I served on Long Beach from 1987-1990. The ramp thing in the front was for underway replenishment of Terrier missiles. She carried something like 120 Terrier (SM-1 and 2ER) missiles. One third in the front launcher and two thirds in the rear. It was capable, as I recall, of sharing missiles fore and aft. (Not in combat.)The big wash tub radars on the forward superstructure and on the box are targeting radars. The later mods removed the phased array and replaced it with ANSPS-48 and ANSPS 49, with all the control equipment. The mod was called the New Threat Upgrade. Also, my crew was near 100% at hitting targets. The Long Beach shot down a number of aircraft during Viet Nam. It was a cool ship, but a terrible command climate. Thank you for covering it.
Our ship did ops alongside the Long Beach on numerous occasions. To a man everyone commented on how ugly it was. Still we were envious because nuke power plant meant you didn’t have to refuel every 3 days.
Thanks for playing long Beach. Thanks for giving her a chance. She may be ugly but I like that ship. She had impressive missles for back in those days. I wish this game would allow us to put what weapons load out on each ship that they were able to carry.
@@grimreapers the hull of USS Long Beach still shows on Google Earth at Bremerton. So, it's either just been finally scrapped or it's still around. Either way I guess it was still a bit "hot" or complex to scrap.
@@sosayweall7290 Yeah, but I'm pretty sure we have sub hulls decommissioned in the 80s that still haven't been scrapped. I'd guess that it's just a matter of waiting her turn.
@@sosayweall7290 the middle section of hull containing the reactors is still there the bow and stern only got cut off about 4 years ago.....still there cause I think they are still trying to work out how to get the much bigger reactor compartments up to the Hanaford storage site, all previous reactors (subs and the smaller CGNs are all a smaller size)
The 1983 variant of Long Beach removed the SCANFAR radar in favor of a more conventional SPS-48 (the big square radar on the fore superstructure). The reason for this was simple: USS Ticonderoga with Aegis was undergoing sea trials when Long Beach went into refuel and refit in 1982, entirely superceding the need for SCANFAR. With the lack of available parts to repair the SCANFAR system since Enterprise never had it installed and Aegis development halted SCANFAR production, it was decided to replace it with a cheaper, more conventional, more available radar. The loss of capability was seen as acceptable due to the impending commission of the similarly capable, but cheaper Ticonderoga class.
I've always liked the looks of the Talos missile. And, it's credited with shooting down 4 migs at long range (around 60 miles). The kills were made by the cruisers USS Long Beach and Chicago.
8:56 those are Zuni rocket pods loaded with chaff only a couple ships received it to my knowledge the Galveston class and the providence class cruisers received as well as the 60’s refit of battleship New Jersey
As a former AN/SPS-49 technician I can tell you detection range was well in excess of 200 miles. We used to monitor Iranian and Iraqi aircraft going off to engage each other from well down in the North Arabian Sea.
Lol. Uggers or not, I'll take "practical and effective and ground-breaking" any day over pretty! Haven't heard of this ship before. Impressive. Liking the change to "vs. aircraft" too, given intended role. Good stuff, Cap!
My father worked on the Long Beach in 1977/78. My dad was the head of Tiger Team(Civil Service Nuclear Response Team) from 1976-78 when he passed. His specialty was NDT(Non-Destructive Testing). My father was born the son of a 1/2 black Sharecropper in Vance SC. His mother died in childbirth and he was raised by 6 of his aunts in Charleston SC. 5'10" at 14 years old, he faked his birth certificate to work in the Shipyard at WW2s onset. At 15 he was drafted and served in the Pacific. After the war he used the GI Bill to get his HS diploma, then SELF TAUGHT himself Calculus and Physics, joined Tiger Team and became its head. My dads story is COMMON among "The Greatest Generation" Thanks Dad
I miss hearing her heart beat, when my girlfriend cheated, The Long Beach was my solice. I slept below the aft starboard Tomahawk launcher, ABL's . 2nd division, she was a dream to steer. And an honor to serve aboard.
@@arride4590 a ship is always she, because sailors have historically been men and men miss women while at sea, so the ship herself takes the place of women until the sailor returns home.
Number 1 Talos missile was a beam rider missile, so you can only track 1 target per director, standard intercept was 2 missile per target. the forward firing terrier missiles were semi active homing, but still 1 target per director on old long beach, the updated long beach was equipped with SM2ER, 8 birds per missile director, this was done through 4 mid course correction antenna added in the early 80's , The 1983 Long Beach flat panel radars were removed and replaced by SPS 48 3D radar that's why the 83 version looks different. I worked at PNSY in the 80's when missile, search and fire control systems on all USN combatant were being updated. The Stanchion you mention up by the MK26 launchers was for reloading terrier and SM2 missiles.
Long Beach was part of my Battle Group Echo I was onboard USS Ranger CV-61 with the USS Missouri BB-63 this occurred in 1987 in the Indian Ocean ( Operation Earnest Will )
The Talos system had 2 fire control radars, one foe each bird. Command guidance in newer systems allowed birds to use the CW radar on a shared basis so you could have multiple targets.
@@spoork9443 pretty sure USN didnt use any lasers for Talos missile system. I had a FCCS (Fire Control Senior Chief, E-8)that was on Chicago and got to shoot down MiGs with Talos over in Nam. I worked for him in mid-80s (I worked on Nato SeaSparrow and RAM missile systems onboard USS David R. Ray as a FC2, E-5) and he talked all about Talos, no lasers ever mentioned and we were still trying to figure out lasers for Ronnies Star Wars project. I think you have it confused with something else.
Many don't know that once Talos went away, the missiles themselves were used as supersonic drones called Vandals for target practice. I was on the Nato Seaparrow crew on USS David R Ray that got to shoot a bunch of RIM 7P test shots which culminated in a Vandal shot. Yes, we nailed it, as did the 5 inch boys, which was a first at the time. Also during these tests, I got to pop a QF-86, which was a repurposed F-86 Sabre.
That is a cool tidbit to learn. How fast were the Vandals run for target practice if you're able to say? I can't imagine the 5" being much use against them if they were flat out mach 3 liek the Talos appears to be at least in game.
@@Whatsinanameanyway13 The one we shot was between mach1 and 2. It was also on an offset because they wouldn't shoot it directly at a ship with over 300 people on it, safety. Just the fact that a 5 inch round was able to hit a big piece of the target after we got it, and yes it was still supersonic, was a huge deal and those guys were stoked for quite some time. We had many cameras onboard but of course nothing like they have today.
That is even more impressive. Makes sense they would have to had fired it offset to protect the ship & crew in case the defenses missed. Thanks for your service and for sharing this story.
Thank you for doing this vis using the USS LONG BEACH CGN-9. I was TAD on the long beach and she has always been in my heart. I LOVE that ship. Thank u again...
fwd magazines are the Terrier 40 for 1st launcher , 80 for second launcher both are the mk10 and the aft launcher is the mk12 with 52 Talos, the 4 smaller odd looking radar's are the SPG55 targeting radars for the Terrier/SM2 EDIT Cap the ramp you asked about is a folded down davit for RAS (refueling/replenshiment at sea), Long Beach still carried fuel and could refuel her own escorts! Long Beach also is credited with the first surface to air kills by a ship with missiles downing 2 migs during Vietnam at long range
Hi cap! Fun fact about the talos, it could also actually carry a w30 nuclear warhead as well as a HE warhead. While not necessarily designed like the NIKE system, it still followed some doctrine ideas of the NIKE by using nuclear explosions to destroy large soviet bomber formations
That nuke tipped missile had a special name. Do you know it? IIRC, it started with a ‘B’. The ship I was on (CGN-35) as an OS, was the last ship capable of firing this missile in the early 90’s.
The "billboard" radar changed when the SPS-48 radar was introduced, which made the SCANFAR system redundant, if not obsolete. However, there were two different SCANFAR radars used for the phased array, which accounts for the change in the planar antenna array: it was originally the SPS-32, then was augmented by the SPS-33, which was installed several years after the -32. I used to work on the SPS-48 on the USS America (CV-66; not the gator freighter).
Some additional insight: Being nuclear-powered not only meant the ability sustain high speed operations for weeks on end, but it also meant plentiful fuel for the generation of electricity AND to keep distilling units producing ample fresh water for the crew's enjoyment while underway. "What's 'shower hours'?" a nuke sailor may have said to his counterpart on a conventional ship. And while each reactor would normally power each shaft independently; it is certainly possible to keep all the main engines steaming on just one reactor (with only a slight reduction in top speed if non-essential loads [DUs, service steam, etc] are shed.)
