"Shkval Torps and Sonar" Topic

Calling all squids – Lion in the Stars, anyone else with knowledge on this…

A few assumptions here, for the sake of gaming:

1) The VA-111 Shkval torps work as advertised, especially the type 2 variant, with terminal guidance and a conventional warhead, vectored thrust to go along with the fin steering of the first. 200 knots max speed, and a range of 6-8 nm.

This thing lighting off rocket motors and establishing a supercavitation bubble is going to be noisy as heck, to put it lightly. (If I'm wrong here, let me know. It changes where I'm going next…)

Will that amount of noise being put out be enough to bounce off the hull of the launching sub, and provide a return to passive sonar? Essentially, active pinging itself, kind of?

(I'm not thinking of having these things be nuke-tipped – that makes for a very short game. Well, okay, shorter than a sub fight normally, and nukes foul sonar for everyone, for some time, from what I've read.)

My understanding is at such high speeds there is no terminal guidance from inside the bubble, unless the torp can slow once it is close to the target.

Of course, perhaps someone's come up with some tech I'm not aware of.

Yep, everyone in the same ocean will likely know it has been fired.

At ultrafast speeds, the bubble it travels in supposedly makes sensors deaf, dumb, and blind, which is why nuke tips are useful. Just need to get in roughly the same region as the target to use those.

Not sure on the sound bouncing, but the launch point should be easy to pinpoint, regardless, due to that. My guess is the loud noise may drown out any other echoes off other objects.

Underwater explosions foul the sonar in the region as well, for about 5 – 10 minutes, or so, from what I've read of WWII depth-charge attacks.

The launch transient alone will reveal the shooter, though it's not hugely directional. I was playing in a 1:1 game where two subs would drive towards a point in the ocean, first sub to get a hard firing solution shoots a water slug and call the bearing to target on the underwater telephone. Several times, the other boat would call a complete wrong bearing from where we were shooting (should have been a reciprocal bearing to what we were shooting, give or take a few degrees, but was on the completely wrong side of the ship!)

Flow noise plays hell with passive sensors, subs go deaf above about 20 knots, unless there's a *very* loud sonar.

I have no clue how the supercavitating torpedoes guide themselves, they're surrounded by a steam bubble and then water, with a hellacious flow noise at the interface.

As I understand it, the Shkvall were intended to force an attacking submarine to cut the guidance wire.

Thank for the input, gentlemen – always appreciated.

I have no clue how the supercavitating torpedoes guide themselves, they're surrounded by a steam bubble and then water, with a hellacious flow noise at the interface.

Yeah, I'm not sure how you could get one of those to do terminal guidance – I mean, I know how I'm doing things like this in the scifi version of the sub project, but the baseline 'real world' version, no idea.

I'll have more questions, I'm sure – I need some clarifications about the Snapshot rules (appropriately, about snapshots) from Robert Nott, and I'll bring those here when I know more.