View Single Post
  #5  
Old September 18th 09, 11:35 AM posted to sci.military.naval,rec.aviation.military,rec.aviation.military.naval
William Black[_1_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 176
Default Sub-Launched SAMs

Paul J. Adam wrote:
In message
,
BlackBeard writes
Not quite. Considering that no known manned aircraft has ever been
shot down buy a sub-launched SAM in a real situation, (does anyone
even know of a successful test?) it is just an anecdote about what
they _thought_ might happen.


The only live-fire test I know about is for the US SIAM (Self Initiated
Antiaircraft Missile) which in 1981 shot down a QH-50 drone at a range
of two miles and altitude of 1500' (Friedman, "US Naval Weapons"). That
seems to have been purely a missile test, not an all-up system
evaluation. SIAM was - as far as I can tell - intended to be launched in
a capsule that contained a search radar which would hand off target data
to the missile, which would then use IR homing to acquire and intercept.

The missile got as far as test firings but it seems the rest of the
system never got beyond concept phase.


Wasn't there talk of some sort of floating raft that could be released
from the submarine that had some sort of SAM installation mounted on it?

I'm remembering all this from two or three decades ago and I do remember
quite a lot of pretty fevered talk at the time, articles in the IISS
'informal' magazine and lots of rather silly stuff about submarines
engaging helicopters in what passed for the 'informed press', which in
those days was mainly journalists who been conscripts in the army twenty
years earlier...


--
William Black

"Any number under six"

The answer given by Englishman Richard Peeke when asked by the Duke of
Medina Sidonia how many Spanish sword and buckler men he could beat
single handed with a quarterstaff.