I don’t know if anybody has read the signal flags on the intro ship but it’s says “Foxtrot Uniform Charlie Kilo. Yankee Echo Alpha Hotel” thought I’d share that
What seemed to be happening was the big chunky Talos missiles were forcing the Su-24s to expend countermeasures, fuel and energy early which kept them from forming up. It made their missiles vulnerable to the SM-2ER Swarm and after they retried their 2nd attack run they had burned up the countermeasures and entered the SM-2 bubble. When they tried to run away or were heading straight for their attack runs on the Talos missiles started smacking them down and on top of that the SM-2s were now close enough to keep enough energy to hit maneuvering targets. A surprising synergy for such an ancient system.
Same thing for Terrier prior to NTU upgrades. Missile requires a dedicated FC Radar to illuminate the target for the entire flight. NTU which came from the AEGIS developments brought the ability to only require FC Radar illumination of the target during the terminal phase of the engagement.
@@popsbents3542not quite the same thing tartar interior used semi active guidance meaning they guided on the reflected CWI energy from the guidance radar. That allow them to be fired at where the target was going to be rather than where it was at. Talos used the beam writing technology meeting. It had to follow the beam All the way to the target. That sometimes resulted in it chasing the target and running out of energy. Not nearly as efficient as semi active homing
@@lohrtom You've got this quite mixed up. The Mk77 Talos FCS consisted of both SPG-49 CW illuminators and SPW-2 direction radars. The missile rode the beam of the SPW-2 into the vicinity of the target and then homed in on the reflected energy from the SPG-49. Formal description would be "beam riding flight control with terminal semi-active radar homing". The four antennas visible around the intake of the missile are for the terminal SARH phase. The use of two separate radar systems meant that the SPW-2 could lead the target by a significant distance, sending the missile on an intercept course. Leading long range targets was something SARH systems of the time struggled with, because the guidance laws required the missile seeker to see the target at all times. Introduction of true inertially guided missiles (like the RIM-66 and -67) obviated the need for beams like the SPW-2, as now the missile could now pull lead blind and rely purely on the inertial system to put it in the basket for terminal SARH. This is one of several reasons that the RIM-67 has a range 5x that of the RIM-2 despite being a fairly similar size and weight.
You can use full or half lead homing with both target illuminator SACLOS homing and beamriding homing. In fact its easier with beamriding, since you can just compute lead on the launch platform abd aim the guidance tightbeam to lead, meanwhile a semi active missile needs to compute range and target velocity locally on the missile. Or you can encode lead in the illuminatir signal I guess. But honestly both of these command methods are very odd for SAMs. Most often you see radio command guidance, where the missile doesnt need a radar antenna of its own at all for guidance.
@lohrtom The conventional warhead Talos used beam-riding guidance only for the midcourse phase (with the SPW-2 FCR), then switched to interferometer semi-active homing for the terminal phase (with the SPG-49 FCR). The nuclear warhead Talos was the version which used beam-riding guidance for the entire flight. You might be interested in the following technical digest by John Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, which developed the surface-to-air missiles for the US Navy in the Bumblebee project: search for "jhuapl evolution of the talos missile", the first pdf link is the technical digest.
watching this again Cap, TALOs is guided by the two big SPG49 tracking radars on the aft superstructure as you said only two can be guided at once. Even the Tico's can only target 4 aircraft at once cause they only have 4 SPG62 targeting radars but the difference is they can have more SM2s in the air because as they don't need to point the spg62s at the target till the terminal attack phase, mid course guidance is done via a different system.. EDIT the SPS48E on the 82 version is probably about 300nm range due to how high it is on the mast
that angled structure above the aft talos missile house was for Vert Replenishing of the Talos magazines it was stored in that angled down position when not in use
Thank you for playing the USS Long Beach. I got to tour her when I was briefly stationed in San Diego in 1987 shortly after I graduated form RTC/NTC Boot camp. One of the guys from my A-school got orders to her so we got a brief tour. Amazing experience. I will always have a soft spot in my Gunner's mate heart for her. I know she is unique in the fleet, but for game play I came up with three more good names that would historically fit into the fleet order of battle if you wanted to play a what if… CGN-9 is obviously Long Beach her self, then using established hull numbers designate CLGN-160 to: CLGN-160 USS Indianapolis CLGN-161 USS Juneau CLGN-162 USS San Francisco The first two cruiser names obviously were lost during WWII, and the San Francisco was Rear Admiral Daniel J. Callaghan's Flag Ship during the Night Fight Bar Room brawl of November 13th, 1942. If I ever get to model and play this sim, I would love to run these as sister ships. The 688 Class Attack Submarines bearing the names to both Indianapolis and San Franciso wouldn't be assigned until the 1970s, so these could fit in a alternative history. Anyway, great match up. Thank you!! cheers, - wright sublette
The Talos and Terrier had two guidance radars for each launcher which made for two targets per engagement, two missiles per engagement. The Talos had active radar terminal guidance so once they were within self-guidance range, the next two missiles could be fired. Terrier was a semi-active homer, which meant the guidance radars had to illuminate the target throughout the engagement. The SM-2 ER had a strap on INS and the guidance radars could be shared, though the NTDS update would allow an AEGIS ship to fire the missiles and use its own guidance radars to illuminate the targets as the missiles came close enough to guide at max range.
Wow that RIM 8 was insane!! It said they were basically missiles with ramjet engines built on each one... Disposable ramjet engines?? Couldn't be cheap😮😮!!
The 1983 version does not have the 1960s SCANFAR flat radar antennas on the superstructure (phased out). Instead it has the SPS radar on top. SCANFAR had no FCR (Fire Control Radar) capabilities. Talos were directed using those dish antennas at the back, one per target per missile. So either 2 talos going for the same target (2x2 = 4) or 1 for each target = 2. That was the limiting factor. Until the SPY-1 radar every ship had the same limit : you can engage as many targets at the same time as you have FCRs only! FYI : RIM-7 Seasparrow FCR looks like a battleship light projector and can be manually operated. Making it an Optical Tracked Radar Guided system. fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIM-7_Sea_Sparrow#/media/Fichier:Sea_Sparrow_Mark115_Fire_Control_Director.JPEG
Slight correction: it was the introduction of inertial guidance that allowed sharing of illuminators between targets. You launch wave 1 at target A, then wave 2 at target B. Wave 1 flies inertial until they get close. The illuminator points at target A just long enough for engagement, then pivots rapidly to target B. Wave 2 has been flying inertial this whole time, and if everything works out right, the Wave 2 missiles turn their seekers on just as the illuminator switches to Target B. Prior to inertial guidance, missiles went stupid the instant the illuminator moved or turned off. SPY-1 has little to do with illumination, and that's why all the Arleigh Burkes and Ticos still sport a set of SPG-62 illuminators. SM-6 is active, SM-3 is active, ESSM Blk 2 is active, but all flavors of SM-2 (excepting Block IIIC) are currently semi-active.
I served on the Long Beach from 1988-1992. She was a very stable ship. Yes she had a big box in the wind but she also had two C1W pressurized water reactors on the keel. That massive weight low in the ship kept her stable.
Long Beach, Bainbridge and Enterprise were the first 3 nuclear powered surface ships in the USN. If my memory serves me correctly they deployed together to Viet Nam in the late 60s
@@puckhead777 You are right... I was ONLY thinking of the CGN 9, and the three long shooters... I was not thinking of the Virginia and so on... thank you.
Never thought of Long Beach as ugly. Watching her effortlessly zip around the battle group, she was quick and sleek. The Truxton, now that was an ugly boat.
The ramp thing in front was a "Sliding Padeye". This was in its stowed configuration. It was used during Underway Replenishment to bring over all manner of cargo/ammunition via wire, including missile reloads though this was rarely done except to practice. In use it would be tipped up and bolted down. Most ships use with fixed mounted sliding padeyes or deck retractable ones. Long Beach did it like this because this was the only large open area, but the missile magazine was under this deck so it could not be retractable.
Talos also had an Anti radiation version too! During Vietnam the cruisers Columbus and Long Beach attack Viet Cong SAM radar sites with them... Also when Long Beach was refitted in 1982 the removal of the Scanfar radars and associated equip it removed over 400tons of weight from the cube! From what I have read it totally changed her handling!!
