In the game there’s a section set aboard the USS Barack Obama (hyuk hyuk), an aircraft carrier where the big bad guy has been transported to. He arranges for a massive attack on it to take the carrier over for his evil plans - the radar and guided missiles can’t target the light gliders raining down on the flight deck (on their approach the admiral says “are those birds?”) and all heck breaks loose.
Is a glider-borne assault on a modern carrier even remotely plausible? What would the crew do in such a situation?
Sailors and Marines do practice their “repel boarders” drill. If the carrier was boarded, the security personnel (MPs or whatever their maritime equivalent) would probably engage the enemy with whatever handguns or other duty weapons they had available. Meanwhile, the rest of the crew would be sealing hatches, securing entrances, and acquiring their weapons. It would be a lot of chaos and confusion, but each sailor knows what part of the ship they are assigned to defend.
The more interesting question is, how would someone get on board a vessel to begin with?
If they’re using little GI Joe jetpacks, that could be problematic. Every carrier has multiple gatling gun systems called a “Phalanx” that it uses to shoot down incoming missiles. The question is whether the system would recognize human-sized jetpacks as a threat. If it did, their attack would be over very quickly.
My sailplane shows a primary return on ATC radar if they turn the 100mph filters off. Since a carrier is probably also watching for unfriendly shipping, they would not have such filters. We also had a glider pilot get cited for a controlled airspace incursion when a F-117 spotted him on radar, and reported him to ATC.
Composite gliders still have steel pushrods, stainless cables, lots of aluminum landing gear hardware, hinges, and avionics. You could probably build a glider of spruce and fabric that would have a fairly low radar signiture. Note that anything that has a different dielectric constant than air (pretty much everything but air!) will still cause a reflection, regardless the fact that it is not a conductor, pretty much the same as you can still see objects made of glass with your eyes.
Thousands of sailors with cutlery from the galley and tools from the machine shops in the cramped spaces belowdecks is still a force to be reckoned with.
What’s Dr. Evil supposed to do if such an unlikely attack succeeded? Ram the carrier into a bridge? The rest of the carrier group (destroyers, cruisers, frigates, and submarines) would sink or disable the carrier immediately. Hostages no longer count. Any hint that the bad guy could sieze the onboard nukes would mean a trip to the bottom of the ocean via torpedoes, missiles or gunfire.
Other objections: Besides the parts about being able to sneak past the radar or stop/fit dozens of very large gliders necessary to land sufficient troops.
The bad guy has F-18 fighter pilots - I think not.
Guys to operate catapults and the rest of the carrier - no.
Oh, we’ll use hundreds and hundreds of small paragliders - launched from where/from what that also doesn’t show up on radar? A carrier group has a pretty good handle on what’s in the air and under the sea for hundreds of miles around.
The navy got stung pretty good some years ago when they lost a carrier and had heavy damage to a number of other ships in a war game against an asymetrical threat involving swarms of small fast boats. There was a lot of bitching about how the bad guys cheated. The game was reset, the enemy commander quit over having “rules” imposed on the bad guys, and with the new constraints - the good guys won according to the brass. NO ONE on the outside thought so - changes and recognition of different threats ensued.
CIWS can be fired automatically or manually, plus some of them have cameras and can be manually trained and fired. Also, a carrier has a very well stocked armory as well as all kinds of 50 cals and M240s mounted not to mention a lot of lookouts at any time.
Good luck trying to land an unpowered glider on a carrier going 30+ knots and swerving even a little bit. Surely all the Barack Obama’s captain needs to do is order a 45 degree turn and most of the gliders go over the side as they hit the flight deck edge on.
You could probably also do this with fiberglass, including composite control linkages, cables made of Spectra, etc.
But, as you note, it would be very challenging to get the radar signature so low that it could not be seen at all. And incoming gliders capable of carrying troops would be large and slow, so easily seen (at least in daylight) and easily evaded/repulsed once they are detected (or the first one arrives).
The weapons and ammo they carry would add to the radar signature too wouldn’t they? There’s also the teensy issue of whatever is towing them, and how close they need to get before release. You’d need an awfully reliable wind to try and get to it from hundreds of miles away without one.
Otara
If the troops in the glider are carrying metal weapons, no. They’d light up like a Christmas tree by any radar the US Navy has on any current ship. The ‘square-barrels’ in the carrier crew would shoot 'em down, before they got within 20 miles. Too bad, so sad. This was an easy question to answer.
So given that transporting troops onto a carrier through such a method is unfeasible, what about really small drones, say less than four feet wingspan, and loaded with a few pounds of high explosive apiece? I don’t think you could sink the ship, but could you cripple it? Certainly you could damage the flight deck and its soft targets like the catapult and any planes currently on deck.
But the gliders are not going to get within 100 miles of the carrier, before some radar picket in the CBG will detect you, and shoot you down. But even if you do, the carrier, itself, will pick you up on radar, and you’ll be shot down by the SeaSparrows they carry. You’ll never get close enough for the Phalanx to notice you, so it doesn’t matter that they wouldn’t see you as a target.
You can’t be killed by a weapon system that you can’t get close enough to for it to care. You’re already dead. You’re not a problem.
What are the gliders like? Sailplanes like this? I don’t even see how you could fit very many on a carrier. There’s a decent amount of space on a carrier but they wouldn’t be able to touch down orderly and taxi out of each others way. They’d soon be landing on top of each other. And unless there’s some guarantee that the deck will be clear, a carrier can have enough planes on the deck that there’s little or even no room to land.
If, perhaps, the carrier was somewhere like New York City and hundreds of guys on hang gliders launched from the tops of all the buildings, they wouldn’t have time to shoot them all, some might land on the carrier and a second after landing the pilot would be up and running. A handful might find cover and then there could be a gun battle with Marines. That sounds realistic enough for a video game.
How hard are the wings / fuel tanks of fighter aircraft and helicopters?
How much damage would it do if half a dozen model planes with a small amount of HE were able to get near the ship and specifically target the fuel tanks to create a “mess” on deck to stop flight operations?
Not true. It will track virtually any target.
“The current Phalanx variant (Block 1B) adds the ability to counter asymmetric warfare threats through the addition of an integrated, stabilized, Electro Optic sensor. These improvements give Phalanx the added ability to counter small high speed surface craft, aircraft, helicopters, and Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS).”
