The key missing information here seems to be how many of these satellites would be required to have constant coverage of likely trajectories. This depends on the distance at which the laser remains effective. There would be no atmospheric scattering, but beam collimation is never perfect. It also depends on how fast the satellite can fire a new shot, as any warhead will be surrounded by decoys and other penetration aids. If this requires a large number of satellites, I am very sceptical. While Starlink has shown the possibility of creating large constellations, these sats would surely be much larger and more expensive. Really, Starlink makes me think something like BRILLIANT PEBBLES (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brilliant_Pebbles) would be a more reasonable alternative.
Also, could an adversary surround the warhead with absorbent chaff as a countermeasure? Or simply an ablative shield, the warhead needs one anyway to get through the atmosphere.
Still, a very interesting read from a very interesting CEO.
Yeah, me too. Bruno, although ex-LM and ULA, is one of those "born-dirt-poor-but-obsessed-with-rockets" kind of CEOs that seem to be hard to find these days. That's one of the great differentiators between now and the days of the S1C; you'd have a hard time finding finance executives doing technical steering in 1967. Which, I mean, fair point, as far as I'm concerned, but I might be a wee bit biased.
From a layman's perspective, it seems like maybe DEWs should be looking at disrupting the extraordinarily delicate aerodynamics/hydrodynamics/plasmadynamics(?) of maneuvering Mach 5+ targets in atmosphere. Why do I say that? Well, if these things get consistent asymmetry in any part of their forward shock they'll spin themselves into bits, that's one. You can't shield the air with ablatives, that's second. Also, third, the sheath might be part of the communication/guidance system, so disrupting that it is good. Finally - somewhat related to second - tuning DEWs to interact with a plasma has TONS of possibilities, which helps to mitigate DEW's many many weaknesses over longer ranges. For the most part, I think DEWs will be short range wunderwaffen - particularly on the defensive end - but there's going to be niche cases.
Referenced: cost of firing a laser is $1 of gasoline run through a generator. That's roughly a liter.
Let's say raw energy content is 32MJ/L, and we have gasoline=>electricity losses of 50% and laser efficiency of 30%, so we expect a little more than 5MJ per shot.
If you can hit a 2m target moving at 5Km/s through 1000Km of space and atmosphere with 5MJ, how much energy can you put on a 1m target moving at 7m/s at a range of 500Km?
The difficulty in killing people from space will be targeting, and the limited availability of fuel and oxidator in space.
Brilliant Pebbles seems way more practical today than 1987. Lots of exotic 80s autonomous systems are now commercial and mundane, and launch costs are plummeting.
Sending up a space laser seems particilarly absurd when one could send up 100(?) drone interceptors for the same cost with less R&D, especially when a drone constellation is far more resilient against anti satellite weapons.
Not to mention that this simply moves the initial conflict to space, where adversaries can deploy DE satellites to destroy ours... and THEN launch missiles.
It's incredible that 40 years after Reagan and the "Star Wars" defense plan, we finally have entities doing what seemed obvious even to high-schoolers at the time: just make the missiles zig-zag.
Kind of by definition if something is -sonic then it's in the atmosphere. There would be less scattering but there would definitely be some on the target end.
> could an adversary surround the warhead with absorbent chaff as a countermeasure
That would require a constant stream of chaff (it would get left behind pretty quickly without any thrust), and would need to be shot out in the opposite direction of travel (lowering the missile speed the entire time), and require the chaff and its launch mechanism to be part of the payload (increasing weight).
"U.S. has excellent defenses against all classes of ballistic missiles"
This is the first time I've actually read somebody making that claim. Every other take on this topic has been that defenses against long range missiles are woefully inadequate and easily saturated by a low two digit number of missiles with MIRVs.
Those criticisms are not about the technical capability of missile defenses, but the scale at which they are deployed. If you can shoot down anything, but you only have 40 shots, obviously you can be defeated by anyone who can make 41 of even the crudest missiles. Likewise the best tank in the world is much less effective after it runs out of ammo. But if the issue is merely scale, all you need to do is make more interceptors, which is a finite and predictable expense, as opposed to developing a new technology which could be a massive money pit that ultimately fails.