400 tons of radar? Excess? That's like cruising along at speed with 200+ SUV's parked up high. (Just an approx. I generally refuse to do math in public).
It's not on you or the Long Beach, Cap. REDFOR AI is severely OP right now after the last update that gave us LB. They're spoofing missiles all over the place, and incoming to you are near impossible to hit. Devs are working on it.
The limit to the number of missiles you can have in the air at one time is target illuminators. Most of the older missiles are "beam riding" that is; to save weight on the missile it has a radar receiver but no radar transmitter so they rely on the ship to "illuminate" the target with radar. Prior to the SPY-1 and Aegis, most Search radar was not accurate enough to do fire control requiring a specialized "illuminator" radar. As an example: on Long Beach the 2 target illuminator radars for the Talos missile are the big "Search light" looking things on the after superstructure and the 4 illuminators for the Terrier missiles can be seen on top of the "Cube" and just forward of it.
At 8:35, those green round things are SPG 55 fire control radars. They guide the SM-1 and SM-2 missiles. The front two missile launchers are twin MK 10. The MK 26 was on the Kidd class destroyers, Virginia class CGNs, and the early Tico CGs.
The Long Beach retained her Mk.10 launchers forward, loading, first, SM-1 ER and then, SM-2 ER missiles after 1983. There was at the time of her rebuild/upgrade a plan to make her a CGSN, with the Mk.71 8" gun forward, a Mk.45 5" aft. a helipad and hanger, two Tomahawk launchers, two Harpoon launchers, two Mk.26 launchers with 64 reloads (or possibly waiting until the Mk.41 VLS became available. To this would have been added SPY-1 radars.
10:30 I believe you were right when saying it was a drone launching platform. That or a missile loading ramp of some sort. They were working on drones back in the late 50's early to mid 60's and were messing with the concept during WWII.
Long Beach's SPS-32/33 SCANFAR radars were by far NOT the first USN "phased array" radar, but they were the first shipboard billboard type phased array search radar. The 1944 Mk15 surface fire control radar was the first electronically scanned phased array radar used in combat, the preceding 1942 Mk8 was a mechanically scanned phased array radar. The mid 1950s SPS-39 3D radar was also a phased array radar, as was its replacement the SPS-48. These used rotating antennas, not "billboards". The "funny launching ramp" is a kingpost used in UNREP to receive missiles from an ammunition ship. The "smaller guns" are CHAFFROC, launchers for ZUNI 5" rockets with CHAFF warheads for missile seeker distraction. Mk10 launchers for Terrier are forward, Mk 12 for Talos aft. Both Talos and Terrier (RIM-2 and RIM-67 SM-1ER) were stowed in their magazines without fins, they had to be manually attached before firing giving a loading cycle of ~30 seconds between each pair of launches. The rate of fire in game is much too fast. www.navalgazing.net/attach/Mk10LauncherDiagram.png?v=1622504687.png By the mid 1980s RIM67s were on all Terrier ships, ~90nm -67Cs on NTU ships, ~40nm -67Bs on the rest. www.designation-systems.net/dusrm/m-67.html The 1980s refit removed the SCANFAR phased array, replaced by the far lighter, more effective and reliable SPS-49/SPS-48 radars which improved detection and tracking ranges. The SCANFAR tracking radar actually manually tracked targets, so the conventional system could actually track more incoming. Aluminium superstructures were used in 1930s built Japanese heavy cruisers. Very early versions (1959s and nucs thru the 1980s) of Talos and Terrier were beam riders, originally requiring two fire control directors per target (later modified to one per) from launch until impact. The next generation were all semi-active homers requiring one director per target for illumination from launch until impact. With NTU(SYS2) and AEGIS, SM-2 missiles used a data link until seconds before impact. Thus each director could be used simultaneously for more than 2 targets, vastly increasing firepower. Late model Talos (late 1960s) had ~100-130nm+ against targets at high enough altitudes, but ranges started at ~50nm. www.designation-systems.net/dusrm/m-8.html
and rear area may have been some kind of a remote launcher they didnt call them drones like today but we did have radio control capability for various aircrafts for certain uses
The limit on missiles is the illumination radars. 2 in the rear and 4 up front. They can only illuminate a total of 6 targets at once. You can fire more than 6 missiles but they are limited to the 6 targets. My GQ station was winging and finning the missiles before they come out on the rails in the front on a different ship but they had the same setup and they are huge. We called them flying telephone poles.
15:25 if I remember correctly the earlier SM-2 variants did have a limit on the number of guidance channels but an interesting workaround was used; the missiles were launched in waves but the ones not actively being guided were set on essentially autopilot to advantageous vectors and once the channels freed either from hits or misses then other missiles already in the air were rapidly picked up on the free channels to keep engaging targets. Since they were command guidance linked a pilot might have no idea where the incoming missile is at since it's only the Ship emitting radar energy and could also have predicted their course and selected an autopilot missile nearby then only use guidance mode till it's probably too late to evade.
Talos was in the Aft twin-arm Mk12 missile mount. The 2 missile director in the aft superstructure were removed with Talos, making room for the 2 CIWS Phalanx mounts.
The SPS-32 and SPS-33 radars were mechanically steered which made them maintenance nightmares, so they were replaced by the SPS-48 and SPS-49. This was also part of the USN's program to have all ships in a CBG all used the SPS-48 and SPS-49 so that the Soviets couldn't pick out the CV by ESM.
If you like the Talos I suggest you have a look at the Royal Navy's "Sea Slug" from the county class destroyers - pretty much the whole ship was taken up with storing them. During the Falklands they were largely fired as a "birdscarer" to scare the attacking pilots wiht such a huge missile being fired at them 🙂! Those radars were the firecontrol radars for the SAM systems.
That’s not a ramp or drone launcher. It is most likely an Underway Replenishment station. Think a sliding pad eye that raises and lowers cargo to the deck.
There was a Navy Legend that Long Beach saw a MIG doing touch and goes over Hanoi. The radar techs said "That's within range of the TALOS". So they shot it down.
The reason Long Beach bridge changes was the radars on the bridge where removed it was the same thing that happen to USS enterprise. The radar was deemed unreliable. It was removed and normal radar was added
Ive done alot of reading on the all nuclear surface navy concepts of the 60s and 70s and it really is something to behold. The only reason they didnt do it is they couldnt reliably train and retain reactor technicians in the numbers needed to maintain that many reactors. Its a good thimg they didnt as well. The budget cuts and long beaches reactor space is still floating in washington state with no real plan for how to safely dismantle and store the reactor and its fuel.
Talos and Terrier were SARH missiles, sometimes referred as "beam riders", because that's what SARH missiles do - homing on a target illuminated by a fire radar. This has a couple of implications, such as you need line-of-sight and you can only fire at as many targets as you can illuminate at once. With a phased array/PESA radar like the SPY-1, this obviously much higher, as you "virtualize" beams by phase shift.
All of this is wrong. Beam riding missiles look rearward to center themselves in the guidance beam. This is a cheap method but sucks for long range engagement. It becomes less accurate as distance between missile and illuminator grows. SARH missiles look forward to see radar energy reflected off the target. This is difficult to implement for long range engagement, but the method becomes more accurate as the missile gets closer to the target. Both Talos and early Terrier rode a beam towards the target (requiring a guidance radar) and then switched to SARH (requiring an illuminator radar). Later missiles used inertial guidance for the flight phase but still required an illuminator for the terminal phase. The introduction of this inertial guidance meant that illuminators were only required for the terminal phase, so you could have multiple missiles in the air for each illuminator, as long as they weren't going to hit separate targets at the same time. SPY-1's main contribution was being able to process enough tracks simultaneously to take full advantage of this missile capability. It could also send mid-course updates to the missile's inertial system, which kind of filled the same role as beam-riding, but it's more like a phone call describing the target's position and less like steering the missile with a spotlight.
