Müs wrote:
Diamondeye wrote:
Screeling wrote:
How are they locating the ship? Can we not assume the ship is visible from the coast for them to hit? I don't see anything that indicates where the ship is other than the larger body of water.
That is a possibility, but the indications are that the ship is
at least 12 miles off the coast. I'd have to do some math to see how visible that really is. Also, there needs to be a way to pass targeting data to the missile. These things aren't designed to be fired off visual sightings; naval combat is expected to take place BVR as a general rule.
Assuming you can't do that sort of targeting with some binos, a boat, and a sat phone yeah?
I imagine that it's
possible, but not ideal. Most weapon systems have ways you can employ them if you really need to when you can't use them in the most preferred way; no one wants to be in combat going "welp, can't fire, **** it, let's eat an MRE." There's a thing called "bearing-only launch" that some types of anti-ship missiles can use, but I don't know if these ones had that capability, although I could look it up if they've released what type of missile it is anywhere.
The problem without electronic targeting (which evidently they did have) would be finding the range, assuming the ships were close enough to shore to be seen (the horizon for radar is slightly longer than the visual horizon). If you don't have bearing-only launch capability (which is not the best way to do things in the first place) you need to get the range somehow and that's fairly tricky looking at a ship out on featureless water unless you've got a real "seaman's eye". On land, its easier because you can look at other terrain features, especially if you have a map and get a pretty good idea how far away something is.
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