What Do You Think Of This? Hoot Missile - Iranian Supercavitation Torpedo. (Marine, weapons)

[JordanJP]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoot_(missile)

Pretty damned scary when you think about how it works.
Do you think the US will develop anything similar?

[Poncho_NM]

War and weapons of war can be scary.

"The Hoot torpedo is an underwater missile that uses supercavitation to attain high velocities far in excess of a conventional torpedo. The Hoot is evidently derived from the Russian Shkval missile (though Iran officially denies this)."
Iran's Hoot Missile

[Submariner]

I am a former career submariner [1976-2001] I would say there have been a lot of attempts at making super-fast torpedoes.

If set within a context of being one facet of a much larger system, then they may have a place in warfare. A sea-floor grid of hydrophones, a shore-based computer lab to filter the data and try to track combatants, air-domination to allow helicopters sweeps dropping sonobuoys to give your computer tracking a 3D depth of field; and then you may be able to develop a fire-control solution that is highly refined enough to guide such a weapon to it's intended target.

It is very difficult to hear what is ahead of you in the water. If you are moving very slow, then you can develop systems to hear to both sides; but never ahead.

To move fast, then you lose all ability to hear to the sides, you become blind.

To fire a blind weapon and to hope that it hits a target requires a very highly developed fire-control solution. You need to know exaclty where the target is, and exactly what it's vector of movement is.

If the target zigs at all, then by the time the weapon travels 20nm to get there it will miss.

These fast fish tend to make a horrible level of noise. Every surface ship within a 500nm range will hear it's operation, every sub within 1,000nm will be tracking it.

There was a system where a group of helos would drop hundreds of sonobuoys hoping to get a solution on a combatant, a helo-carried computer would try to find a real-time fire-control solution, and then drop a super-fast torpedo from the air, to chase after the combatant. [it never worked very well]

Many of these attempts as weapons systems have been tried. They rarely work well. They require a great deal of pre-positioned support with nearly total air / land / sea domination.

Inside of a harbor on the other hand, they can work. Like when Sweden forced a soviet sub to surface in their coastal waters.