The limit with Talos is that it uses combined beam-riding and semi-active radar homing for guidance. There are two illuminators/FC radars, each of which can support one engagement, so in principle a single-ended Talos config can fire on two targets at once with two missiles each. However, if the targets are too tightly bunched up, the FC radars may not even try to engage more than one, since it's quite possible for the missile to accidentally home in on the *average* between several returns and fly right between them, not close enough to trigger the proximity fuze. This would generally have been fine for the nuclear version, but not for the conventional one. The missiles initially stay centered in the guidance beam (using a receiver on the tail), and indeed have to be launched into it, then when they get close to the target switch over to homing on the radar reflections from the target (using four short antennas on the nose). This was done to counteract the fact that reflected radar is quite weak at 125+nm, so SARH-all-the-way wasn't reliably possible in the 1950s, but beam-riding gets less accurate the further away the missile gets from the launcher. Terrier and Tartar had similar limitations, as does SM-1, though all of those use SARH all the way instead of beam-riding. (Early Terrier and Tartar used beam-riding but switched very quickly to SARH.)
From my understanding the reason that only two Talos missile could be used at once was due to only having two guidance radar. Talos was a beam riding missile for most of it flight so the fire control radar need to be aimed at the target the whole flight, and It only had two radars dedicated to the Talos missile the two AN/SPG-49s near the stern above the launcher. The other four fire control radars were dedicated to guiding the Terrier missiles .
8:15 I love seeing the SPG-55B… those are immensely powerful FC radars, which don’t appear to be used at all in Sea Power. As I recall, in burn-through mode, they could cook a pilot in the cockpit. At least that’s the stories (as an OS) we heard on my ship, which also had 55B’s.
In her 1982 refit Long Beach had her SCANFAR system removed and replaced by the AN/SPS 48 and 49. It's my understanding that the SCANFAR wasn't particularly reliable and utilizing vacuum tubes was somewhat obsolete by the early '80s. I'd also venture to guess that with only one other ship in the fleet utilizing that system that replacement parts weren't exactly easy to come by in the early '80s. Long Beach was originally equipped with two Mark 10 Terrier launchers forward and one Mark 12 Talos launcher on the stern. By the 1980s the two forward Mark 10s were equipped to launch Standard Missiles and the stern Mark 12 was removed in its entirety, and eventually replaced by the aforementioned Tomahawk Armored Box Launchers.
Correct that vacuum tube SCANFAR was finicky, but they did upgrade it to solid-state in the late 70s before removing it in the 82 refueling. It was removed because, in January 1983, USS Ticonderoga was commissioned with Aegis, superceding the need for SCANFAR. With the scrapping of SCANFAR from Enterprise, as well as production halting to focus on Aegis instead, the decision was made to replace it with a more conventional radar that was readily available. Aegis was not installed due to the extreme cost, which only made sense to install into the new ships which were explicitly designed to use it.
I didn’t know that they retrofitted the SCANFAR on Long Beach with solid state electronics, did they do that with the Enterprise as well? Did reliability improve after that update? Did that retrofit improve its raw capability vis-a-vis range of detection and what?
I thought that the US had search drones on ships from the 1950’s … heck they converted some B-17’s into what we would call “drones” today back in world war 2. They actually had colour TV for the drone pilots … freaken nuts what could be done by 1945 and how long it was before the general public knew what could be done if you needed to.
Technically the US was building 'drones' in WW1: the unmanned Kettering Aerial Torpedo, nicknamed the "Bug.", and the Royal Flying Corps was experimenting with several "Aerial Target' types in 1917.
Talos Tactics 101. Fire missile. 20 seconds before impact, target with fire control radar. This was done in Vietnam with great effect as the MIGs were taking off at Haiphong and Hanoi.
with the terrier i think it was the first to go onto a ship, as us brits were developing one first with the seaslug missile, starting in 1943 but yea as you know with most things british it was delayed till 1961 (5 years after the yanks) before it was finally put on a ship because of constant changing of the requirements of it. though techincally it wasnt called teh rim 2 (originally SAM-N-7) untill 1963, so techincally if you say rim 2 we got there first with seaslug but only techincally
Cool video, I think to have your missiles be as effective as possible, you'd need to fire them manually, before the bombers are in range of the missile, and you'd have to time it so that the interceptors are in range by the time they get to the bombers. So for the talos maybe you'd fire it at 160nm and by the time the missiles reach the target the bombers would have moved 30 nm.
Glad to know Im not the only fan of the Anti Aircraft torpedo known as the Talos. Im not sure if Talos would actually fall for countermeasures because ir eas guided by the ship. So unless you fooled the ship and I think there was guy behind it, chaff wouldn't really change anything. I think, could be wrong.
The Long Beach was the last TRUE cruiser built by the U.S. Navy. Every cruiser built after her was based on a DD hull. The USN even called them "frigates" to differentiate them from real cruisers built during WWII and Long Beach. I think she's beautiful, but I kinda wish they went with the preliminary art deco design.
Cap, nice video. As for potential missions, remember that the Russian navy knew it could not match or stop NATO naval power. Provided a conflict stayed conventional, their primary tasks were: 1. Hunt down US/UK/FR SSBNs AND command ships with nukes 2. Hunt down CVs and CVNs 3. Prevent US and Canadian reinforcements and supplies from reaching Europe 4. Disrupt all other lines of naval shipping/communication Suggestion for scenarios include a Russian surface unit of 3 ships (combination of DDs and FFs) tryies to interdict a NATO convoy of 5 tranasports (like you did for Gibraltar previously) previously, gaurded by 3 escorts (1 cruiser and 2 frigates). Or A Russian cruiser and destroyer are being hunted by a six ship NATO force (think a modern replay of the hunt for the Bismark). Or A NATO combat group is attempting to hunt down a Russian sub, which is trying to escape (think hunt for red october).
I haven't looked back through all of the previous episodes but have the Virginia class cruisers ever been featured before?
Yes but I'll probably do another look at her: ua-cam.com/video/VIcPkkzOkUQ/v-deo.html
@grimreapers Excellent.
I served on Long Beach from 1987-1990. The ramp thing in the front was for underway replenishment of Terrier missiles. She carried something like 120 Terrier (SM-1 and 2ER) missiles. One third in the front launcher and two thirds in the rear. It was capable, as I recall, of sharing missiles fore and aft. (Not in combat.)The big wash tub radars on the forward superstructure and on the box are targeting radars. The later mods removed the phased array and replaced it with ANSPS-48 and ANSPS 49, with all the control equipment. The mod was called the New Threat Upgrade. Also, my crew was near 100% at hitting targets. The Long Beach shot down a number of aircraft during Viet Nam. It was a cool ship, but a terrible command climate. Thank you for covering it.
I remember you guys 32nd Street San Diego and almost always moored at Pier 5.
I have to wonder what the ride was like on the upper bridge.
What was the command climate like, can you provide some examples? What was life on board like in general?
In A School (FC) in 90 I was hoping for a billet on the Long Beach, but wasn't possible due to my C School.
Thanks for your service, my fellow sailor!
Our ship did ops alongside the Long Beach on numerous occasions. To a man everyone commented on how ugly it was. Still we were envious because nuke power plant meant you didn’t have to refuel every 3 days.
lol roger.
Thanks for playing long Beach. Thanks for giving her a chance. She may be ugly but I like that ship. She had impressive missles for back in those days. I wish this game would allow us to put what weapons load out on each ship that they were able to carry.
Pleasure. I like her now.
@@grimreapers the hull of USS Long Beach still shows on Google Earth at Bremerton. So, it's either just been finally scrapped or it's still around. Either way I guess it was still a bit "hot" or complex to scrap.
@@sosayweall7290 Yeah, but I'm pretty sure we have sub hulls decommissioned in the 80s that still haven't been scrapped. I'd guess that it's just a matter of waiting her turn.
@@sosayweall7290 the middle section of hull containing the reactors is still there the bow and stern only got cut off about 4 years ago.....still there cause I think they are still trying to work out how to get the much bigger reactor compartments up to the Hanaford storage site, all previous reactors (subs and the smaller CGNs are all a smaller size)
Long Beach isn't ugly just unique looking.
The 1983 variant of Long Beach removed the SCANFAR radar in favor of a more conventional SPS-48 (the big square radar on the fore superstructure). The reason for this was simple: USS Ticonderoga with Aegis was undergoing sea trials when Long Beach went into refuel and refit in 1982, entirely superceding the need for SCANFAR. With the lack of available parts to repair the SCANFAR system since Enterprise never had it installed and Aegis development halted SCANFAR production, it was decided to replace it with a cheaper, more conventional, more available radar. The loss of capability was seen as acceptable due to the impending commission of the similarly capable, but cheaper Ticonderoga class.
