HARPOON! so soon?

I really had a blast last night with the Harpoon! Thanks ED!

Dropped 8 Harpoons in total, 7 of them hit the target, 1 was shot down by its target (Chinese Type 52 DDG).

They are a lot of fun to work with but you need to think a bit about the geometry of the attack to come up with the right numbers for the bearing and distances, especially when using the HPTP function and when the target is moving. But actually this little complexity is what I really like about them! :smilewink:

The Harpoon is slow and as such will get ripped apart by modern defensive systems. I love using it though. When we get the terminal pop up feature and other deployment methods, it will be even more interesting to use.

If you're after a tactic to get it to nail a modern ship I would try swarming it from multiple directions. Let's be honest no one is ever going to take on a ship with a couple of old missiles on there own.

Also, take into account when setting up the bearing. It's relative to the waypoint and not your direction.

I notice while carrying 4 'poons, if I program one, the settings won't transfer to all of them.

Is there a button which transfers the same bearings and such to all. It would suck to key it in for all of them.

One went on target (and got shot down by Kuznetzov). The other 3 headed for shore.

I notice while carrying 4 'poons, if I program one, the settings won't transfer to all of them.

 

 

Is there a button which transfers the same bearings and such to all. It would suck to key it in for all of them.

 

 

One went on target (and got shot down by Kuznetzov). The other 3 headed for shore.

No, you have to set the PROG for each individual weapon/station. But it‘s not such a big deal (compared to programming multiple JDAMs). Done it yesterday but I intentionally used slightly different bearings for each weapon to attack a battle group with multiple ships. Worked like a charm.

Thanks. Yeah, I'd probably vary the bearings by a degree or two for each.

Things will get better when the Harpoon is hashed out more plus we get A/G SEA mode radar.

Fired two at the russian carrier.

One decided it was scared, and turned 180 to shore 10 sec after launch

One went on, fount the carrier and did the skim, only to get shot down by the anti missile defense.

that Russian Carrier defense is no joke, i sent 4 at it all in skim and it took down them all, and me too, but that's probably because i was just watching my Harpoons

Setup a long convoy of cargo ships to do target practice. Fired all Harpoons from about 15k feet and all of them couldn't get to skimming the water before flying over the ships. Not sure if I need to be under 10k to fire them as that's not what I saw in Wags' video.

Setup a long convoy of cargo ships to do target practice. Fired all Harpoons from about 15k feet and all of them couldn't get to skimming the water before flying over the ships. Not sure if I need to be under 10k to fire them as that's not what I saw in Wags' video.

The civilian cargo ships doesn't have radars and any other emitters, and Im not sure that Harpoon can detect it in BOL mode. You better try with military ships.

The civilian cargo ships doesn't have radars and any other emitters, and Im not sure that Harpoon can detect it in BOL mode. You better try with military ships.

Excuse me but this is nonsense. Whether the ship has a radar or not is completely irrelevant here. The Harpoon works well against cargo ships, I had 2 out of 2 hits on the dry cargo ship.

The Harpoon always uses its own radar to find ships. That is also independent from the launch mode, BOL or R/BL (which will come when the A/G radar is there).

What CarbonFox described sounds like a problem with the launch geometry. A combination of a too-close search range and a too-high FLT altitude may cause the missile to not be able to prosecute a target even if it "just" saw it on the radar. You want the missile to open its seeker early enough to see the target based on the FLT altitude set. It is obvious that in order to prosecute the same ship once from FLT LOW and once from FLT MED, the Harpoon needs to start searching earlier (=at a greater distance from the target) at FLT MED because it will travel more during the descend to sea skimming altitude.

I have good results when I set up the harpoon to FLT LOW and set the search distance so that it begins searching about ~10 nm out from where I suppose the target to be.

FLT LOW works well but FLT MED and FLT HIGH can't descend on time. Always overshoot

The civilian cargo ships doesn't have radars and any other emitters, and Im not sure that Harpoon can detect it in BOL mode. You better try with military ships.

I suspect you're confusing Harpoon with HARM.

Adding to the FLT options:

The lowest selectable setting "LOW" means the missile while cruise and begin to search at 5000 ft MSL - but only if you launched it from 5000 ft or above. You can however release the weapon at an altitude below 5000 ft MSL and it will cruise in that altitude (i.e. it will not climb to 5000 ft).

There is a limit though below which you cannot release and that is indicated by an "ALT" or "ALTITUDE" (can't remember exactly) indication on the HUD. Just climb a bit until the warning disappears and you are good to launch. In my case I released 4 Harpoons at around 3200 ft MSL and they cruised at that altitude until they found their targets and descended to sea skimming altitude.

