projector essentially sends a high-energy single pulse through the water directed at an incoming torpedo. That pulse probably wouldn't be able to crack a torpedo - you'd probably need on the order of 250-500PSIG overpressure to do that, (scuba tanks contain 2000PSIG regularly). You wouldn't be able to detonate the high explosive, because you need a wavefront speed above the detonation velocity, which for C4 is about 7000m/s (much slower than the speed of sound in water, 1482m/s).
I don't have the time right now to spin the equations, so I could be wrong.
However, you would be able to disrupt and dissipate that bubble around an incoming supercavitation weapon with a high-energy sonic pulse. Break that bubble, and the torp stops dead in the water because it can't reform the bubble around itself. If it mistakes that sudden stop for a ship hull - boom.
'Be always mindful, even when ditch-digging.' --D. T. Suzuki
When asked about the possible ecological effects on marine life the military had no comment.
They got asked this because of the concern with low frequency sonar. But the comparison is probably not all that relevant. Low frequency goes for ever, hence the humpback whale's use of it for communication. So a low frequency sonar can hurt a whale that's quite some way away.
The anti-torpedo weapon, on the other hand, uses shock waves. Shock waves are mostly made of high frequency components which die out quickly. So probably only those whales in the immediate vicinity are in trouble. Just do all the testing in a "desert" part of the ocean, where there's no life.
Also, I thought that particular weapon wasn't suited to non-nuclear use because it can't steer well inside it's bubble and it's so noisy it can't home on a target. Ah, I see from this article initial versions were unguided, current versions have an autopilot, and future versions will slow to conventional speeds for terminal guidance.
The thing is, you need to do a cost/benefit analysis.
Answer these questions:
When was the last time a US ship was hit with a torpedo? Vietnam maybe? Korea?
How often would this system be tested on various vessels, during war games and such? (Answer, a lot. The navy doesn't usually have a lot of work to do, so they practice. A lot.)
What's the impact on marine mammals, and over what range? (they have a long history of being injured by loud noises, sensitive auditory systems and all)
Ok, so if you make half or 2/3 of an already endangered whale population so deaf that they can't find a mate or beach themselves on rocks they can't "see", pushing them over the edge to total extinction, is that worth protecting a few of our ships from a weapon type that hasn't even been deployed in 30-40 years?
I don't know the answer, but caution is never a bad idea.
m-
You catch enchiladas by picking them up behind the head and holding them underwater until they don't kick anymore -VeGas
Next time I'm on a submarine under fire though, I won't be wishing a torpedo away based on some ideals of pacifism.
I will satisfy your request by calling you short-sighted. Humans on submarines are an expensive luxury. Humans have sailed these subsurface warships for over a hundred years, but it is unlikely they will sail them for a hundred more. I think we all hope that whales will be around for at least the next hundred and more years. Technology that threatens their existence while preserving something we won't need much longer is an unacceptable tradeoff.
Submarines' primary value is providing an unpredictable launch location for missles. In short order, we should be able to accomplish the same with drones more cheaply and effectively. Without life support overhead, these drones should be able to operate indefinitely underwater without surfacing. This acoustic detonation project is a waste of tax dollars supporting a system that has a limited lifespan.
Seth
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Not everybody is a Carl Sagan or Martin Luther King. These people are volunteers who climbed onto a war ship of their own free will. If you care so much about them then why didn't you talk them out of it?
There's no shortage of replacement for human beings. A species or environment on the other hand can be lost forever.
No sig today...
You're right. I air-to-surface torpedos are kind of over these days. It's all about air to surface missles now.
My big complaint on this is it's an example of the military's tendency to spend where there isn't a real-world problem. This problem climbs all the way up into the executive branch. In his first term, George W. Bush decided to pull the US out of the ABM treaty. This was because our government wanted the freedom to develop technology to destroy ICBMs. Even after Sept. 11th, the US government wasn't convinced that low-tech is the more plausible threat. The entities who will actually do us harm aren't going to invest in complex systems that send explosive material guided by computers and lasers.
In Iraq, our blind eye to low tech has been exploited with roadside bombs that penetrate the thinly-armored underbelly of our troop transport vehicles. Same with the tens of thousands of RPG launchers menacing our soldiers. More recently, the military has improved the shielding beneath these vehicles and figured out better ways to protect against RPGs. The current method is to erect galvanized tin around tanks and APCs so that the RPG will detonate outside the vehicle. It's a directed charge, so without an impact, it causes exponentially less harm when exploded beside the vehicle. Here's a description of an electric force-field concept to protect against RPGs.
Anyway, I hate to see money misdirected at defending against implausible scenarios while very real threats abound. And to sacrifice whales for the cause is icing on the cake of waste.
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!