I've always liked the looks of the Talos missile. And, it's credited with shooting down 4 migs at long range (around 60 miles). The kills were made by the cruisers USS Long Beach and Chicago.
Thanks
8:56 those are Zuni rocket pods loaded with chaff only a couple ships received it to my knowledge the Galveston class and the providence class cruisers received as well as the 60’s refit of battleship New Jersey
Awesome.
As a former AN/SPS-49 technician I can tell you detection range was well in excess of 200 miles. We used to monitor Iranian and Iraqi aircraft going off to engage each other from well down in the North Arabian Sea.
Yeah, well, USS Long Beach thinks YOU'RE ugly!!
How dare he insult SEACUBE!
Lol. Uggers or not, I'll take "practical and effective and ground-breaking" any day over pretty!
Haven't heard of this ship before. Impressive.
Liking the change to "vs. aircraft" too, given intended role. Good stuff, Cap!
@@Doodelz02it’s only ugly cause it’s got Enterprises Radar on it
My father worked on the Long Beach in 1977/78.
My dad was the head of Tiger Team(Civil Service Nuclear Response Team) from 1976-78 when he passed.
His specialty was NDT(Non-Destructive Testing).
My father was born the son of a 1/2 black Sharecropper in Vance SC.
His mother died in childbirth and he was raised by 6 of his aunts in Charleston SC.
5'10" at 14 years old, he faked his birth certificate to work in the Shipyard at WW2s onset.
At 15 he was drafted and served in the Pacific.
After the war he used the GI Bill to get his HS diploma, then SELF TAUGHT himself Calculus and Physics, joined Tiger Team and became its head.
My dads story is COMMON among "The Greatest Generation"
Thanks Dad
Rest in peace and glory to your father, thank you so much for his service, truly a proud son with a great father
outstanding!
Thank you from one Vet to another's for your Dad's Greatest Generation and his service. GO USN and GO Tigers !!!
I was stationed on LB the same time frame of your dad. I worked with ASROC.
The Cube is not ugly, it’s perfect in its geometrical form
I miss hearing her heart beat, when my girlfriend cheated, The Long Beach was my solice. I slept below the aft starboard Tomahawk launcher, ABL's . 2nd division, she was a dream to steer. And an honor to serve aboard.
Poetry🙌
Why she and not he?
@@arride4590ships in the English, and thus also the American tradition, are female.
@@arride4590 Most ships historically are referred to using female pronouns.
@@arride4590 a ship is always she, because sailors have historically been men and men miss women while at sea, so the ship herself takes the place of women until the sailor returns home.
Number 1 Talos missile was a beam rider missile, so you can only track 1 target per director, standard intercept was 2 missile per target. the forward firing terrier missiles were semi active homing, but still 1 target per director on old long beach, the updated long beach was equipped with SM2ER, 8 birds per missile director, this was done through 4 mid course correction antenna added in the early 80's , The 1983 Long Beach flat panel radars were removed and replaced by SPS 48 3D radar that's why the 83 version looks different. I worked at PNSY in the 80's when missile, search and fire control systems on all USN combatant were being updated. The Stanchion you mention up by the MK26 launchers was for reloading terrier and SM2 missiles.
Longbeach did had MK10 launchers, not MK 26.
@@jerryware5749 correct twin mk10 and 1 mk12 my bad
@@jerryware5749 Correct 2 mk10 1mk 12 my bad...
When I was on the Lincoln (CVN-72) the California (CGN-36) moored on the opposite side of the pier we were on. The California was a very pretty ship.
Long Beach was part of my Battle Group Echo I was onboard USS Ranger CV-61 with the USS Missouri BB-63 this occurred in 1987 in the Indian Ocean ( Operation Earnest Will )
Thank you for your service.
The Talos system had 2 fire control radars, one foe each bird. Command guidance in newer systems allowed birds to use the CW radar on a shared basis so you could have multiple targets.
Thanks
from my knowledge the talos system uses a laser riding seeker to kill its targets
@@spoork9443 pretty sure USN didnt use any lasers for Talos missile system. I had a FCCS (Fire Control Senior Chief, E-8)that was on Chicago and got to shoot down MiGs with Talos over in Nam. I worked for him in mid-80s (I worked on Nato SeaSparrow and RAM missile systems onboard USS David R. Ray as a FC2, E-5) and he talked all about Talos, no lasers ever mentioned and we were still trying to figure out lasers for Ronnies Star Wars project. I think you have it confused with something else.
Guessing they had issues with tracking computers back in 1958 ... as in ... not!
Many don't know that once Talos went away, the missiles themselves were used as supersonic drones called Vandals for target practice. I was on the Nato Seaparrow crew on USS David R Ray that got to shoot a bunch of RIM 7P test shots which culminated in a Vandal shot. Yes, we nailed it, as did the 5 inch boys, which was a first at the time. Also during these tests, I got to pop a QF-86, which was a repurposed F-86 Sabre.
That is a cool tidbit to learn. How fast were the Vandals run for target practice if you're able to say? I can't imagine the 5" being much use against them if they were flat out mach 3 liek the Talos appears to be at least in game.
@@Whatsinanameanyway13 The one we shot was between mach1 and 2. It was also on an offset because they wouldn't shoot it directly at a ship with over 300 people on it, safety. Just the fact that a 5 inch round was able to hit a big piece of the target after we got it, and yes it was still supersonic, was a huge deal and those guys were stoked for quite some time. We had many cameras onboard but of course nothing like they have today.
That is even more impressive. Makes sense they would have to had fired it offset to protect the ship & crew in case the defenses missed. Thanks for your service and for sharing this story.
Wowser that's a fast drone!
I'm just here to express my love for the F-86.
Thank you for doing this vis using the USS LONG BEACH CGN-9. I was TAD on the long beach and she has always been in my heart. I LOVE that ship. Thank u again...
fwd magazines are the Terrier 40 for 1st launcher , 80 for second launcher both are the mk10 and the aft launcher is the mk12 with 52 Talos, the 4 smaller odd looking radar's are the SPG55 targeting radars for the Terrier/SM2
EDIT Cap the ramp you asked about is a folded down davit for RAS (refueling/replenshiment at sea), Long Beach still carried fuel and could refuel her own escorts!
Long Beach also is credited with the first surface to air kills by a ship with missiles downing 2 migs during Vietnam at long range
Hi cap! Fun fact about the talos, it could also actually carry a w30 nuclear warhead as well as a HE warhead. While not necessarily designed like the NIKE system, it still followed some doctrine ideas of the NIKE by using nuclear explosions to destroy large soviet bomber formations
That nuke tipped missile had a special name. Do you know it? IIRC, it started with a ‘B’. The ship I was on (CGN-35) as an OS, was the last ship capable of firing this missile in the early 90’s.
@ i do not to be complete honest. But now imma google it
The nuke tipped ones also had surface attack as a mission too, though no target seeker or complicated fuzing, simply 'fly to this position and baang'
Nah she's not ugly, the Long Beach is one of the most beautiful ships we ever put to sea.
hmmm
Don't know about that man. But she's defintly still better looking than the Ticos.
@firstname8637 Ticos are ugly as hell but they have great capabilities. Long Beach and the Virginia's look much better.
The "billboard" radar changed when the SPS-48 radar was introduced, which made the SCANFAR system redundant, if not obsolete. However, there were two different SCANFAR radars used for the phased array, which accounts for the change in the planar antenna array: it was originally the SPS-32, then was augmented by the SPS-33, which was installed several years after the -32. I used to work on the SPS-48 on the USS America (CV-66; not the gator freighter).
Some additional insight: Being nuclear-powered not only meant the ability sustain high speed operations for weeks on end, but it also meant plentiful fuel for the generation of electricity AND to keep distilling units producing ample fresh water for the crew's enjoyment while underway.
"What's 'shower hours'?" a nuke sailor may have said to his counterpart on a conventional ship.
And while each reactor would normally power each shaft independently; it is certainly possible to keep all the main engines steaming on just one reactor (with only a slight reduction in top speed if non-essential loads [DUs, service steam, etc] are shed.)
I don’t know if anybody has read the signal flags on the intro ship but it’s says “Foxtrot Uniform Charlie Kilo. Yankee Echo Alpha Hotel” thought I’d share that
What seemed to be happening was the big chunky Talos missiles were forcing the Su-24s to expend countermeasures, fuel and energy early which kept them from forming up. It made their missiles vulnerable to the SM-2ER Swarm and after they retried their 2nd attack run they had burned up the countermeasures and entered the SM-2 bubble. When they tried to run away or were heading straight for their attack runs on the Talos missiles started smacking them down and on top of that the SM-2s were now close enough to keep enough energy to hit maneuvering targets. A surprising synergy for such an ancient system.
