HMS EAGLE in the Falklands
- Thread starter flasheart
- Start date
Awesome update. I too need to know what happened to the last 2 super etendards?
The real question is how many Exocet Missiles do they have left, it's either one, or two depending on which Super Etendard crashed into the sea.
Rather enjoying the TL, particularly the Argentine POV.
Even if Eagle has to suspend flight ops, Invincible on its own is adequate to fend off the remnant of the Argentine air force.
Eagle had an armoured deck (one of the last to have one) so it depends on the kind of crash. If its a gear collapse/ploughed the deck that's "Sweepers man your brooms" if its a barrelled right in and exploded then that's more worrying.
The big question is how early or late the crash has occurred in the recovery cycle. If it’s one of the first aircraft to attempt a landing and it leaves the flight deck unusable, that could mean the loss of most of the air group - presumably it would be totally impossible to recover any aircraft to Invincible or Hermes, and even if any somehow could manage to land they would be unable to launch again.
The landings had been going on for a while as the post mentions the officers at the briefing had tuned them out. Hopefully that means most birds made it back to the barn.
Nice update.
While the British have sustained casualties this battle has ultimately been far too costly for the Argentines. There air force is decimated and out of the fight as if they send them again then it's very likely that none of them will survive to return to Argentina. Which means that the British to all intents and purposes have air superiority as well as sea superiority over the Falkland Islands the defeat of the Argentines garrison is now really only a matter of time.
While the British have sustained casualties this battle has ultimately been far too costly for the Argentines. There air force is decimated and out of the fight as if they send them again then it's very likely that none of them will survive to return to Argentina. Which means that the British to all intents and purposes have air superiority as well as sea superiority over the Falkland Islands the defeat of the Argentines garrison is now really only a matter of time.
Nice summary - I wish some of my past students could have put it as concisely!
(No need to get into timing cycles of the transmitter/receiver, pulse duration and/or PRF right now...
)Sailors will never leave someone to drown unless there really is no other option. Also, even leaving aside the moral reason for saving them, they could provide valuable intelligence. Of course, the chances of any of the downed aircrew being close enough to an RN ship to be rescued before dying of the cold are minimal at this time of year, unfortunately.
-IF- the flight deck is totally unusable - if not, push the wreckage off the side and carry on - there were (and are) standard operating procedures for this sort of thing. EAGLE had an angled flight deck, so the area available for landing is more than was actually needed for a landing - but I don't know exactly how the arrestor gear was set up and the landing runs needed for Phantoms/Buccs, so don't know if landing at a slightly different angle to avoid a damaged area of deck might be possible. I'm sure someone on here knows though!
Indeed. I remember reading about British Pacific Fleet operations in WW2 and the horrendous number of broken aircraft they had to pitch over the side. I really thought that operating losses might become a factor in the OTL Falklands campaign, but fotunately the ability of the Sea Harrier to stop, then land, prevented that. Operating a CATOBAR carrier in the Southern Ocean, approaching winter, might result in more losses.
Good point. It did occur to me after I’d posted (honest)
ACtually it's a quarter. Radiated energy (per surface unit, which is what counts) goes down with the square of the distance.
If the "full range" is the distance at which energy per unit area is minimally detectable, then the effective range should still be half that distance, since the total distance traveled is double the distance between source and target (due to making a round trip). Am I missing something?
Received power actually declines with the fourth power of range because the radiation has to go from the transmitter to the target and then back to the receiver. Non-ambiguous range is a function of pulse repetition frequency, so any radar returns have to get back to the receiver before the next pulse goes out. A radar operator (or designer) could chose a PRF that allows for the maximum capabilities of the signal processor to be used without going beyond. There are signal processing techniques that allow a radar to display accurate returns from multiple pulses, but they are resource-intensive and generally only used for scientific radars.