Eugene Leitl wrote:
>
> Michael S. Lorrey writes:
>
> > > Cruse Missiles.
> >
> > Attackable with conventional aircraft and surface to air missiles (even of the
> > shoulder fired kind).
>
> You have to know they're there. A relatively slow stealth delivery
> vehicle with cool exhaust hugging the ground is quite difficult to
> see, even from above.
True, but where are you launching from? Canada? Mexico? Frankly I'm not
worried about sophisticated threats from terrorists. They don't have
this kind of capability, and won't for a long time.
>
> > > Stealth technology.
> >
> > Submillimeter radar. new generation IR sensors.
>
> Try spotting a helium-assisted electroflight delivery vehicle, which
> contains essentially no metal, and is 99% translucent. Or, just
> camouflage as private aircraft, using teleoperation.
Carrying a metallic bomb weighing several hundred pounds at the very
least?
(BTW: Backpack/suitcase bombs are not that small, or that light)
A helium lifting device would have to be at least 30 feet in diameter to
life that much weight, and an aircraft would not be that much smaller.
>
> > > Cheap balloon decoys.
> >
> > To do what? they have distinctly different ballistic characteristics and radar
> > signatures.
>
> It should be not so very difficult to engineer decoys which look like
> a warhead. In a pinch, just make inflatable warhead-shaped metallized
> baloons.
You'd have to make the warhead have the same reentry shell as an IRV,
the same mass as an IRV, and its own guidance, like an IRV. The only
thing that won't be in your decoy is an actual nuclear weapon, while the
decoy takes up as much space and weight as a real weapon. Decoys are
dumb.
>
> > > Armored warheads.
> >
> > Added weight reduces the total number of warheads you can carry, and makes the
> > warhead either larger, and thus easier to hit, or else denser, and thus a much
> > hotter and easier to spot target.
>
> Of course you deploy decoys before atmospheric reentry. As soon as the
> thing encounters enough atmospheric drag to develop a plasma coat,
> you don't have very much time to hit it.
Terminal phalanx and other systems like THAAD are terminal systems like
this. Its obviously feasible, otherwise, why would we be focusing on the
terminal stage first?
>
> > > Warheads in orbit.
> >
> > Easily detectable with xray and gamma ray observation platforms. Allowing
>
> Huh? A dormant, well-shielded warhead? From a distance of some 100 km?
> Uh, don't think so.
>
> > warheads in orbit automatically allows you to put warhead powered xray lasers in
> > orbit, which are far far cheaper and more effective than any other laser
> > technology. Every bomb you use as an xray pump can kill 50-200 targets at once.
>
> Er, you can only align the bomb towards one target. Nuke for nuke,
> that's quite expensive. Also, it is very, very difficult to destroy a
> remote target which is shielded by, say, a few cm of tungsten. I
> haven't heard of any successfull xRay laser tests in orbit (duh).
>
Actually, no. The testing has all been underground for obvious
legal/treaty reasons, but they've been designed with many focusing
devices on a single bomb.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jul 27 2000 - 14:13:18 MDT