The US maintains a rather small inventory of interceptors because for the past few decades only small strikes by rogue nations or accidental launches by major powers have been considered likely threats, and a large number of interceptors jeopardizes mutually assured destruction, which has been a much more cost effective counter against large scale nuclear exchanges. But there's nothing saying the US needs to stick to the current number if the global geopolitical situation changes.
This is probably better interpreted as "the US has the best defenses against ballistic missiles". The Patriot missile is proven to defeat Scud missiles in real combat, and THAAD is the most thoroughly tested system against long range ballistic missiles. Is that going to stop 5,000 ICBMs with penetration aids launched against the US? Almost certainly not, and I don't think the author meant it that way.
I think the claim is true, I also think that a lot of missiles would get through.
A baseball analogy, an excellent, best in the world baseball batter will hit 4 out of every ten balls thrown at him. that is still an awful lot of balls that get through.
For real world numbers note how well Israel does against all the ballistic missiles thrown at them, also note that these are slow short range ballistic missiles.
The article is very cool and informative, I actually enjoyed it.
But since I didn't know the author, it took me to the last paragraph and his signature to notice he's actually trying to sell us on the idea of putting actual Death Ray satellites in space.
That's kind of cool too, but I'm sure it's a very bad idea to combine worldwide surveillance and killer lasers in space.
Hypersonic is a poorly defined term. Some people use it to simply mean "faster than about 5x the speed of sound". That is what people mean when they say "China and Russia have Hypersonic missiles".
But speed at that level is basically irrelevant for interception etc.
Other people use Hypersonic to mean able to manoeuvre at those speeds. A normal ICBM, especially the old ones, cannot do that. They follow a simple, predictable, course to their targets. In theory that makes it easier to hit them. Only no one can do that. People have done a respectable job of shooting down non-ICBMs. But ICBMs are 10-100 times faster, further away, higher, etc. And no one will use 1, they will use 1000 and it is dooms day unless you intercept 990 of those.
So all of this is really just a mix of honest ignorance (and confusing terms) and dishonest sensationalism...
The point of a hypersonic missile is to NOT follow a simple parabolic curve to the target. That is what hypersonic really means: able to manoeuvre at speeds about the speed of sound. That makes it harder to intercept. Only no one can intercept an ICBM anyway.
Interestingly this is why the first Hypersonic missile was actually build in the 1930s...
You know, before we had interceptor missiles that were tolerably good against ballistic missiles, pretty much the exact same argument was made by experts like Edward Teller for why space based lasers and/or particle beams were essential to intercept ballistic missiles.
Not saying its necessarily wrong now, but it was definitely very expensively wrong the last time.
I am been fascinated by Edward Teller and the x-ray laser. It strikes me as a case of a golden hammer [0]. Here he had an incredible tool: a thermonuclear weapon. It can destroy a silo, a fleet of ships, or a city. What else can we do with it [1]? Maybe for the best it didn’t work out.
The human genome project cost 3 billion dollars to sequence the first genome(s) (with one draft costing about 300 million), you can now have your genome sequenced for less than $1000.
Yes there are differences, but science and technology have moved on substantially. Just because it was wrong the last time does not mean it is going to be wrong this time.
It's hard to take his praise for laser interception of hypersonic weapons seriously.
For intercepting swarms of cheap drones? It's a great fit! Space-based lasers for intercepting ICBMs? Maybe? But true hypersonic weapons (which Kinzhal is not) fly only in air (after all, they use oxygen in it to fly), while being covered in a plasma shield which is really good at absorbing all kinds of electromagnetic radiation.
Meanwhile, with high enough laser power you get instabilities in air which act as a natural diverging lens for your beam, drastically reducing effective range of your system. Push power even further to compensate for it and you will get plasma, which does even better job at dispersing energy of your beam. So in the end, you get a very short range interception system with a minuscule time frame to perform interception of a hypersonic target.
I had heard that space based stuff was “illegal” - finally looked up what treaty defines that
“Development of orbital weaponry was largely halted after the entry into force of the Outer Space Treaty and the SALT II treaty. These agreements prohibit weapons of mass destruction from being placed in space. As other weapons exist, notably those using kinetic bombardment, that would not violate these treaties, some private groups and government officials have proposed a Space Preservation Treaty which would ban the placement of any weaponry in outer space.”