The Long Beach for me is beautiful.
Battlebox 9000
Happy new year cap, thanks for the fireworks!
One of the major drawbacks of the Talos missile is that it used beam riding guidance instead of semi-active homing.
Same thing for Terrier prior to NTU upgrades. Missile requires a dedicated FC Radar to illuminate the target for the entire flight. NTU which came from the AEGIS developments brought the ability to only require FC Radar illumination of the target during the terminal phase of the engagement.
@@popsbents3542not quite the same thing tartar interior used semi active guidance meaning they guided on the reflected CWI energy from the guidance radar. That allow them to be fired at where the target was going to be rather than where it was at. Talos used the beam writing technology meeting. It had to follow the beam
All the way to the target. That sometimes resulted in it chasing the target and running out of energy. Not nearly as efficient as semi active homing
@@lohrtom You've got this quite mixed up. The Mk77 Talos FCS consisted of both SPG-49 CW illuminators and SPW-2 direction radars. The missile rode the beam of the SPW-2 into the vicinity of the target and then homed in on the reflected energy from the SPG-49. Formal description would be "beam riding flight control with terminal semi-active radar homing". The four antennas visible around the intake of the missile are for the terminal SARH phase.
The use of two separate radar systems meant that the SPW-2 could lead the target by a significant distance, sending the missile on an intercept course. Leading long range targets was something SARH systems of the time struggled with, because the guidance laws required the missile seeker to see the target at all times.
Introduction of true inertially guided missiles (like the RIM-66 and -67) obviated the need for beams like the SPW-2, as now the missile could now pull lead blind and rely purely on the inertial system to put it in the basket for terminal SARH. This is one of several reasons that the RIM-67 has a range 5x that of the RIM-2 despite being a fairly similar size and weight.
You can use full or half lead homing with both target illuminator SACLOS homing and beamriding homing. In fact its easier with beamriding, since you can just compute lead on the launch platform abd aim the guidance tightbeam to lead, meanwhile a semi active missile needs to compute range and target velocity locally on the missile. Or you can encode lead in the illuminatir signal I guess.
But honestly both of these command methods are very odd for SAMs. Most often you see radio command guidance, where the missile doesnt need a radar antenna of its own at all for guidance.
@lohrtom The conventional warhead Talos used beam-riding guidance only for the midcourse phase (with the SPW-2 FCR), then switched to interferometer semi-active homing for the terminal phase (with the SPG-49 FCR). The nuclear warhead Talos was the version which used beam-riding guidance for the entire flight.
You might be interested in the following technical digest by John Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, which developed the surface-to-air missiles for the US Navy in the Bumblebee project: search for "jhuapl evolution of the talos missile", the first pdf link is the technical digest.
Nice looking ship. Maybe not sleek, but she has her own charm.
Hi Cap, I believe variants of the Talos Missiles were able to be fitted with nuclear warheads if required for a bigger boom.
I had the Revell kit of the Long Beach as a kid. Never thought it was ugly though!
watching this again Cap, TALOs is guided by the two big SPG49 tracking radars on the aft superstructure as you said only two can be guided at once. Even the Tico's can only target 4 aircraft at once cause they only have 4 SPG62 targeting radars but the difference is they can have more SM2s in the air because as they don't need to point the spg62s at the target till the terminal attack phase, mid course guidance is done via a different system..
EDIT the SPS48E on the 82 version is probably about 300nm range due to how high it is on the mast
USS Long Beach: First and Last!
Built the Revell model of this ship too many years ago to admit. Always liked the ship.
Quite frankly, i didn't think she was ugly at all. She matched quite well with the Enterprise. Look at some photos on line... it's really cool.😊
that angled structure above the aft talos missile house was for Vert Replenishing of the Talos magazines it was stored in that angled down position when not in use
Amazing! Multiple Long Beaches in line aheead formation.
Thank you for playing the USS Long Beach. I got to tour her when I was briefly stationed in San Diego in 1987 shortly after I graduated form RTC/NTC Boot camp. One of the guys from my A-school got orders to her so we got a brief tour. Amazing experience. I will always have a soft spot in my Gunner's mate heart for her.
I know she is unique in the fleet, but for game play I came up with three more good names that would historically fit into the fleet order of battle if you wanted to play a what if…
CGN-9 is obviously Long Beach her self, then using established hull numbers designate CLGN-160 to:
CLGN-160 USS Indianapolis
CLGN-161 USS Juneau
CLGN-162 USS San Francisco
The first two cruiser names obviously were lost during WWII, and the San Francisco was Rear Admiral Daniel J. Callaghan's Flag Ship during the Night Fight Bar Room brawl of November 13th, 1942. If I ever get to model and play this sim, I would love to run these as sister ships. The 688 Class Attack Submarines bearing the names to both Indianapolis and San Franciso wouldn't be assigned until the 1970s, so these could fit in a alternative history. Anyway, great match up. Thank you!! cheers, - wright sublette
Thanks for the video my grandfather and father where both stationed on the longbeach super cool to be able to see her sail again
The Talos and Terrier had two guidance radars for each launcher which made for two targets per engagement, two missiles per engagement. The Talos had active radar terminal guidance so once they were within self-guidance range, the next two missiles could be fired. Terrier was a semi-active homer, which meant the guidance radars had to illuminate the target throughout the engagement. The SM-2 ER had a strap on INS and the guidance radars could be shared, though the NTDS update would allow an AEGIS ship to fire the missiles and use its own guidance radars to illuminate the targets as the missiles came close enough to guide at max range.
Wow that RIM 8 was insane!! It said they were basically missiles with ramjet engines built on each one... Disposable ramjet engines?? Couldn't be cheap😮😮!!
The 1983 version does not have the 1960s SCANFAR flat radar antennas on the superstructure (phased out). Instead it has the SPS radar on top.
SCANFAR had no FCR (Fire Control Radar) capabilities. Talos were directed using those dish antennas at the back, one per target per missile. So either 2 talos going for the same target (2x2 = 4) or 1 for each target = 2. That was the limiting factor.
Until the SPY-1 radar every ship had the same limit : you can engage as many targets at the same time as you have FCRs only!
FYI : RIM-7 Seasparrow FCR looks like a battleship light projector and can be manually operated. Making it an Optical Tracked Radar Guided system.
fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIM-7_Sea_Sparrow#/media/Fichier:Sea_Sparrow_Mark115_Fire_Control_Director.JPEG
It's amazing about the two FCR restriction. Such a limit.
Slight correction: it was the introduction of inertial guidance that allowed sharing of illuminators between targets. You launch wave 1 at target A, then wave 2 at target B. Wave 1 flies inertial until they get close. The illuminator points at target A just long enough for engagement, then pivots rapidly to target B. Wave 2 has been flying inertial this whole time, and if everything works out right, the Wave 2 missiles turn their seekers on just as the illuminator switches to Target B. Prior to inertial guidance, missiles went stupid the instant the illuminator moved or turned off.
SPY-1 has little to do with illumination, and that's why all the Arleigh Burkes and Ticos still sport a set of SPG-62 illuminators.
SM-6 is active, SM-3 is active, ESSM Blk 2 is active, but all flavors of SM-2 (excepting Block IIIC) are currently semi-active.
@@TheFirstIcon Thanks for the correction.
I served on the Long Beach from 1988-1992. She was a very stable ship. Yes she had a big box in the wind but she also had two C1W pressurized water reactors on the keel. That massive weight low in the ship kept her stable.
Long Beach, Bainbridge and Enterprise were the first 3 nuclear powered surface ships in the USN. If my memory serves me correctly they deployed together to Viet Nam in the late 60s
I forgot the name of the other Nuclear Cruiser -- thank you!
@@FleetDefenderRA5 there was almost 10 of them. CGN-9, CGN-25, and then CGN-35 thru 41.
@@puckhead777 You are right... I was ONLY thinking of the CGN 9, and the three long shooters... I was not thinking of the Virginia and so on... thank you.
My grandfather was on the Enterprise with the Bainbridge and the Long Beach racing down to Cuba in October of 1962.
