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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   32650 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 7, 2025

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From the POV of a missile the carrier is essentially stationary, whatever direction it moves is irrelevant.

In terminal phases sure, but if the carrier is making a hard turn to move itself to a place where they suspect the missile won't be, I can see it. The carrier can do evasive maneuvers in the minutes between the missile being detected and the missile being anywhere near the carrier.

I mean, possibly..

https://old.reddit.com/r/navy/comments/1ka8nsu/updated_information_about_todays_hornet_loss/

In any case you'd expect the missile to be detected 300-500 km out. It turns out Houthis do have anti-ship ballistic missiles with ~500 km range, and there if you knew the missile flies straight after boost phase and you were aware the seeker has a limited detection area theoretically hard evading would have a point.

Other suggestions were this was a cruise missile and they turned hard to bring an extra CIWS unit into a position to intercept.

Thanks for the link, yeah makes sense. I was just making things up that felt plausible.

It still seems like a mistake to me bc..can't phalanx intercept 3 mach objects? Don't carrier groups have SM6 to get rid of this ? Worst case it hits, it's maybe a 250 kg warhead, probably not even armor piercing, would just smudge the deck no?

And this here would depend on the seeker having as strictly very limited range of searches so you could get out of it by sailing those few minutes.

But we don't really know anything firm and they won't say so.

Even if you have outer layer air defenses, you don't have a lot of time if they goof up and you need your CIWS. So maneuvering to unmask seems very plausible to me.

I'd also say that the US military, from what I can tell, embraces a mindset of utilizing the full spectrum of their capabilities for the sake of professionalism. Which is a DoD Powerpoint-y way of saying that the military likes to both test and practice things during real military environments, so making a radical maneuver to unmask in the face of even a nominal threat could very well be seen as a "best practices" thing.

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