The sad state of affairs is that international space treaties are practically unenforceable..
Hence ULA CEO proposing giant space lasers™ which obviously will not be defense only in the long run. The same way the US "defense industry" has never defended.
And who is going to stop the Chinese from putting weapons into orbit? Heck they might've done it already and we'd be none the wiser.
A laser being able to destroy a low flying high speed missile hardend against those is probably also able to a lot more. Like destroy enemy planes. Or combatants. Or heads of states. Or pesky journalists/dissidents.
Allowing sth like this to be deployed, not sure if this can be allowed by eg other nation states. It certainly puts the status quo in disarray...
The article argues that lasers are cheap because you can just run them off a diesel generator in a container. But then it switches to space... which obviously doesn't do well with diesel and refueling.
I assume we're talking about either battery+solar cell or nuclear power on those satellites?
The important part is that their overall energy consumption is low. And their usage is quite bursty so I think you're right that a space based laser would just spend days charging batteries via solar or from an RTG.
Also even on land with the diesel generator, I assume the generator is charging up batteries or super capacitors and not hooked up directly to the laser. Estimating a ~30 second laser discharge, only the most gigantic diesel generators can convert a gallon of diesel to electricity in half a minute.
Almost certainly solar. The limitation isn't so much gathering the energy as it is keeping the thing from melting itself down. If you want to fire it more often you're probably going to have to put a bunch of these in orbit and maintain them indefinitely. Very expensive.
Just spitballing here but it might have to do with the fact that materials that absorb light are more heat conductive than materials that are reflective.
The SR71 was famously painted black as a mitigation for surface heating issues because the black paint conducted heat away from the areas the were really susceptible to ram-heating.
Perhaps reflective surfaces reflect some percentage of the incoming energy away, but thermally conductive surfaces conduct a larger percentage of that energy away and are able to safely sink it into some thermal mass.
I think the usual issue is a mirrored surface is not robust enough to absorb extreme levels of energy for very long before it becomes a poor mirror.
I expect the counter will be more along the lines of having sufficient ablating material to block the laser - a small amount of extra armour probably has an outsize affect on survivability.
This sounds like completely made up rubbish to me. Reflective surfaces definitely absorb less heat. Mirrors may however be impractical and may not reflect enough to make the missile immune.
I thought a primary issue with DE weapons was water vapor?
My grandfather helped design several missile systems and held patents on radar interferometry, he claimed repeatedly that laser systems would never work practically because all the enemy had to do was wait for a rainy or misty day.
He claimed the power requirements for DE skyrocketed to unrealistic levels almost immediately once you had to pierce water vapor.
Anything that endangers mutually assured destruction does not make war less likely, but instead more likely. Also, militarizing space risks making Earths orbit unusable, since when you have a death laser satellite, that is a valid military target, and it's destruction might cause a chain reaction of debris hitting other satellites.
> By the way, the U.S. has excellent defenses against all classes of ballistic missiles
I am highly skeptical of this claim.
The author is otherwise correct: you can almost pinpoint the target soon after launch of a ballistic missile because of the way trajectories work. Ballistic missles go through three phases: launch, flight and re-entry. Modern ICBMs have a re-entry velocity as high as 7km/s (Mach ~20). Intercepts at that speed have, to my knowledge, an extremely poor record.
Another factor is that ICBMs can (and do) carry multiple warheads. These will separate at different points in the flight phase or re-entry phase to hit different targets. Detecting multiple warheads isn't necessarily easy either because they're unlikely to have the visible plume of a full-blown rocket engine and it's at such a distance that radar signature probably isn't sufficient to detect the warhead let alone plot the target sufficiently accurately for a kill vehicle to hit it.
The author is otherwise correct in that the real advantage of hypersonic missiles is targeting. The speed (Mach 5-10) makes intercept difficult and you won't know the target until it hits it really so good luck intercepting that.
Maybe top secret THAAD development has improved to the point where it can reliabily intercept ICBM warheads at scale but I'll believe it when I see it. Most ICBM defense relies on hitting the launch vehicle in the boost phase because that's when it's the slowest.
I imagine the targets can be predicted based on the trajectory of the missile, the same calculations used by the missile to release the warheads could in theory be used by the defender to predict their release and intercept them.