Browsing the web I found a source stating that the lowest release altitude is around 2500 ft AGL. That seems to be close to what is currently implemented in DCS.

I'm reading that many people are not happy with the lethality and effectiveness of the Harpoon in its current state. My feeling is that there are some unrealistic and too high expectations on the capabilities of the missile.

It was the Viggen and its magnificent Rb-15F missiles which dragged me into anti-surface warfare. I've found it so fascinating that at one point I almost exclusively flew anti-ship missions with the Viggen and that got me to study a lot about that kind of warfare, the tactics and weapons used in real life and what we can do in DCS. In hindsight, the perfect preparation for the Hornet :-)

People that are expecting the Harpoon to be the one-shot-killer missile mostly get two things wrong:

1) Survivability of the Harpoon

As others mentioned earlier, the Harpoon is a large and subsonic missile. As such, is easily detectable by ships radars and other sensors and due to its moderate speed, it is a juicy target for missile defence systems. Note that most of the warships (in DCS) actually have more than one missile defense system. At longer ranges the Harpoon can be shot down by naval SAMs and at closer range the CIWS can kill it in its terminal flight phase.

Flying at sea-skimming altitude and/or doing a pop-up maneuever in the terminal flight phase can help to dodge the SAM and CIWS bullets but it is by far not a guaranteed protection method. (This is actually where the Rb-15F is superior to the Harpoon because it does a last-second zig-zag maneuver at sea skimming altitude which is often pretty effective in avoiding the Russian CIWS).

The only effective countermeasure here is to overwhelm the enemy ship(s) with just so many missiles so that it/they simply cannot shot down all of them.

2) Lethality of the Harpoon

The AGM-84D has a 221 kg penetrating blast-fragmentation warhead. This is about as much explosives as you have in a Mk83 bomb. Try sinking a destroyer, a frigate or even a cruiser with a single Mk83...

Admittedly, the Harpoon when flying a sea-skimming terminal profile is intended to hit the ship near the waterline, hence it has a slightly higher potential to do more critical damage to a vessel than a bomb dropped on its superstructure. Nevertheless, it will take a couple missiles to sink a warship. Have a look at youtube, there are a bunch of videos of Harpoons and other anti-ship missiles used in training and tests against some old ships. You might be surprised how small the effect of a single missile hit usually is. It is one thing to disable a ship (making it unfit to perform combat or even move). Sinking a ship is a completely different story.

During Operation Praying Mantis when the US and Iranian navy had some engagements in 1988, the Iranian frigate Sahand took hits from 3 Harpoons and 4 LGBs. It was on fire immediatly but it sank only after a couple hours. Speaking about damage modelling in DCS: I found that to be rather good with ships compared to some other units. With a bit of damage the ship will lose speed or stop completely, burn and not be able to employ any weapons, i.e. defend itself any further (which makes sinking it a whole lot easier, of course).

So to sum it up:

A) you need many missiles to have somet getting through the defense layers of warships and b) you need a enough missiles actually hitting the ship to sink it.

To give you an idea of the magnitude: My favorite anti-ship mission is one where my target is the Kuznestov battle group which in my mission consists of the Kuznetsov carrier itself, the Moskva (Slava-class cruiser), one Grisha, two Neustrashmiys and one support ship. This is a very, very well defended battle group. Before I tell you what and how many assets I use to attack them: I really sink all of them in usually 1 out of 2 attempts, so a 50/50 chance (flown that mission at least 30 times now with only minor changes to the mission).

Flying against this battle group are:

Wave 1

• 
  4 flights of 4 Hornets, each loaded with 4 Harpoons
  

• 1 flight of 4 Tornados, each loaded with 2 Sea Eagle
  

• 2 flights of 4 Viggens, each loaded with 2 Rb-15F
  

Wave 2

• 3 flights of 4 Hornets, each loaded with 4 Harpoons
  

• 1 flight of 4 Tornados, each loaded with 2 Sea Eagle
  

That gives 88 missiles in Wave 1 and another 56 missiles in Wave 2. Oh and there also is a Ticonderoga cruiser sending Harpoons as well (I think that fires 8 Harpoons in a few seconds interval and then reloads for quite some time).

So you can tell it really takes A LOT missile to kill an entire battlegroup. Just the Kuznestov itself is so well defended that it really is hard to sink it. I believe it takes more than 7 or 8 direct hits before it will sink.

But it also is A LOT of fun really! :smilewink:

The harpoon in its current "early access" state only do about 3% damage to a large russia war ship. ( cant recall the name of it ).

