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Two Sailors Injured When Drone Crashes Into US Navy Guided Missile Cruiser
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "CNN reports that two sailors were hurt when a drone malfunctioned and crashed into the Chancellorsville, a 567-foot Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruiser, as the ship operated off the Point Mugu area of Southern California in an area where BQM-74E aerial targets are widely used. The drone was being used to test the ship's radar tracking when it malfunctioned, veered out of control and struck the cruiser. 'No sailors were seriously injured, but two sailors were treated for minor burns,' the Navy said in a statement. 'The ship remains capable of operations. However, it did sustain some damage and will return to its homeport of San Diego to have the damage assessed. The Navy is investigating the cause of the malfunction.' Chancellorsville has one of the most advanced air defense systems in the Navy, and the ship regularly tests missiles off Southern California. In late August, Chancellorsville successfully used an SM-6 missile to hit a target drone off Point Mugu. The cruiser stocks a variety of missiles, including Tomahawks."
Its just a matter of time, keep firing on those drones and eventually they will fight back.
No. It was using components provided by a company call Cyberdyne Systems.
Those navy vessels are dangerous places to work, even in practice.
Time Bomber the Book coming soon.
There's a difference between not sinking when struck by an object and being perfectly invulnerable to everything.
These ships are designed to simply stay afloat and remain at least partially operational if struck, not have some kind of magic force field that stops even the paintwork being scratched if struck.
This is the real world, not fantasy land. A 3 ton aircraft crashing into a warship is still going to cause a fair bit of damage. We haven't invented completely invulnerable metal yet.
They are recoverable, remote controlled, subsonic aerial target, capable of speeds up to Mach 0.86...
This ain't no Predator, that's one fast sucker. No wonder it was able to put some hurt on that ship.
Actually - the drone was NOT being controlled by anyone aboard the ship. At least one article that I read specified that the drone was operated from a shore station. TFA doesn't make mention of that fact.
To put things in perspective - the ship's capability to detect and intercept stealth aircraft was being put to the test. The cruiser didn't have control of the drone, because that would have been "cheating". Instead, another command activity was responsible for the drone, ensuring that the cruiser's personnel had to do the actual work of spotting it, and calculating "kill" shots on it. Standard routine for ship's gunnery and missile exercises since long before I served.
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Chancellorsville has one of the most advanced air defense systems in the Navy[...]
But it could not defend itself against a runaway drone. Very impressive.
Seriously, that drone was *supposed* to be in the area. You don't sail around in peace time with the system on hair trigger and shoot at everything you can or cannot identify just because it it gets close. You need to be REALLY sure before you shoot down something or really bad things can result.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Define "armored". Then, refer to Jane's or any other listing of combat ships you might think of. You will note that we no longer have "armored" ships. No "pocket battleships", no "heavy cruisers", nothing of the sort. We're discussing a "guided missile cruiser" here, not a WWII heavy combat ship.
Naval doctrine dropped armor in exchange for speed and stealth well before I was born, in the latter 50's. The Marines have more armor on an Abrams tank than any ship of the line has.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
It wasn't a 3 ton drone. It was most likely a BQM-74, which weighs 600 lb empty. They've been flying them since 1965. It doesn't really have a lot to do with Predators, Reapers, etc.
Exactly... by the time these boats get hit my a modern weapon, it's over. It's kind of like how Cannons made castle walls pointless.
...the ship's capability to detect and intercept stealth aircraft was being put to the test.
I'd say they found it and I suppose you could say the Chancellorsville "intercepted" it too.
It's a 3 ton low speed aircraft crashing into an armored cruiser by definition designed to be shot at with things like shells and missiles and bombs and torpedoes. Surpising.
The BQM-74E has a gross weight of 549 pounds, not 3 tons, and it can fly around 600mph. I am certainly not a physicist, but even I can remember p=mv. If the mass is 249kg, and the velocity is 260 m/s, then the momentum is around 65,000 Netwons per second. In comparison, a bullet will typically carry less than 1 Newton per second of momentum. So yeah, if you get by 65 kilonewtons per second, there's going to be some damage.
A 3-ton object moving at the same speed would have over 700 kilonewtons per second of momentum.
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