Actually fire that many missiles and torpedos at the same time? Looked for pics and can't find any of an Arleigh Burke firing more than one at a time.
shareDon't even try to compare anything you see in the film with real life.
The Movie is a Cartoon.
I joined the Navy to see the world, only to discover the world is 2/3 water!
Good question. I believe the Aegis system would allow them to control 12 missiles to target at once. But I'm a tad rusty.
shareThere is no specific "fixed number" like 12, that it can "control at once"
That is a lack of understanding in just how Aegis and the Missile's guidance system works.
Older missile systems had SARH guidance. This meant that a Fire Control radar had to be locked onto the target for the missile's entire time of flight. The number of missiles a ship could control at once was limited to the number of Fire Control Directors the ship had aboard.
The Newer system has I/M/TSAR Guidance.
This means that the missile is launched on a pre-computed intercept point and for most of the flight the missile is flying with inertial guidance. If the target was to alter course, a new intercept point would be calculated and updated to the missile in flight. At no point so far is a Fire Control Radar necessary.
The fire Control director is only needed in the very last few seconds of flight.
So now the limitation is not the flight time of the missile to target, but the time it is required to illuminate the target in the terminal phase.
So now with Aegis... You could have several missiles flying to one set of targets while the firer control radars are guiding a different set of missiles into their targets while yet another group of missiles is being updated, and so on and so on.
Missiles can be heading to multiple different groups of targets simultaneously with no guidance from the Fire Control Radars. Each missile will be flying itself to a pre-computed aim point with occasional updates to that aim point from the ship as the targets maneuver. Only in the final few seconds before impact is the Fire Control Radars needed to insure accuracy of the intercept.
The hard limitation is the maximum number of targets the Aegis system can track and maintain... Which is in the hundreds. So long as the timing of the intercepts of each target is spaced enough that a director has time to slew over to the new target with a missile in flight after a prior target is destroyed.
As you can see, depending on the distance to multiple targets, the max number is variable.
A Burke has four Fire Control radars aboard so you could say the number it can actually guide into a target simultaneously in the terminal phase is 4, but even that is not true. Because the SPY-1 Radar can act as a Fire Control Radar itself and has the ability to electronically steer multiple radar beams in a fire control mode while simultaneously keeping up a scan for new targets.
Truly, the limitation is in how many VLS cells the ship has loaded with SM's and how quickly they can cycle the firing rate.
I joined the Navy to see the world, only to discover the world is 2/3 water!