Lasers are a cool solution. I wonder if it's possible to reduce scattering using a fore-shot before the main pulse, surely the fore-shot would mostly clear a column through the atmosphere by the heating of any particles in the path of the laser. I don't really know the physics of it but it seems like something like that would work.
Would be cool if we get to the point where we can ionise a very narrow column of air and then use it to deliver an electrical arc as directed artificial lightning! A la Loki's LIP-C: "Brian Gragg kicked his chair away and stood up from the gaming workstation. As the blinded strike team members writhed on the floor, crying out, Gragg moved calmly toward the burly team leader who had shouted at him. Gragg aimed a silver-capped index finger at the man—a lens at its very tip. Black fiber optic and electrical cables ran down the back of Gragg’s hand like veins, disappearing beneath his shirt. “The name is Loki, asshole.”
A ruler-straight bolt of electricity cracked like a bullwhip from his fingertip into the man’s body armor, followed by a flickering series of bolts in quick succession—three a second. The team leader’s muscles jerked with each thunderclap. The smell of ozone filled the air." (Daniel Suarez)
> However, the only practical way to defend against long-range hypersonic gliders, which can threaten entire regions along a single flight corridor, is from Space. Orbiting DE platforms, looking down on entire regions from the ultimate high ground can leverage “birth to death” tracking of any given glider, combined with its speed of light “interceptor,” to completely nullify this threat.
But wouldn't an attacker then first take out the DE satellite, and only after launch the missile?
That could certainly be a defense strategy, but taking down satellites work very much in the same way as taking down a ballistic missile - and there's considerable collateral damage due to the amount of space debris (which could very well induce more debris), which in turn could damage your own satellites.
The other thing to understand is that most of these weapons are costly and war is a game of outlasting the enemy and running down their resources. Having expensive missiles is more effective as a threat than as a means of wearing down an enemy.
The threat is very simple: I can hit any target you care about and there's nothing you can do about it. The flip side is that you only have a limited amount of these missiles and once they run out, the threat goes away. So the trick is to use enough of them to make the threat credible but keep around the remaining rockets to keep the threat credible to minimize loss of resources. That makes them more effective as a defensive weapon than as an offensive weapon.
A lot of modern wars are asymmetric where a technically advanced party with superior resources is worn down by a relatively unsophisticated enemy over time. Consider for example the British, Russian and US attempts to conquer Afghanistan. They each failed. The fallacy here is that committing a lot of resources is expensive and not long term sustainable economically. Once the will to continue fighting evaporates, you basically lose the fight. All the other side has to do is keep on fighting.
This reads as though these are already deployed. If that is so, why have we not seen them being used in Ukraine? Surely the ground based, city defenses lasers he mentioned would be invaluable there?
Summary: Space based directed energy (DE) weapons are the only thing capable of reliably intercepting hypersonic glide vehicles --- and the USA does not have them at this time.
Once a line of sight is established from the DE platform to the warhead, it is impossible to outrun this “speed of light interceptor.” No high G maneuver will work.
The speed of light isn't infinite. Between a satellite seeing the latest maneuver, sending data to a ground station, and a laser burst reaching its target, you've got at least 20 ms and quite likely as much as 100 ms. For a 1 G maneuver that's still going to get you within 10 cm of your target, which is just fine; but a 10 G maneuver could make you miss entirely.
A larger advantage of lasers is probably the opportunity for multiple shots: If you miss with a kinetic interceptor, it's too late to launch another, but if your laser misses you'll know in a matter of seconds and you can try again as soon as your capacitors are recharged.
[+] [-] empedocles|2 years ago|reply
The key missing information here seems to be how many of these satellites would be required to have constant coverage of likely trajectories. This depends on the distance at which the laser remains effective. There would be no atmospheric scattering, but beam collimation is never perfect. It also depends on how fast the satellite can fire a new shot, as any warhead will be surrounded by decoys and other penetration aids. If this requires a large number of satellites, I am very sceptical. While Starlink has shown the possibility of creating large constellations, these sats would surely be much larger and more expensive. Really, Starlink makes me think something like BRILLIANT PEBBLES (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brilliant_Pebbles) would be a more reasonable alternative.
