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First of all that's a very important article people should be aware of: around the ABM treaty, nuclear _powered_ cruise missiles, and maybe some deaths developi
by imglorp 6y ago
First of all that's a very important article people should be aware of: around the ABM treaty, nuclear _powered_ cruise missiles, and maybe some deaths developing that tech. This is just last year, Putin driven.
Second of all, it's not clear why it needs to be nuclear powered. Our 1970's subsonic cruise missiles are terrain-following for 2500km at 30m AGL. You can throw them from trucks or ships or planes and go well into
someone's territory. A fair assumption is that everyones' are better now in all axes. The point is you don't need the price/risk of unlimited range, unless your goal is to terrorize and poison everything on the way to your target.
- acidburnNSA 6y agoWe had some nuclear scramjets in the Project Pluto era. I think one nice thing about them in the military sense is that they can go REALLY fast for a pretty long time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pluto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pluto
- sandworm101 6y agoThey were doomed. The issue was heat. At supersonic speeds air friction heats the missile. Without fuel being burnt there is no way to dump the heat off the missile. Regardless of heat from the engine, after a few hours air friction would see the entire thing glowing red, the "thermal thicket".