The B-1B wasn't designed to dive bomb. From what I have read, the standard mission profile was to come in at low altitude going high subsonic which for the B-1B is Mach 0.92. It has a high altitude top speed of Mach 1.25 and a Radar Cross Section of 26 square feet, it was optimized for low-penetration missions like the F-111 Aardvark is, but it can carry way more payload than the Aardvark can, with three internal bomb bays carrying 75,000 pounds. At least I don't think the airframe of the B-1B can't handle dive-bombing. Still, too damn bad that at this point the B-1B can't carry Small Diameter Bombs, they can carry ninety-six of the damn things, each one has a decent amount of boom as well, slightly more than a Mark 82. Because, well, as Joseph Stalin once said "Quantity has a quality all it's own." and dropping ninety-six SDBs times three that is two hundred eighty-eight bombs all GPS guided, dropping that many bombs on target, even with Abyssal Spookiness involved you are certainly bound to get more than one or two hits, I would bet at least dozen. Simply because of pure saturation of the target area with bombs.
Then again I could be talking out of my ass here, but I did read Wikipedia article and the B-1B otherwise known as "Bones" is designed for high subsonic, low altitude penetration missions, combined with it's low Radar Cross-Section, on par with likely a F-16 or F-15 but a metric ton of bombload, it will likely work against the Abyssals. However this will likely be the first time in history that the B-1B is going to do the mission profile that it was designed to do.
Again pure speculation. However, I don't think something that big, can handle dive-bombing. It was designed to come in fast and low, smash the enemy's face in with a ton of payload, and then get the heck out. However I am not an aeronautical engineer, but considering the fact that the B-1B has Variable-Swept Wings, I don't know if the wings can actually handle the strain, doing the dive itself more than likely, but pullout? The SBD Dive Bomber was designed to handle a metric ton of G-load, like 6-gees plus. The B-1B is limited to about 3-gees for gee load.
The big problem with the SDB for this purpose is that it's a conventional demolition bomb, with an instantaneous contact fuse. The traitor has deck armor; therefore, you need to use penetration bombs to get through it, like the AP bombs of old. The best choice would be the BLU-109/B, a penetration version of the Mark 84 2000-pound bomb that would fairly closely approximate a 15" AP shell; it would provide the best odds of being able to penetrate her horizontal armor and burst within her for massive damage, as opposed to merely bursting against the armor and mildly tearing up her upper works. The Bone could carry 24 of those internally, and (since I expect that the whole "can't use the hardpoints any more due to START treaties" thing went out the window with the start of the Abyssal War), it could probably carry at least six--possibly as many as 24--of them externally, too. Given MSSB and the experience with Hoppo/Habbakuk, there's a good chance that the Air Force wouldn't bother installing guidance kits on them (if it's not gonna do any good, anyway, then no point in using them up); while the BLU-109/B is really intended for use with guidance kits (the Paveway III LGB version being the mainstay of the F-117 in Desert Storm), it should be just as accurate as the Mark 84 is when dropped unguided, since it has the same aerodynamic profile.
The B-1 can't do what most people think of as dive bombing, the old WW2 75-degree dive angle, ALL of the drag devices out to limit airspeed, and eight-gee pullout, no. However, what it certainly could do is the dive bombing tactic taught to fighter jocks today, which uses a shallow dive (on the order of 10-20 degrees), no drag devices out and relatively high throttle settings, and about a 2-3 gee pullout. Combined with modern bombing computers (see below) that will release the bomb at exactly the right moment, this makes for very accurate delivery of unguided bombs, plus it allows for a low-altitude release that the traitor won't be able to dodge, whilst still keeping the bombs' airspeed up so they have the kinetic energy to penetrate her armor.
Hey, at least he got the part about B-1s being intended for fast, low-level attacks right. This is progress. Thor researched a question before speaking.
Now, the part about a hail of 250-pound guided bombs whose guidance won't work being the best way to sink a battlecruiser... that's just plain silly. But he's half-right, and if he keeps trying to actually look stuff up and think things through, maybe he'll be adequate one of these days. Progress!