Also, could an adversary surround the warhead with absorbent chaff as a countermeasure? Or simply an ablative shield, the warhead needs one anyway to get through the atmosphere.
Still, a very interesting read from a very interesting CEO.
[+] [-] MilStdJunkie|2 years ago|reply
From a layman's perspective, it seems like maybe DEWs should be looking at disrupting the extraordinarily delicate aerodynamics/hydrodynamics/plasmadynamics(?) of maneuvering Mach 5+ targets in atmosphere. Why do I say that? Well, if these things get consistent asymmetry in any part of their forward shock they'll spin themselves into bits, that's one. You can't shield the air with ablatives, that's second. Also, third, the sheath might be part of the communication/guidance system, so disrupting that it is good. Finally - somewhat related to second - tuning DEWs to interact with a plasma has TONS of possibilities, which helps to mitigate DEW's many many weaknesses over longer ranges. For the most part, I think DEWs will be short range wunderwaffen - particularly on the defensive end - but there's going to be niche cases.
[+] [-] dsr_|2 years ago|reply
Let's say raw energy content is 32MJ/L, and we have gasoline=>electricity losses of 50% and laser efficiency of 30%, so we expect a little more than 5MJ per shot.
If you can hit a 2m target moving at 5Km/s through 1000Km of space and atmosphere with 5MJ, how much energy can you put on a 1m target moving at 7m/s at a range of 500Km?
The difficulty in killing people from space will be targeting, and the limited availability of fuel and oxidator in space.
[+] [-] brucethemoose2|2 years ago|reply
Sending up a space laser seems particilarly absurd when one could send up 100(?) drone interceptors for the same cost with less R&D, especially when a drone constellation is far more resilient against anti satellite weapons.
[+] [-] ShadowBanThis01|2 years ago|reply
It's incredible that 40 years after Reagan and the "Star Wars" defense plan, we finally have entities doing what seemed obvious even to high-schoolers at the time: just make the missiles zig-zag.
[+] [-] dabluecaboose|2 years ago|reply
Kind of by definition if something is -sonic then it's in the atmosphere. There would be less scattering but there would definitely be some on the target end.
[+] [-] askvictor|2 years ago|reply
That would require a constant stream of chaff (it would get left behind pretty quickly without any thrust), and would need to be shot out in the opposite direction of travel (lowering the missile speed the entire time), and require the chaff and its launch mechanism to be part of the payload (increasing weight).
[+] [-] nitwit005|2 years ago|reply
The easiest way for North Korea to nuke Tokyo is to just put the bomb on a legitimate seeming boat, and sail it over.
[+] [-] elurg|2 years ago|reply
Elon needs to talk less about peace with Russia and more about deploying weapon systems. He can make enough money from it to retire on Mars.
[+] [-] jupp0r|2 years ago|reply
This is the first time I've actually read somebody making that claim. Every other take on this topic has been that defenses against long range missiles are woefully inadequate and easily saturated by a low two digit number of missiles with MIRVs.
[+] [-] jjk166|2 years ago|reply
The US maintains a rather small inventory of interceptors because for the past few decades only small strikes by rogue nations or accidental launches by major powers have been considered likely threats, and a large number of interceptors jeopardizes mutually assured destruction, which has been a much more cost effective counter against large scale nuclear exchanges. But there's nothing saying the US needs to stick to the current number if the global geopolitical situation changes.
[+] [-] Manuel_D|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] somat|2 years ago|reply
A baseball analogy, an excellent, best in the world baseball batter will hit 4 out of every ten balls thrown at him. that is still an awful lot of balls that get through.
For real world numbers note how well Israel does against all the ballistic missiles thrown at them, also note that these are slow short range ballistic missiles.
[+] [-] guhcampos|2 years ago|reply
But since I didn't know the author, it took me to the last paragraph and his signature to notice he's actually trying to sell us on the idea of putting actual Death Ray satellites in space.
That's kind of cool too, but I'm sure it's a very bad idea to combine worldwide surveillance and killer lasers in space.
[+] [-] LatteLazy|2 years ago|reply
But speed at that level is basically irrelevant for interception etc.