I always found Long Beach to be a beautiful ship. I would have proudly served on her.
Never thought of Long Beach as ugly. Watching her effortlessly zip around the battle group, she was quick and sleek. The Truxton, now that was an ugly boat.
I beg your pardon! And it's Truxtun not Truxton.
The ramp thing in front was a "Sliding Padeye". This was in its stowed configuration. It was used during Underway Replenishment to bring over all manner of cargo/ammunition via wire, including missile reloads though this was rarely done except to practice. In use it would be tipped up and bolted down. Most ships use with fixed mounted sliding padeyes or deck retractable ones. Long Beach did it like this because this was the only large open area, but the missile magazine was under this deck so it could not be retractable.
Talos also had an Anti radiation version too! During Vietnam the cruisers Columbus and Long Beach attack Viet Cong SAM radar sites with them...
Also when Long Beach was refitted in 1982 the removal of the Scanfar radars and associated equip it removed over 400tons of weight from the cube! From what I have read it totally changed her handling!!
400 tons of radar? Excess? That's like cruising along at speed with 200+ SUV's parked up high. (Just an approx. I generally refuse to do math in public).
It's not on you or the Long Beach, Cap. REDFOR AI is severely OP right now after the last update that gave us LB. They're spoofing missiles all over the place, and incoming to you are near impossible to hit. Devs are working on it.
Roger thx. Annoying.
The limit to the number of missiles you can have in the air at one time is target illuminators. Most of the older missiles are "beam riding" that is; to save weight on the missile it has a radar receiver but no radar transmitter so they rely on the ship to "illuminate" the target with radar. Prior to the SPY-1 and Aegis, most Search radar was not accurate enough to do fire control requiring a specialized "illuminator" radar. As an example: on Long Beach the 2 target illuminator radars for the Talos missile are the big "Search light" looking things on the after superstructure and the 4 illuminators for the Terrier missiles can be seen on top of the "Cube" and just forward of it.
did you just call my glorious cube ugly
How dare he
At 8:35, those green round things are SPG 55 fire control radars. They guide the SM-1 and SM-2 missiles. The front two missile launchers are twin MK 10. The MK 26 was on the Kidd class destroyers, Virginia class CGNs, and the early Tico CGs.
Reapers, please meet Mover and Gonky, aviators who play DCS, excellent no-nonsense channel on tactical air combat.
The Long Beach retained her Mk.10 launchers forward, loading, first, SM-1 ER and then, SM-2 ER missiles after 1983. There was at the time of her rebuild/upgrade a plan to make her a CGSN, with the Mk.71 8" gun forward, a Mk.45 5" aft. a helipad and hanger, two Tomahawk launchers, two Harpoon launchers, two Mk.26 launchers with 64 reloads (or possibly waiting until the Mk.41 VLS became available. To this would have been added SPY-1 radars.
LONG BEACH MY BELOVED!!!!!
10:30 I believe you were right when saying it was a drone launching platform. That or a missile loading ramp of some sort. They were working on drones back in the late 50's early to mid 60's and were messing with the concept during WWII.
Thanks, Cap. I'm leaning alot about the navies of the world!
Me too.
Long Beach with Talos scored several MIG kills during the Vietnam War
Yes I remember reading this now, I didn't know what Talos was at the time.
Ugly? You have insulted our savior, Her Holy Cubeness, the C U B E!
Now you get it. She was incredibly important to Naval R&D. Operated with her on occasion when I was stationed in.... Long Beach.
What great content. Nobody puts more work into what they do, grateful!
Long Beach was our only Cruiser in the Battlegroup during my deployment in 1984. We had a Kidd class too but not other Cruiser.
Long Beach's SPS-32/33 SCANFAR radars were by far NOT the first USN "phased array" radar, but they were the first shipboard billboard type phased array search radar. The 1944 Mk15 surface fire control radar was the first electronically scanned phased array radar used in combat, the preceding 1942 Mk8 was a mechanically scanned phased array radar. The mid 1950s SPS-39 3D radar was also a phased array radar, as was its replacement the SPS-48. These used rotating antennas, not "billboards".
The "funny launching ramp" is a kingpost used in UNREP to receive missiles from an ammunition ship.
The "smaller guns" are CHAFFROC, launchers for ZUNI 5" rockets with CHAFF warheads for missile seeker distraction.
Mk10 launchers for Terrier are forward, Mk 12 for Talos aft. Both Talos and Terrier (RIM-2 and RIM-67 SM-1ER) were stowed in their magazines without fins, they had to be manually attached before firing giving a loading cycle of ~30 seconds between each pair of launches. The rate of fire in game is much too fast.
www.navalgazing.net/attach/Mk10LauncherDiagram.png?v=1622504687.png
By the mid 1980s RIM67s were on all Terrier ships, ~90nm -67Cs on NTU ships, ~40nm -67Bs on the rest.
www.designation-systems.net/dusrm/m-67.html
The 1980s refit removed the SCANFAR phased array, replaced by the far lighter, more effective and reliable SPS-49/SPS-48 radars which improved detection and tracking ranges. The SCANFAR tracking radar actually manually tracked targets, so the conventional system could actually track more incoming.
Aluminium superstructures were used in 1930s built Japanese heavy cruisers.
Very early versions (1959s and nucs thru the 1980s) of Talos and Terrier were beam riders, originally requiring two fire control directors per target (later modified to one per) from launch until impact. The next generation were all semi-active homers requiring one director per target for illumination from launch until impact. With NTU(SYS2) and AEGIS, SM-2 missiles used a data link until seconds before impact. Thus each director could be used simultaneously for more than 2 targets, vastly increasing firepower.
Late model Talos (late 1960s) had ~100-130nm+ against targets at high enough altitudes, but ranges started at ~50nm.
www.designation-systems.net/dusrm/m-8.html
Great info!
and rear area may have been some kind of a remote launcher they didnt call them drones like today but we did have radio control capability for various aircrafts for certain uses
The limit on missiles is the illumination radars. 2 in the rear and 4 up front. They can only illuminate a total of 6 targets at once. You can fire more than 6 missiles but they are limited to the 6 targets. My GQ station was winging and finning the missiles before they come out on the rails in the front on a different ship but they had the same setup and they are huge. We called them flying telephone poles.
Nice one Cap!
15:25 if I remember correctly the earlier SM-2 variants did have a limit on the number of guidance channels but an interesting workaround was used; the missiles were launched in waves but the ones not actively being guided were set on essentially autopilot to advantageous vectors and once the channels freed either from hits or misses then other missiles already in the air were rapidly picked up on the free channels to keep engaging targets. Since they were command guidance linked a pilot might have no idea where the incoming missile is at since it's only the Ship emitting radar energy and could also have predicted their course and selected an autopilot missile nearby then only use guidance mode till it's probably too late to evade.
Talos was in the Aft twin-arm Mk12 missile mount. The 2 missile director in the aft superstructure were removed with Talos, making room for the 2 CIWS Phalanx mounts.
The SPS-32 and SPS-33 radars were mechanically steered which made them maintenance nightmares, so they were replaced by the SPS-48 and SPS-49. This was also part of the USN's program to have all ships in a CBG all used the SPS-48 and SPS-49 so that the Soviets couldn't pick out the CV by ESM.
Her call sign was "ALCOA"; the name of the alumnium aluminum foundry company
Roger, lots of Alu on this baby.
If you like the Talos I suggest you have a look at the Royal Navy's "Sea Slug" from the county class destroyers - pretty much the whole ship was taken up with storing them. During the Falklands they were largely fired as a "birdscarer" to scare the attacking pilots wiht such a huge missile being fired at them 🙂! Those radars were the firecontrol radars for the SAM systems.
That’s not a ramp or drone launcher. It is most likely an Underway Replenishment station. Think a sliding pad eye that raises and lowers cargo to the deck.
Roger
There was a Navy Legend that Long Beach saw a MIG doing touch and goes over Hanoi. The radar techs said "That's within range of the TALOS". So they shot it down.
Loved the look of Long Beach --- futuristic and seemed "related" to CVN-65. Beautiful bow structure, too.
The reason Long Beach bridge changes was the radars on the bridge where removed it was the same thing that happen to USS enterprise. The radar was deemed unreliable. It was removed and normal radar was added
That's a shame. Thanks.
