Strategic Rocket Forces (RVSN): Discussion & News

There was a recent report that the strategic rocket forces C4IR system will be upgraded to a 4g network.

I think the purpose of reminding the US of the facts is to help them put into perspective that building ABM systems against threats that don't exist is making a real threat from very real ICBMs and real nuclear warheads that will work as advertised a bigger threat to the US.

Not that the US seems to have noticed.

Perhaps historians might look back and identify this warning as a clue to why there are no humans left and the world is ruled by the Dolphins.

I would have loved to have seen the US have a really good president that instead of setting a goal to beat the Soviets to the moon to get over not getting into space first (another misnoma... the US claims to have won the space race, when in actual fact it won the race to put a man on the moon... it lost the race to space in every regard... first satellite, first animal, first man in space, first man in orbit, first to take photos of the far side of the moon that is never visible from earth, first to land stuff on the moon etc etc were all Soviet victories...), that they had set the goal to do the opposite of their invention of consumerism... to develop green technology that will more efficiently use the resources we have and get us off our dirty energy dependencies on Coal and Oil and the technology to make plastic that wont pollute the earth for a million years.

It would take advantage of the American spirit with clear and achievable goals, and the result would probably be that we would already be on Mars now because the technology needed for humans to efficiently use less rather than more would mean we could set up self sufficient colonies in space and on the moon and all over the place.

Instead of the west dependent on foreign places for oil and other energy resources the US cold be making money selling these new green technologies to Africa and other countries that could use high tech solutions that don't pollute and create seas of rubbish like the consumer society the US is exporting does.

Opportunity missed. Could have been an opportunity for Obama, but he was made largely toothless because Republicans cared more about making Obama look bad than actually doing something that might benefit the people of the US.

No great surprise... all that money for bailouts for the banks and they are either hanging on to it or investing it in foreign countries to get the best return on their dollar. The US government should have made demands to ensure the money was invested in the US economy to create jobs and get things going, but for a slightly higher return they spent most of the money in China or they are hanging on to it for a rainy day and multi million dollar retirement packages for the CEOs.

BTW I think the world will be a much better place with more dominant countries, rather than one or two dominant players.

A strong China and India and Brazil and Russia and South Africa and other nations is a good thing in my opinion.

The US and the west seems to want a bunch of yes men and for the international bodies like the UN to be a rubber stamp tool to meet their needs... which is clearly not healthy for anyone.

With more voices being heard and more players able to punnish other players for breaking the rules, their might not be fewer wars, but there will be fewer safe wars like the US interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan which have done absolutely nothing to make Americans safer.

There was one interesting idea from Russia about a good cold war weapon that might apply, and that was a mini sub with a compact AIP nuclear reactor.

Imagine a small 1,000 ton or less mini sub with a nuclear power plant instead of a diesel plus batteries and electric drive.

The reactor is not a conventional reactor, it is of the type used to power satellites that are in the earths shadow too often to make solar panels useful. The reactor is like a big battery that generates a few hundred kilowatts for about 13 years.

The point is that with that power you can charge batteries and operate CO2 scrubbers, and once the batteries are charged you can operate on them in quiet conventional sub mode. Even when charging the batteries you are running quiet as there is no diesel engine.

The negative consequence is that your sub wont be fast, the positive consequence is that you have the underwater duration of a nuclear powered sub at much reduced cost.

The idea is basically have 30-40 of these mini subs with crews of 15-20 men with massive food reserves that can sail to the US coasts and operate there for a month at a time and then sail home... each sub will be armed with a few torpedos for self defence but as a main weapon payload these will be ballistic missile subs armed with a mini SLBM with a flight range of 3-4,000km. A load of 2-4 missiles that can pretty much all be fired at once from underwater means a very quiet sub to hunt with a deadly payload that has a short flight time to target on a depressed trajectory very very close to the US.

Note the nuclear power plant is safe and tested and has no moving parts and when it was fitted to a rather old SS the performance went from 350NM underwater range to 7,000NM underwater range, and the latter was mainly because the underwater speed is something like 4KNTs and they pretty much ran out of food... with one nuclear battery they had an unlimited supply of fresh water and air and continuous electrical power source of about 600 KW or so I believe.

With newer and more modern and efficient electronics and electrical hardware and newer power plants a future vessel would be a very interesting idea.

Of course they are currently developing an AIP for their new LADA class subs that uses fuel cell technology, except instead of using stored Hydrogen, which is a fire risk and an infrastructure problem at every port it operates from, it apparently uses chemicals drawn directly from diesel... which is carried on a diesel electric sub anyway.

nominal flight time of a ballistic missile traveling between the U.S. and Russia is about 30 minutes; it is 12 minutes for a missile launched by a submarine stationed off the coast

Not strictly true as it really depends where the submarine is and where its targets are... a submarine can legally operate in US economic waters... it can get to just over 12 miles from US soil before the US actually has any rights to take any action.

A bold, or clever captain could operate 12.5 miles off the coast in all electric super quiet mode for months on end... tests have shown that active sonar is needed to keep track of such a threat most of the time, so a Russian sub in Cuban or even Canadian or Mexican waters could enable less than 5 minutes warning depending on the target... much like the US Jupiter missiles in Turkey that created the Cuban missile crisis.

The Iskander is a tiny missile, they could develop a sub launched missile with similar design parameters that flys a non ballistic path with lots of manouvers that would make interception incredibly difficult as the missile speed would be quite high.

At the time of war , there is no economic water , U.S navy with ABM defences ,anti submarine forces will spread in any place that could reach thousands of miles to detect any threat,so there is no economic water line as i think,,

Normally a diesel electric is easy to track, because its diesel engines are noisy and when it is running on batteries it is slow.

The use of a nuclear battery means this new type of sub will still be quite slow, but will never have to surface and run diesel engines to charge up its batteries.

Such a vessel would be the ultimate stealth vessel... large SSNs are much faster, but their reactors make noise so they are not as quiet as a nuke electric sub.

In times of peace the subs would lurk undetected in coastal waters off the US... they could even make the sub with spherical internal pressure hulls to allow it to go down very deep (ie 1,000m or more).

In the event of a war a signal sent to the subs would initiate the conflict... so even if they have SSNs shadowing them the launch procedure would likely be fire the missiles and dive to 1,000m or deeper where US weapons can't follow.

Potentially more dangerous than stealth bombers, and you could reassign them to regime change roles with conventional warheads in different regions... they would be useful as land attack subs and of course with torpedoes as an anti shipping vessel.