Other people use Hypersonic to mean able to manoeuvre at those speeds. A normal ICBM, especially the old ones, cannot do that. They follow a simple, predictable, course to their targets. In theory that makes it easier to hit them. Only no one can do that. People have done a respectable job of shooting down non-ICBMs. But ICBMs are 10-100 times faster, further away, higher, etc. And no one will use 1, they will use 1000 and it is dooms day unless you intercept 990 of those.
So all of this is really just a mix of honest ignorance (and confusing terms) and dishonest sensationalism...
The point of a hypersonic missile is to NOT follow a simple parabolic curve to the target. That is what hypersonic really means: able to manoeuvre at speeds about the speed of sound. That makes it harder to intercept. Only no one can intercept an ICBM anyway.
Interestingly this is why the first Hypersonic missile was actually build in the 1930s...
[+] [-] dragonwriter|2 years ago|reply
Not saying its necessarily wrong now, but it was definitely very expensively wrong the last time.
[+] [-] time0ut|2 years ago|reply
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_the_instrument
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Excalibur
[+] [-] vertis|2 years ago|reply
Yes there are differences, but science and technology have moved on substantially. Just because it was wrong the last time does not mean it is going to be wrong this time.
[+] [-] rektide|2 years ago|reply
(But yes, SDI had almost no chance of working at the time.)
[+] [-] joncrane|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fuoqi|2 years ago|reply
For intercepting swarms of cheap drones? It's a great fit! Space-based lasers for intercepting ICBMs? Maybe? But true hypersonic weapons (which Kinzhal is not) fly only in air (after all, they use oxygen in it to fly), while being covered in a plasma shield which is really good at absorbing all kinds of electromagnetic radiation.
Meanwhile, with high enough laser power you get instabilities in air which act as a natural diverging lens for your beam, drastically reducing effective range of your system. Push power even further to compensate for it and you will get plasma, which does even better job at dispersing energy of your beam. So in the end, you get a very short range interception system with a minuscule time frame to perform interception of a hypersonic target.
[+] [-] loudmax|2 years ago|reply
It addresses a lot of the same topics as this Medium article.
[+] [-] alexvoda|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] verdverm|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tpm|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gooseyman|2 years ago|reply
“Development of orbital weaponry was largely halted after the entry into force of the Outer Space Treaty and the SALT II treaty. These agreements prohibit weapons of mass destruction from being placed in space. As other weapons exist, notably those using kinetic bombardment, that would not violate these treaties, some private groups and government officials have proposed a Space Preservation Treaty which would ban the placement of any weaponry in outer space.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_weapon
[+] [-] 4gotunameagain|2 years ago|reply
Hence ULA CEO proposing giant space lasers™ which obviously will not be defense only in the long run. The same way the US "defense industry" has never defended.
And who is going to stop the Chinese from putting weapons into orbit? Heck they might've done it already and we'd be none the wiser.
[+] [-] Faark|2 years ago|reply
A laser being able to destroy a low flying high speed missile hardend against those is probably also able to a lot more. Like destroy enemy planes. Or combatants. Or heads of states. Or pesky journalists/dissidents.
Allowing sth like this to be deployed, not sure if this can be allowed by eg other nation states. It certainly puts the status quo in disarray...
[+] [-] boxed|2 years ago|reply
I assume we're talking about either battery+solar cell or nuclear power on those satellites?
[+] [-] varenc|2 years ago|reply
Also even on land with the diesel generator, I assume the generator is charging up batteries or super capacitors and not hooked up directly to the laser. Estimating a ~30 second laser discharge, only the most gigantic diesel generators can convert a gallon of diesel to electricity in half a minute.
[+] [-] jandrese|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ambicapter|2 years ago|reply
Does anyone know why this is the case? Do mirrored surfaces trigger some sort of internal reflection which ends up absorbing more energy?
[+] [-] gateorade|2 years ago|reply
The SR71 was famously painted black as a mitigation for surface heating issues because the black paint conducted heat away from the areas the were really susceptible to ram-heating.
Perhaps reflective surfaces reflect some percentage of the incoming energy away, but thermally conductive surfaces conduct a larger percentage of that energy away and are able to safely sink it into some thermal mass.
[+] [-] Panzer04|2 years ago|reply
I expect the counter will be more along the lines of having sufficient ablating material to block the laser - a small amount of extra armour probably has an outsize affect on survivability.
