Originally Posted by
ORAC
The only point I wil add is that during any 3 day AD exercise the force had always expended all it’s Mx stocks by the end of day one.
Working on historic kill rates from Vietnam/Arab-Israeli/Indo-Pakistan conflicts the general view was that in a shooting war they’d, hopefully, achieve 3-5 kills, and hopefully against any Kitchen/Kingfish Mx above and outside F-4 Sparrow snap-up range.
That was basically what the only study on the system's effectiveness in a general war that has been released to the National Archives and was produced in 1975 for the three 85 sqn sites said. shot out on day one. the projected kill number was 0.8!!!! As regards the ASM's, not a hope. The Radar's were fully capable of tracking them at useable ranges but the seeker in missile wasn't, plus 65000ft was about the limit for the missile's manoeuvrability and the warhead / fuze combination was very much designed to chop bombers in half.
As regards the effectiveness of the system as compared to the Soviet systems and early models of Hawk, Bloodhound Mk 2 was streets ahead of them as regards ECCM. One major advantage was that the engagement controller had a view of what the missile was actually seeing shown on his console and the capability to control certain aspects of the missile's receiver systems operation while the missile was in flight. The Missile was fully capable of switching between semi active and passive homing (and vice versa) by itself and if it lost lock it would try and regain lock by itself on the last known good target Doppler shift which the EC could update in flight when jamming was quite. The system had only two major limitations and those were laws of physics related. The first and major one which was never fixed was target discrimination of two or more targets in close formation (and by close formation I'm talking about separations of around 1500 feet or less). The missile's dish had a field of view of around 4.5 degrees, thus if their were two targets within its field of view both of which were being illuminated equally by the radar, it would only see them as one target and the missile would fly through the gap in-between. If the missile missed either of them by more that 110 feet, the proximity fuze wouldn't detonate the warhead as the effectiveness of the Con Rod warhead dropped of massively as soon as the hoop of steel generated broke apart. The only other way that the missile could discriminate between targets was by target radial velocity (Doppler shift), but seeing its "speed gate" was around 48 knots wide, that not going to be much use if both targets were traveling in the same direction and speed. However when various formations of drones were engaged at different distances apart in firings at both Woomera and Aberporth, except for very close formations, the missile normally got a sniff of a stronger signal off one of the targets and successfully got within lethal warhead miss distance of that target. The RAF though this was a major problem as they were looking for an 80% success rate in trials and the best they got was around 58% in this trial condition. This problem was common for most radar guided weapons of the era anyway. The other issue was low level intercept over water. During the missile evaluation trials at Woomera in the first half of the 1960's, the missile successfully intercepted targets as low as 180 feet AGL. When they tried low level shots at Aberporth (below 400ft), the missile had a tenancy to dive into the sea in front of the target. The main cause of this was the target reflected a small bit of the illumination beam up into the air (the missile being well above it and diving down onto the target) and a larger part of the signal onto the sea. If the sea was calm, this signal was reflected back up into the air and was stronger than the signal off the target, so naturally the missile went for the stronger signal. At least 8 missiles ended up doing this, however at least one officer at Aberporth correctly identified that the main problem was Aberporth's radar being located 450ft above the sea on a cliff top and that the problem would be less of an issue at North Coates or Bawdsey.