Eh... not the best way to
sink her, but if you're just trying to score hits, screw up fire controls, and otherwise annoy her, saturation with large numbers of small weapons is the best way to improve your odds of hitting. It's the shotgun approach--you'll have a lot of misses, but you'll have a higher number of hits, and while each pellet does relatively little damage, the combined number of hits should ruin the target's day. (And yes, 250- and 500-pounders would be effective against her primary fire controls and her secondary guns; those were essentially unarmored, because A) you can't afford to put gratuitous weight up high like on the fire control systems, and B) on all-or-nothing ships, the relatively thin armor you could put on the secondary battery is seen as wasted weight that could be better put onto the main armor box. On US fast battleships, the secondary mounts had 2" STS gunhouse plating, primarily to protect from the main battery's muzzle blast, and the fire controls had plating no thicker than any other "sheetmetal" part of the ship, armored only against bad weather and
maybe machine gun fire.)
Uh, I was about to propose the other way around, uh, what was it called? Toss bombing? One of the ways the Sea Harriers bombed Port Stanley during the Falklands War. Then I pondered two things:
1 - Accuracy suffers. I dunno if it is possible for the computer to assume a specific area (instead of trying to get the abyssal), and even if it was, would wind speed and direction be considered in the calculations for the release point?
2- The guy making the comment on the Port Stanley attack mentioned something about the bombs not having the right angle to cause optimum damage. I assume it would be something similar here, even if they scored hits, there would be spots that if hit, wouldn't cause as much damage as a hit from a fly-by bombing?
Modern bombing computers come in two forms. One operates in a mode called Continuously Computed Impact Point, and the other operates in Continuously Computed Release Point. Broken down, as I understand it, CCIP basically is an advanced modern version of the old-fashioned bombsights, using the aircraft's bombing radar to map the ground ahead and then, using altimeter and attitude data, will display, on the HUD, a plumb line going straight down from the aircraft velocity vector indicator to an "impact circle" that continuously shows the pilot where the bombs will land if they hit the "pickle switch" at that instant; the pilot lines up the plumb line on the target, and when it enters the impact circle, hits the pickle switch to release the weapons.
CCRP, on the other hand, displays the plumb line and and impact circle some specific distance down it (controllable by the pilot, IIRC) that is
not where the bombs will land if released at that instant. The pilot still flies the same way--line up the plumb line with the target, then fly until the target enters the impact circle--but instead of simply pressing the pickle switch, they press
and hold the switch. Pressing it marks the desired impact point; so long as the switch is held down, the computer keeps the impact circle locked relative to the ground and, when the current CCIP impact point matches the locked-in target point, it automatically releases the bombs.
CCRP is preferred by most pilots, as it allows you to fly a flightpath that has the target disappear below your nose before the bombs release (allowing higher, faster, and flatter bombing runs), and, so long as you keep it gentle enough, it can also be used for the "idiot's loop"-style "over-the-shoulder" toss bombing attack that was devised in the 50s for low-level nuclear bombing (or any other form of toss bombing where you start your pullup before bomb release). As mentioned, though, since a CCRP computer
has to also do CCIP calculations, they're generally set up so that if you're flying outside the CCRP envelope, they'll revert to CCIP mode.
The problem with toss bombing against the traitor is that she's a ship, and toss bombing increases the "dead time" between weapons release and weapons impact, during which time she could maneuver to try and dodge them; effectively, it's like high-altitude level bombing, in that respect. (Indeed, that was the whole point of the "idiot's loop" use of toss bombing; it not only reversed your direction to increase distance from the bomb at impact, but it also gave you more time before the bomb hit than in a level bombing run, further increasing your chances of getting outside the lethal blast radius before it hit on a low-altitude nuclear attack.)
And while a BLU-109/B hitting the traitor's belt after being dropped from a low-altitude, high-speed B-1 attack run might well punch through it, I sure as hell wouldn't want to be the first to try skip bombing with a modern low-drag bomb case...
Those were retired. Most have been sold off to other countries or have been scrapped.
Most, but not all. And you can bet your ass that, if a major naval war broke out tomorrow, the US Navy would bring as many of them back as it could to fill out the fleet, at least until LCS-derived frigates can enter service--and while we wouldn't be repossessing them from foreign navies, you can damn well bet that there would be emergency stop-work orders sent to the scrappers that have them so that INSURV could go out and see how many of the ones sold for scrap they could repossess and return to service, too. (If little to no work has been done on cutting her up yet, then we could always buy her back from the scrapper, make repairs, and put her back into service.) They'd be ancient and worn out, but better an ancient, worn-out ASW platform that doesn't have its primary AAW and ASW on-board weapons any more than no ASW platform at all. Think about all the "four-stackers" and other "flush-deckers" that were dragged out of mothballs for emergency war service early in WW2; it's similar to that--"we need hulls, and it'll be a couple years before they start arriving--what the hell do we have that can be a stopgap solution?"
