Why Did Torpedoes Go Out of fashion as anti surface ship weapons?

Read this. Good book.

 

Great book.

I thought a second, similar book was coming out years ago though.

 

Radar is only line of sight if you totally ignore the ability to do atmospheric bounce.

 

Not ignoring about it, just forgetting about it.

 

1. Russians do have a hard kill antitorpedo torpedo. It is short range and rocket engined. Done testing intercepts.

2. Shkval - 200km/h is no game changer. It is an interesting piece of tech, but no more. It is a valid doomsday weapon to send a number of nukes into the CV circle. If you want a conventional kill, with a conventional warhead, a conventional torpedo is more practical.

3. Radar is not a just a Line of Sight when you are talking about sea skimmers. Radar is not capable of operating on very small altitudes. The narrow beam of radar that is tracking a sea skimmer lets say at 5km from a ship, will be illuminating the water weaves behind the target (because the radar itself, is higher than the sea skimmer), receive the return signal, and try to de-select the second echo signal (from the sea waves) from the first echo signal (from the sea skimmer)(dhopler comes in play). This will decrease radar effectiveness and precision in many times.
The side lobes of the signal, reflecting from sea waves are going to jam the picture in the same manner as an active jammer does.
Radar horizon means not only geometrical Earth curve shadow, but also that 15-10-5m alt, where the radar is 4x\10x\100x times less effective that in “Above horizon mode”.
The higher you raise the radar antenna, the more range it will give you, the more trouble you will have detecting the fast moving \ small cross section sea skimmer.
The second issue is with the intercept missiles. If you launch It vertically, it will be observing the sea skimmer from high above, which means it will see the water weaves, which might easily throw of tracking and make the initial lock useless.

4. The beyond the horizon radars employ reflection of a radar wave from ionosphere. These are very inprecise. Only stationary. Useless for detecting small objects, useless on ships.

5. The signal that you heard in the radio, and which you can catch now, belong to a list of government services. A sub raises its mast, listens on a certain wavelength, the signal is there, all OK. The signal is not there – means that we are at war, break radio silence - request orders (And alike). The signal itself can be garbage.

6. You can catch the radar 10x further than its detection range if you know the signal form (If you know what you are looking for). Otherwise it is likely to get lost in modern extremely crowded radio environment. But if you do know the signal form, you can catch it 100 times further, 1000 times further, from Mars and Pluto.