4 ms·

> It makes no sense for USA to build hypersonic, because none of our foes are building a missile shield comparable to AEGIS. If I remember right, one US Genera

• dragontamer 3y ago
  > you're going to want your spears to be the same strength as your opponents. Why? A substantial portion of energy in a Hypersonic missile is spent battling drag. Its far more efficient to kill them with sub-sonic missiles or supersonic missiles so that there's less drag. The less drag you have, the bigger the payload you can put. Think of it this way: 100% of the weight of your missile needs to be allocated between thrust and explosives. If you go 80% thrust, you'll reach hypersonic, but now you barely have any explosives left over. And the vast majority of this "thrust" is wasted on air-drag. If you go 20% thrust, you'll have 80% explosives left over for your weight. You'll take longer to get there, but supersonic (and subsonic) has significant efficiency gains. ------------ There is a USA hypersonic missile project that does away with this problem by being 100% thrust and attacking with kinetic energy alone. But you can see... this fundamental physics question of allocating "explosive" vs "thrust" is very fundamental to the situation at hand. I posit that any hypersonic missile will do less damage than an equivalent subsonic cruise missile of the same weight class. Because air-drag at hypersonic speeds really is a major play on the amount of energy you deliver to the opponent. ------------- You go "faster' not because it does more damage. You go 'faster' because it avoids the enemy defenses. But that speed costs you rocket fuel (rocket fuel that could have been high explosives instead).
  • rcarr 3y ago
    Well my thinking is that if your missile shield is broken, your fleet is now vulnerable and are likely to get destroyed and you're also vulnerable to an attack on home soil. If you can't get your boats across the ocean how can you ship supplies across the ocean to troops that are on the ground? How can you defend yourself from attacks on home soil if the missiles can penetrate your air defences and fly faster than anything you can send after them?
    • dragontamer 3y ago
      That's called a Ballistic missile and those are just how nuclear war works. The general assumption is that no one uses nukes. Because if we go nuclear, the world as we know it is over. There is no missile shield vs Ballistic missiles or ICBMs. That's always been true. Our defense against ICBMs is always the same, we have more of them and promise to blow the enemy up with our more numerous, bigger nukes. ------------ The reason hypersonic missiles are a 'thing' is because they aren't nukes. They work because China (presumably) figured out a homing device that can lock onto ships. So from a conventional perspective, it's about hitting a fleet of ships without escalating to nuclear combat. That doesn't mean that China instantly wins vs Taiwan, it just means we need to be careful about our fleet positioning and stay outside of China's sensor / homing mechanisms range. Our F35 can perform mid-air refueling for a reason, we can sit outside the range of the Chinese missile and still fly missions, albeit with a slower response time due to the increased flight distance before combat.