[+] [-] barbegal|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] claytongulick|2 years ago|reply
My grandfather helped design several missile systems and held patents on radar interferometry, he claimed repeatedly that laser systems would never work practically because all the enemy had to do was wait for a rainy or misty day.
He claimed the power requirements for DE skyrocketed to unrealistic levels almost immediately once you had to pierce water vapor.
[+] [-] jandrese|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sebzim4500|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bombcar|2 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nT1sSy39CuU
Now it is not misunderstood anymore, in fact, it understands you more than you know.
[+] [-] greiskul|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jmyeet|2 years ago|reply
I am highly skeptical of this claim.
The author is otherwise correct: you can almost pinpoint the target soon after launch of a ballistic missile because of the way trajectories work. Ballistic missles go through three phases: launch, flight and re-entry. Modern ICBMs have a re-entry velocity as high as 7km/s (Mach ~20). Intercepts at that speed have, to my knowledge, an extremely poor record.
Another factor is that ICBMs can (and do) carry multiple warheads. These will separate at different points in the flight phase or re-entry phase to hit different targets. Detecting multiple warheads isn't necessarily easy either because they're unlikely to have the visible plume of a full-blown rocket engine and it's at such a distance that radar signature probably isn't sufficient to detect the warhead let alone plot the target sufficiently accurately for a kill vehicle to hit it.
The author is otherwise correct in that the real advantage of hypersonic missiles is targeting. The speed (Mach 5-10) makes intercept difficult and you won't know the target until it hits it really so good luck intercepting that.
Maybe top secret THAAD development has improved to the point where it can reliabily intercept ICBM warheads at scale but I'll believe it when I see it. Most ICBM defense relies on hitting the launch vehicle in the boost phase because that's when it's the slowest.
[+] [-] empressplay|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fennecfoxy|2 years ago|reply
Would be cool if we get to the point where we can ionise a very narrow column of air and then use it to deliver an electrical arc as directed artificial lightning! A la Loki's LIP-C: "Brian Gragg kicked his chair away and stood up from the gaming workstation. As the blinded strike team members writhed on the floor, crying out, Gragg moved calmly toward the burly team leader who had shouted at him. Gragg aimed a silver-capped index finger at the man—a lens at its very tip. Black fiber optic and electrical cables ran down the back of Gragg’s hand like veins, disappearing beneath his shirt. “The name is Loki, asshole.” A ruler-straight bolt of electricity cracked like a bullwhip from his fingertip into the man’s body armor, followed by a flickering series of bolts in quick succession—three a second. The team leader’s muscles jerked with each thunderclap. The smell of ozone filled the air." (Daniel Suarez)
[+] [-] dist-epoch|2 years ago|reply
But wouldn't an attacker then first take out the DE satellite, and only after launch the missile?
[+] [-] TrackerFF|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jillesvangurp|2 years ago|reply
The threat is very simple: I can hit any target you care about and there's nothing you can do about it. The flip side is that you only have a limited amount of these missiles and once they run out, the threat goes away. So the trick is to use enough of them to make the threat credible but keep around the remaining rockets to keep the threat credible to minimize loss of resources. That makes them more effective as a defensive weapon than as an offensive weapon.
A lot of modern wars are asymmetric where a technically advanced party with superior resources is worn down by a relatively unsophisticated enemy over time. Consider for example the British, Russian and US attempts to conquer Afghanistan. They each failed. The fallacy here is that committing a lot of resources is expensive and not long term sustainable economically. Once the will to continue fighting evaporates, you basically lose the fight. All the other side has to do is keep on fighting.
[+] [-] jackdh|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jqpabc123|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cperciva|2 years ago|reply
The speed of light isn't infinite. Between a satellite seeing the latest maneuver, sending data to a ground station, and a laser burst reaching its target, you've got at least 20 ms and quite likely as much as 100 ms. For a 1 G maneuver that's still going to get you within 10 cm of your target, which is just fine; but a 10 G maneuver could make you miss entirely.
A larger advantage of lasers is probably the opportunity for multiple shots: If you miss with a kinetic interceptor, it's too late to launch another, but if your laser misses you'll know in a matter of seconds and you can try again as soon as your capacitors are recharged.
[+] [-] gilbetron|2 years ago|reply