posted on Feb, 27 2006 @ 02:02 AM
WestPoint23,
Veehaa has it right though he 'tends to forget' that the TASM had the Harpoon seeker group and so could probably have been made to receive updates
just like AGM-84. The problem then being that nobody wanted to put a Carrier at the disposition of the surface/sub yacht club and so nobody /could/
generate targeting for it (they also restricted the deployment of APS-137 on the P-3 for much the same reason).
It should also be noted that the 109B had a passive RF target classification capability and at about this time, the Penguin (roughly a third the
weight) was doing fullup hull classification and hulk/decoy rejection 'on the fly' (without support against a highly cluttered target background)
while the Sunburn and late model AS-6 were able to assign for the whole formation.
And so the notion that the missile itself could not perform the target sort is also misleading, not least because you have upwards of _470nm_ worth of
range on the system (even with the seeker and warhead weight, the fuel reduction was greater than required) so you could easily perform grid or spiral
search patterns and potentially even short popup scans before returning to lolo for optical closure.
What it basically comes down to is the U.S. forces have always been scared pissless of Cruise showing them up as utter incompetent knight-on-his-steed
warriors and have done everything in their power to prevent these superior weapons systems from being fully integrated as effective _competitors_ with
manned systems. Just as they are now doing with UAV/UCAVs.
Finally, don't be fooled by Standards warhead weight. That's a 1,400lb missile folks. If you saw it fired out of a 16" gun as a half-weight Mk.13
HCC, you wouldn't doubt it's destructive power. Yet the Standard arrives at twice the speed of a 16" shell and it's motor is often still
burning.
Against the virtually unarmored superstructures of today's classes in particular, the result is a _devastating_ impact and you don't need to do more
than strip a ship of it's navigation and search/attack systems to render it impotent.
An outcome made made far more likely by the imminent arrival of 4-5 more 'as necessary'.
Range is dependent on guidance mode. If you have an OTH illuminator option (either a helo with an X-band or a tropobounce search radar) you can
tether the weapon to a point where it will kill what it sees. If you don't, you have to rely on the RGM-66C's ARM modes. Note that _all_ Standards
have an inherent SSM mode (as did Terrier/Tartar before them) and so range is going to be dependent on type with 40-70nm impacts not being out of the
question.
The LASM conversions by comparison use a new INS/GPS coordinate optimized parabolic trajectories to hostage targets between 150-200nm inland.
Standard is an /awesome/ kinematic performer.