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Comment by jollybean | Hacker News Reader

As a former naval officer can you help us understand the capabilities here, as there are some odd details emergying:

1) Do ships truly have good defences against Harpoons etc. these days? If 1 or 2 were sent a ship is there a decent chance they'd be neutralized?

2) There's indications Ukraine was flying a drone to distract them possible have their radars not on the right thing, firing missiles from behind. Does this remotely make sense i.e. radar coverage? Or possibly even just overwhelming/confusing the ships operators a bit?

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Sure!

1) Let's look at the ship I am most familiar with, the NL Navy Zeven Provicien class (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Zeven_Provinci%C3%ABn-class...). It generally would have 2 types of anti air defense missiles, the SM-2 and the ESSM (both US-built, see wikipedia for their publicly available specs). Apart from that, there are electronic and flare/chaff passive countermeasures and finally a Goalkeeper CIWS for last-mile defense. I have little doubt that we would have been able to take on an attack of 2 Harpoon missiles. OTOH, the Neptune missiles are a lot more modern than the Harpoon and modern missiles have been known to do tricky things like having a pseudo-random noise generator generate corkscrew like maneuvers to evade the defensive fires. I'll also note that the Moskva was built in the early 80s (though refitted after the fall of the Soviet Union) and it was apparently quite stormy (so additional radar noise from wave reflections may have been a thing). All in all, IMHO it seems quite likely that they were indeed hit. Warships don't just suddenly catch fire, and especially in warzones when the opponent has sophisticated anti ship missiles it seems more likely that the fire was caused by a missile impact.

2) For older warships it could be possible. Usually they would have a rotating air warning radar and a dedicated targeting radar for missile guidance. An example would be the STIR (https://www.thalesgroup.com/en/stir-tracking-and-illuminatio...) on NATO vessels, basically a powerful narrowbeam radar on a servo pedestal. There would rarely be more than two or three on a vessel, so it might be possible to distract all of them with several drones. Modern naval radars use active phased array technology where the amount of tracked targets is no longer the bottleneck (in practice, you'd need dozens of missiles), but as mentioned before the Moskva is from the early 80s so they would probably not have this yet. So it could happen, especially in a stormy sea where the waves provide a lot of additional radar noise, but it is really only speculating without a lot more information than we have right now.

Thank you! Comments like these are the reason HN is so great.

Do you know what happens to explosives on sunk ships generally? Are they usually left at the bottom of the ocean, and could they have the potential to detonate?

And would a ship of that size carry nukes?

The Moskva is nuclear-capable, but I don't think anyone publicly knows whether it was nuclear-armed in this particular conflict. My bet would be no.

That said, if anyone decides to mount a recovery or salvage mission of any kind, it may be worth upgrading that "no" to a soft "maybe".

As far as I know, nobody has tried to retrieve conventional munitions from a shipwreck, and reasonably enough - they're not dangerous enough to be worth the trouble. Nations will go after lost nuclear warheads, though; indeed, Bayesian search theory saw significant development and interest to serve that purpose [1], and the CIA's been known to go to Bond-movie levels of trouble to the same end [2].

Granted, these were both First Cold War projects, but it seems like there's some degree of possibility that this use of "First Cold War" may eventually prove not to have been a somewhat silly joke, so...

[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/RTt59BtFLqQbsSiqd/a-history-...

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Azorian

So by the wonders of Bayes' formula we can conclude that the F-35 that sank in the South China Sea carried nuclear warheads?

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-60607784

No. The F-35 has modern tech that the enemy likely hasn’t (fully) seen.

That makes it worthwhile to try and prevent the enemy from seeing that tech.

No, but by the wonders of a moment's consideration we can surmise that leaving an example of the US's newest stealth technology, in the backyard pool of the power it's primarily designed to be used against, might not strike someone in the US Department of Defense as the world's cleverest idea.

(For what it's worth, I don't love linking to Less Wrong for this or any reason, but I couldn't as quickly find another reference for the point about Bayesian search theory. If not for the fact that I've seen it mentioned elsewhere in, let's say, less breathlessly wide-eyed technopositivistic contexts, I wouldn't have included it at all.)

That's basically my point. There are plenty of good reasons for salvaging the Moskva that are completely unrelated to whether it carried nuclear weapons.

I admit that I'm triggered by Less Wrong, though.

Understandable! I used the phrase "soft maybe" earlier with deliberation aforethought, but I can't blame anyone for overlooking that in favor of the giant red flag I also sent up in the same comment. (Not when there's still 98 years and change to go on my ban from Scott Siskind's Substack, anyway...)

