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> hittiles Oh god please tell me that's not a real word.
by 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.