All though the harpoon is no wonder weapon then i thought i add that I today in the news read that one of the armerican helicopter carriers actual have problems with small boats/ships and have difficulty defending against small targets.. so the actual put an armored vehicle on the deck of it to protect it against low flying misisles/drones and boats near iran.

Now think about DCS that mimic the cold war era ( primary 70's -year 90's planes/ships ect. ) I suppose these kind of ships where less efficient at detecting the harm and also shooting it down than now a days.

I think the best way to use harms are to analyze in what direction the ship is sailing and then try to study from what angle is the ships defences the weakest. Lets face it a broad side is a very large target where many aa guns can shoot, while if your missile come at a 30degree angle maybe only 1 aa gun can shoot.

I don't expect one Harpoon to destroy a ship, but after testing, I found it was doing similar damage as the AGM-65G, with a 135 kg warhead. And it often happens that they are smaller.

AGM-65G is not detected by the ship's defense. I conducted tests on the Grisha Corvette.

[...]Now think about DCS that mimic the cold war era ( primary 70's -year 90's planes/ships ect. ) I suppose these kind of ships where less efficient at detecting the harm and also shooting it down than now a days.

 

I think the best way to use harms are to analyze in what direction the ship is sailing and then try to study from what angle is the ships defences the weakest. Lets face it a broad side is a very large target where many aa guns can shoot, while if your missile come at a 30degree angle maybe only 1 aa gun can shoot.

You did mean Harpoon (AGM-84D) when you said HARM (AGM-88C), don't you?

Can you Rapid Fire them?

Do you have to program each Harpoon or rapid fire them and does the program transfer. Fired four one went in direction of way point other three went straight. Test 2 - Set UFC on all four but height was correct on one as far as skim goes. Other three went high and search was activated too late.

Just my quick experience.

I completely missed anything about FLT and was just launching them with the standard UFC selections on radar activation, detonation range and Bearing.

Do you have to program each Harpoon or rapid fire them and does the program transfer. Fired four one went in direction of way point other three went straight. Test 2 - Set UFC on all four but height was correct on one as far as skim goes. Other three went high and search was activated too late.

 

 

 

Just my quick experience.

You have to program each weapon individually and set all parameters 4 times, including the FLT and HPTP (if desired) options. That is as long as you don’t want to use the default settings (FLT MED, no/unboxed HPTP). Easily done using the STEP OSB.

Once all are set, a good practice is to cycle through all the stations again verifying that indeed correct launch parameters are set for each weapon.

You have to program each weapon individually and set all parameters 4 times, including the FLT and HPTP (if desired) options. That is as long as you don’t want to use the default settings (FLT MED, no/unboxed HPTP). Easily done using the STEP OSB.

 

Once all are set, a good practice is to cycle through all the stations again verifying that indeed correct launch parameters are set for each weapon.

That's the theory. Practically it's bugged. Just programmed 4 Harpoons individually, step by step and checked the launch parameters. Each of them flying to my waypoint 3. There they should go on bearing 53 and start searching after flying for 5 miles from there. Two Harpoons hit a Molnija, the next two just flew bearing 0 at waypoint 3 and hit the Iranian mountains something like 15 miles later. I'd say the Harpoon is still bugged - but hey, it just got released and certainly will get fixed during the next weeks. :)

The Harpoon has me wondering how complex the SLAM and especially the AGM-84K SLAM-ER will be to get on target.

Regarding hitting well defended ships. Wouldn't a combination of HARMs and Harpoons be better as the AGM-88s can take out the ships' defenses or at the very least, keep them occupied enough for a few of the Harpoons to get through.

Thank you, I retried today and you are exactly right. I was just going to fast - verfied all programming was completed prior to launching 4 hits all low funny, I had Pop-Up set on two.

Thanks

That's the theory. Practically it's bugged. Just programmed 4 Harpoons individually, step by step and checked the launch parameters. Each of them flying to my waypoint 3. There they should go on bearing 53 and start searching after flying for 5 miles from there. Two Harpoons hit a Molnija, the next two just flew bearing 0 at waypoint 3 and hit the Iranian mountains something like 15 miles later. I'd say the Harpoon is still bugged - but hey, it just got released and certainly will get fixed during the next weeks. :)

It worked for me (so it’s not just theory) also using the HPTP function like you but I used slightly different bearings and destruction distances for each station. Each found a target and scored a hit.

Not saying it is bug free, in fact ED clearly said it is „heavily“ WIP. I just haven‘t encountered any so far, instead the weapon always worked as expected so far. Maybe I‘m just lucky...but I don‘t complain ;)