With regard to the value of recovering Moskva, I suppose I don't know. It's not all that young a design, and evidently struggles against even subsonic antiship missiles. Not that that means it's worth nothing, of course, but I could see the possibility that to attempt a recovery would be throwing good money after bad. That said, you quite evidently have experience in this realm that I lack, and your analysis is thus certainly better informed than mine.

National pride could be a big reason, maybe it carried their newest hypersonic missile, or maybe it carried some other new technology.

And since it sunk in the Black Sea, depending on the exact location, it could have sunk in a relatively shallow area, where it is easy to do the salvage even if there is no really good reason.

The Israeli Navy, for example, spent several decades searching for its lost submarine INS Dakar. It was located in 1999 and then the conning tower was salvaged from a depth of 3,000m and placed in the Naval Museum.

Typically they would just be left there and (very) slowly degrade. As an example, the Dutch navy still clears hundreds of mines and unexploded bombs every year, left over from the 2nd world war. The explosives still work and are usually triggered with a small clearing charge so that they won't pose any danger to fishermen and the like.

So yes there is potential to detonate, but in general that does not matter a lot unless you are the unluckiest person in the world and happen to be right above it at the time. The explosive wave front expands in a sphere and so decreases in amplitude with the square of the distance to the origin. It loses lethal potential very quickly.

In some cases, everyone just kind of hopes the problem goes away.

SS Richard Montgomery comes to mind. Tsunami threat directly off the southern coast of England.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Richard_Montgomery

https://yewtu.be/watch?v=R9u41aeItss

> Warships don't just suddenly catch fire

Warships, just like everything else, do suddenly catch fire from time to time. Carelessness, negligence, sabotage, or bad luck could cause a fire that would sink a ship. Especially during a war, when munitions are being handled under pressure.

Not the most likely cause, but shit does happen.

BTW, By sabotage I don't mean some mustache twirling spy, but something more mundane, a disgruntled sailor, or a homesick one that wants to return to base as soon as possible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Miami_(SSN-755)#2012_fire

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/sailor-ryan-mays-court-martial-...

OK sure, they do. But on every warship I've ever been on (granted, none of them were Russian), every single person was a trained firefighter and very well aware that there was no fire brigade to call. In particular, setting fire to an ammunition store (as opposed to something more innocent but still vital like the galley) seems like an especially stupid thing to do. I'd also like to point out that every single missile system I've ever seen is not reloaded in any meaningful way at sea. Ships just pull into port an a crane lifts the replacement canisters into place.

Given the potential causes basically being [accident, self-inflicted sabotage, hit by missile], "hit by missile" seems by far the most likely given all the other information about this.

On the warships I've been on, there were only a few well trained fire fighters, and the rest were poorly trained on the job. I doubt if I would have been a very useful member of the damage control team had something happened.

Galley fires could happen anytime. During times of war, guns are being loaded, missile systems are turned on and tested to ensure they are ready. Somebody could easily screw up and cause a major fire. If missiles were fired by the Moskva, then a dud could have caused a fire, and so on.

I'm not claiming this is likely in this case, but it does happen.

Why not consider the sabotage option? A well controlled scuttle will ensure 100% survival for the perpetrators, sure beats dying of Vlady Putin's cancerous convulsions, plus you get to not commit war crimes... What's not to like?

> Warships don't just suddenly catch fire

Warships certainly do suddenly catch fire. They just don't usually catch fire in such a way that it's a casualty. DCS is usually competent enough to get things under control in reasonable amounts of time.

Normally the sudden catching fire is due to electrical problems, particularly when repairs are done by non-electrical teams who fail to follow the correct procedures or doubly so if they are battleshorting for one reason or another.

Now what happened here though definitely wasn't "suddenly catching fire" unless the crew were negligent and incompetent... which well actually looking at the performance of the Russian army that could actually be a possibility.

Russian/Soviet CIWS are mostly effective at targets over 50m. Harpoons are wave skimming. There was a plan to upgrade the Moskova with more modern CIWS but it didn't get funded.

Somebody needed a chalet instead

Ukraine claims to have used their Neptune's, not the new Harpoons.

This is more of an infotainment than proper data, but one could simulate it in DCS (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuMTVI65Myg for a rough demo what it can do).

Note that DCS is (at least partially) Russian, so maybe don't install it on a trusted machine.

Also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KeiOHgzic6Y, lol.

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