No, the scene is impossible. You'd need a battleship to sink a freighter that fast in one shot.
The way a man-portable anti-armor missile like that typically works is to create a jet of hot gas/plasma on impact. This burns a small hole in the armor, then the remainder of the jet plays around inside like a flamethrower. The idea is to fry everything on the inside of the tank. Once it burns through the armor, the jet expands rapidly and loses it's armor-penetrating power. There are some forms "spaced" armor that try to set off the missile early, and some forms of double-warhead missiles to counter spaced armor. But that's designed to penetrate extra layers separated by a few inches at most. The movie showed the missile blowing clear *through* the entire ship and out the other side. You need warship-sized cannon to do that. Here's what happens if you fire a missile like that at a freighter hull: It will burn a hole in it, anywhere from a few inches to a foot across. And it'll start a nice fire on the other side. If there's nothing flammable over there, there's not much effect. For a container ship, I imagine it would ignite the paint of the container just inside the impact point. What happens next depends on what's in the container, and how good the crew are at firefighting. Anybody standing inside the ship near the impact spot will be char-broiled. There's another type of warhead called a "squash-head" that doesn't blow a hole in the armor. It makes a big disk-shaped chunk of armor fly off the inside surface and bounce around the vehicle interior like a buzzsaw. That's rare in a missile, and even less like the movie. In general, infantry-level anti-tank missiles make poor naval weapons. Most ships have too much non-essential volume; you can riddle them with holes and not hit anything too important. A tank has very little internal space that's not filled with bits that it needs. You can get "golden-BB"-esque shots that disable a ship with one shot, but that's getting really lucky.
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Date: 2010-06-14 04:58 am (UTC)The way a man-portable anti-armor missile like that typically works is to create a jet of hot gas/plasma on impact. This burns a small hole in the armor, then the remainder of the jet plays around inside like a flamethrower. The idea is to fry everything on the inside of the tank. Once it burns through the armor, the jet expands rapidly and loses it's armor-penetrating power. There are some forms "spaced" armor that try to set off the missile early, and some forms of double-warhead missiles to counter spaced armor. But that's designed to penetrate extra layers separated by a few inches at most. The movie showed the missile blowing clear *through* the entire ship and out the other side. You need warship-sized cannon to do that.
Here's what happens if you fire a missile like that at a freighter hull: It will burn a hole in it, anywhere from a few inches to a foot across. And it'll start a nice fire on the other side. If there's nothing flammable over there, there's not much effect. For a container ship, I imagine it would ignite the paint of the container just inside the impact point. What happens next depends on what's in the container, and how good the crew are at firefighting. Anybody standing inside the ship near the impact spot will be char-broiled.
There's another type of warhead called a "squash-head" that doesn't blow a hole in the armor. It makes a big disk-shaped chunk of armor fly off the inside surface and bounce around the vehicle interior like a buzzsaw. That's rare in a missile, and even less like the movie.
In general, infantry-level anti-tank missiles make poor naval weapons. Most ships have too much non-essential volume; you can riddle them with holes and not hit anything too important. A tank has very little internal space that's not filled with bits that it needs. You can get "golden-BB"-esque shots that disable a ship with one shot, but that's getting really lucky.