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> Why on earth would you need a nuclear weapon to intercept a ballistic missle? Certainly conventional explosives would have more than enough yield to destroy a
by Tuna-Fish 9y ago
> Why on earth would you need a nuclear weapon to intercept a ballistic missle? Certainly conventional explosives would have more than enough yield to destroy a single missle. Or is the idea that you don't have to hit the target exactly, you just have to be in the ballpark?
Yep. Re-entering ballistic missiles come down really fast -- if you mistime the detonation of your warhead by a few microseconds, no conventional warhead can hit the target. Back when missiles just couldn't be accurate enough, they were deployed with nuclear warheads to have large enough area of effect.
And those missiles were insane. For example, look at the Sprint missile: It accelerates at 100g to reach mach 10 in 5 seconds, just in time to get close enough to nuke the target. After accelerating, the head of the missile glows brightly white hot from heating.
Modern ABMs are typically hittiles, that is they do away with the warhead completely and just intend to hit the target directly, using the fact that they don't have to carry a warhead to gain a drastically better kinematics.
- Pxtl 9y ago> hittiles Oh god please tell me that's not a real word.
- Tuna-Fish 9y agoSorry to disappoint, but it's been in wide use for half a century. BAC coined it to market their Rapier missile which was accurate enough to not need a large fragmentation warhead, and it spread out from there.
- PhasmaFelis 9y agoI wouldn't say "wide use". Google has only 18,000 total hits for the term, and most of those seems to be false positives (e.g. "hit tile").
- Zancarius 9y agoCertainly not in the DoJ's R&D engineering teams, AFAIK. See my post above. That's not to say it's a more common colloquialism in commonwealth countries.
- PhasmaFelis 9y agoSadly, it seems it is. And yes, it's intended as an awful pun.
- Zancarius 9y agoThe OP is being humorous, I suspect. Nothing wrong with a good joke now and again. In my experience (my father worked on several weapon systems programs and numerous other things, including somewhat more recently SM-3), I don't recall them being officially referred to as anything other than "kill vehicle" or "kinetic kill vehicle." Usually it was just "warhead" or "missile." Besides, once you hit about Mach 6, your need for a warhead greatly diminishes.
- dredmorbius 9y agoThe true-speed launch footage is downright freaky: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QiyldgYKy_U https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QiyldgYKy_U Most footage shows slow-motion video.
- tgjsrkghruksd 9y agoThere's no way to get a true-size, true-perspective sense of this kind of speed. We're not built for it. You look at it and it's gone. That's some good vintage video. There's a mix of slow-motion and full-speed views of the recent MDA ABM test at Vandenberg here: https://www.dvidshub.net/video/529942/enhanced-ftg-15-flight-test-video https://www.dvidshub.net/video/529942/enhanced-ftg-15-flight...