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It's simple orbital mechanics to calculate the trajectory. ICBMs aren't like planes, it's not like they just fly to the target and stop. It's powered during the
by MertsA 9y ago
It's simple orbital mechanics to calculate the trajectory. ICBMs aren't like planes, it's not like they just fly to the target and stop. It's powered during the first minutes of flight and then it just coasts from there. The exception to this is MIRV ICBMs where warheads are deployed one at a time and the final stage changes orbit a bit before releasing the next warhead. MIRVs can't change their trajectory that much though, you can target multiple locations, but they have to be in a couple hundred kilometers of each other.
Basically if there's an ICBM flying over China and it looks like it's going to hit NK, there's no way to kill all of that horizontal velocity and significantly change its trajectory.
- ben_w 9y agoI’ve read that ICBMs are very hard to spot after the initial boost phase. That being the case, if I was an ICBM designer, I’d add a cold gas thruster to the payload stage that allowed the target to be adjusted or fine tuned while it was out of the atmosphere in a stealthy way — even a delta-V of just 100 m/s adds up to 280km when the missile takes 45 minutes to arrive.