On Thu, 14 Aug 2008 15:40:55 -0400, hk wrote:

I'd like to know how a ship is supposed to avoid being hit by a
wave-hopping, supersonic missile "steered" by a couple of guys via a
video camera on the weapon and a laptop computer. That's where anti-ship
missile technology is headed.

You mostly have to shoot them down. Spitfires chased the first guided
missiles, V-1's during WWII. They had to be high and dive on the
missiles as they were slightly faster. You can get a hand aimed 95 lb
20mm cannon with 1000RPM and 3300 ft/sec MV. You could put a hundred
of them just below the flight deck edges on a carrier. Take care of
the speedboats, at least. And any ship with hundreds of marines could
man a bunch of machine guns. They have some fifties now, but a state
of the art 20mm would be nice, and not very expensive.
You can jam a control radio link, and they can home on the jammer.
Chaff has been known to work against a radar only missile. missiles
however, could have both radar and infrared homing. Defence gets
harder and harder.

Casady