@ np
Ive done alot of reading on the all nuclear surface navy concepts of the 60s and 70s and it really is something to behold. The only reason they didnt do it is they couldnt reliably train and retain reactor technicians in the numbers needed to maintain that many reactors. Its a good thimg they didnt as well. The budget cuts and long beaches reactor space is still floating in washington state with no real plan for how to safely dismantle and store the reactor and its fuel.
Talos and Terrier were SARH missiles, sometimes referred as "beam riders", because that's what SARH missiles do - homing on a target illuminated by a fire radar. This has a couple of implications, such as you need line-of-sight and you can only fire at as many targets as you can illuminate at once. With a phased array/PESA radar like the SPY-1, this obviously much higher, as you "virtualize" beams by phase shift.
All of this is wrong.
Beam riding missiles look rearward to center themselves in the guidance beam. This is a cheap method but sucks for long range engagement. It becomes less accurate as distance between missile and illuminator grows.
SARH missiles look forward to see radar energy reflected off the target. This is difficult to implement for long range engagement, but the method becomes more accurate as the missile gets closer to the target.
Both Talos and early Terrier rode a beam towards the target (requiring a guidance radar) and then switched to SARH (requiring an illuminator radar). Later missiles used inertial guidance for the flight phase but still required an illuminator for the terminal phase. The introduction of this inertial guidance meant that illuminators were only required for the terminal phase, so you could have multiple missiles in the air for each illuminator, as long as they weren't going to hit separate targets at the same time.
SPY-1's main contribution was being able to process enough tracks simultaneously to take full advantage of this missile capability. It could also send mid-course updates to the missile's inertial system, which kind of filled the same role as beam-riding, but it's more like a phone call describing the target's position and less like steering the missile with a spotlight.
The limit with Talos is that it uses combined beam-riding and semi-active radar homing for guidance. There are two illuminators/FC radars, each of which can support one engagement, so in principle a single-ended Talos config can fire on two targets at once with two missiles each. However, if the targets are too tightly bunched up, the FC radars may not even try to engage more than one, since it's quite possible for the missile to accidentally home in on the *average* between several returns and fly right between them, not close enough to trigger the proximity fuze. This would generally have been fine for the nuclear version, but not for the conventional one.
The missiles initially stay centered in the guidance beam (using a receiver on the tail), and indeed have to be launched into it, then when they get close to the target switch over to homing on the radar reflections from the target (using four short antennas on the nose). This was done to counteract the fact that reflected radar is quite weak at 125+nm, so SARH-all-the-way wasn't reliably possible in the 1950s, but beam-riding gets less accurate the further away the missile gets from the launcher.
Terrier and Tartar had similar limitations, as does SM-1, though all of those use SARH all the way instead of beam-riding. (Early Terrier and Tartar used beam-riding but switched very quickly to SARH.)
They have a Talos at the Yorktown museum. It is very large.
From my understanding the reason that only two Talos missile could be used at once was due to only having two guidance radar. Talos was a beam riding missile for most of it flight so the fire control radar need to be aimed at the target the whole flight, and It only had two radars dedicated to the Talos missile the two AN/SPG-49s near the stern above the launcher. The other four fire control radars were dedicated to guiding the Terrier missiles .
8:15 I love seeing the SPG-55B… those are immensely powerful FC radars, which don’t appear to be used at all in Sea Power. As I recall, in burn-through mode, they could cook a pilot in the cockpit. At least that’s the stories (as an OS) we heard on my ship, which also had 55B’s.
In her 1982 refit Long Beach had her SCANFAR system removed and replaced by the AN/SPS 48 and 49. It's my understanding that the SCANFAR wasn't particularly reliable and utilizing vacuum tubes was somewhat obsolete by the early '80s. I'd also venture to guess that with only one other ship in the fleet utilizing that system that replacement parts weren't exactly easy to come by in the early '80s.
Long Beach was originally equipped with two Mark 10 Terrier launchers forward and one Mark 12 Talos launcher on the stern. By the 1980s the two forward Mark 10s were equipped to launch Standard Missiles and the stern Mark 12 was removed in its entirety, and eventually replaced by the aforementioned Tomahawk Armored Box Launchers.
Correct that vacuum tube SCANFAR was finicky, but they did upgrade it to solid-state in the late 70s before removing it in the 82 refueling. It was removed because, in January 1983, USS Ticonderoga was commissioned with Aegis, superceding the need for SCANFAR. With the scrapping of SCANFAR from Enterprise, as well as production halting to focus on Aegis instead, the decision was made to replace it with a more conventional radar that was readily available. Aegis was not installed due to the extreme cost, which only made sense to install into the new ships which were explicitly designed to use it.
I didn’t know that they retrofitted the SCANFAR on Long Beach with solid state electronics, did they do that with the Enterprise as well? Did reliability improve after that update? Did that retrofit improve its raw capability vis-a-vis range of detection and what?
Nuclear powered vacuum tubes, huh? Wow! 🤦♂️
She was a nuclear powered experimental guided missile cruiser
I thought that the US had search drones on ships from the 1950’s … heck they converted some B-17’s into what we would call “drones” today back in world war 2. They actually had colour TV for the drone pilots … freaken nuts what could be done by 1945 and how long it was before the general public knew what could be done if you needed to.
Technically the US was building 'drones' in WW1: the unmanned Kettering Aerial Torpedo, nicknamed the "Bug.", and the Royal Flying Corps was experimenting with several "Aerial Target' types in 1917.
Talos Tactics 101. Fire missile. 20 seconds before impact, target with fire control radar. This was done in Vietnam with great effect as the MIGs were taking off at Haiphong and Hanoi.
with the terrier i think it was the first to go onto a ship, as us brits were developing one first with the seaslug missile, starting in 1943 but yea as you know with most things british it was delayed till 1961 (5 years after the yanks) before it was finally put on a ship because of constant changing of the requirements of it. though techincally it wasnt called teh rim 2 (originally SAM-N-7) untill 1963, so techincally if you say rim 2 we got there first with seaslug but only techincally
Roger, I'll take any win I can get.
Cool video, I think to have your missiles be as effective as possible, you'd need to fire them manually, before the bombers are in range of the missile, and you'd have to time it so that the interceptors are in range by the time they get to the bombers. So for the talos maybe you'd fire it at 160nm and by the time the missiles reach the target the bombers would have moved 30 nm.
I have researched this ship lots as I have a 1/72 RC model of her!!
The USS Blockhead
I love the Long Beach. As I have said previously, "Ugly possess a Beauty all its own".
Ramp at the front is Harpoon and ahead of that another on the deck is SM2 according to what I can find online
Hey cap, now that we know that it's an issue with the AI, would you do a rematch once the AI is fixed?
Sure.
Nice work!
Glad to know Im not the only fan of the Anti Aircraft torpedo known as the Talos.
Im not sure if Talos would actually fall for countermeasures because ir eas guided by the ship. So unless you fooled the ship and I think there was guy behind it, chaff wouldn't really change anything. I think, could be wrong.
The Long Beach was the last TRUE cruiser built by the U.S. Navy. Every cruiser built after her was based on a DD hull. The USN even called them "frigates" to differentiate them from real cruisers built during WWII and Long Beach. I think she's beautiful, but I kinda wish they went with the preliminary art deco design.
I saw her one time on active duty, tied to the north side of pier 7 NAVSTA San Diego.
Isn't that the same radar that they put on USS Enterprise (CVN-65)?
Think so.
She's not ugly, she's curious
All the missiles are SARH, so you are limited by the number CW designators. NTU can time share like AEGIS and doesn't require one per missile.
Cap, nice video. As for potential missions, remember that the Russian navy knew it could not match or stop NATO naval power. Provided a conflict stayed conventional, their primary tasks were:
1. Hunt down US/UK/FR SSBNs AND command ships with nukes
2. Hunt down CVs and CVNs
3. Prevent US and Canadian reinforcements and supplies from reaching Europe
4. Disrupt all other lines of naval shipping/communication
Suggestion for scenarios include a Russian surface unit of 3 ships (combination of DDs and FFs) tryies to interdict a NATO convoy of 5 tranasports (like you did for Gibraltar previously) previously, gaurded by 3 escorts (1 cruiser and 2 frigates).
Or
A Russian cruiser and destroyer are being hunted by a six ship NATO force (think a modern replay of the hunt for the Bismark).
Or
A NATO combat group is attempting to hunt down a Russian sub, which is trying to escape (think hunt for red october).
Thanks Brian.