Ive seen Twatter implessive account ssy certain radar bands ir IR spectrum can see trough the plasma sheat,Ive seen people say a true hypersonics Rocket cant be true hypersonic because of economic reasons and scramjet, and some say its only a glide vehicle and not a missile and just a balistic hypersonics and other say they have to slow down to find a target.How does this work?
>>64391194cute waverider image
>>64391194IR part of the spectrum is where glowing hot objects radiate the most energy. Plasma might be transparent in that region, maybe, I'm too lazy to check, but you wouldn't be able to see jack shit through it anyway because it would be like trying to look through a 1000 watt LED lightbulb pointed right at your eyeBallistic """hypersonic""" missiles are a marketing term, they only briefly pass into the Mach 5+ regime during the boost phase. They aren't any more difficult to intercept than a regular ballistic missile Economics of hypersonic missiles boil down to the idea that there are time sensitive targets on the battlefield that might pop up for just a few minutes and then disappear into the fog of war again. You're paying a premium for the capability to hit them at all with a hypersonic where other missiles or fighters would take too long to reach them. (And also they're supposedly better at getting past warship defences, but that's not certain. They're more sensitive to jamming due to the need to put the radar seeker behind a ceramic nosecone instead of a polymer one). They aren't going to replace things like PrSM or Tomahawk for your day to day strikes
>>64391194Zircs look like a Tridon 2 missile.
>>64391194Why would you need to see through the plasma sheath? There's nothing stealthy about an incoming hypersonic, the entire point is basically what >>64391376 is getting at: Delivering a ballistic missile very quickly to a given target hopefully before they can evade or launch interceptors. In theory, and where most implessive posters stop talking, you are reducing the time the target's defenses have to recognize and engage the missile from minutes to seconds. In reality, the launch is detected just like every other ballistic missile launch and the target is well aware they have been engaged by a missile before the hypersonic advantages come into play. Hypersonic glide vehicles, like the ones China is betting big on, are able to maneuver and even extend their flight in order to make interception more difficult, again in theory, because there's only so much room for "flying around" incoming interceptors before the missile is rendered ineffective.About what is and isn't a "true hypersonic," either I'm having a stroke or your English isn't that great, and if it is the case that you're ESL unfortunately this is one of those situations that's going to be hard to understand because you have the language gap AND you have people lying to you for e-clout. Hypersonic has become a sort of marketing and propaganda term, any weapon that reaches a certain speed at any point in its deployment is going to be called hypersonic and there are traditional ballistic missiles that meet this requirement that are very old. There are also anti-ship missiles that have a very brief hypersonic boost phase, which also were invented before all the current bullshit about hypersonic advantages. Stuff like that is probably what the twitter accounts are talking about, and you don't need to take them seriously because that argument is pointless.
Another Russian missile thread?
>>64391590What's supposedly wrong with this pic? I am not an engineer.
>>64391599That enormous tower of electronics has less computing power than an old nokia.What is wrong with it is that Russia is still stuck in the pre-90s era of electronics where you needed a wheelie bin of components to do what one chip can trivially accomplish today.
>>64391599They're still using 1950s computer boards, it isn't even IC transistorized, just board component transistors. All of that could get replaced with 4 trays each the size of a large encyclopedia.
>>64391194So first off, plasma is HOT and the engines that can reach hypersonic run HOT which means hypersonic missiles show up on IR.Second, if the missile is covered in radar absorbing plasma then how does the missile see the target?Third, Hypersonic Boost-Glide missiles are only hypersonic at high altitude. At low altitude they slow down to mere supersonic speed due to air friction and not having an engine by that point. Forth, hypersonic speeds need a LOT of fuel. Getting up to ~4000 mph is expensive even without atmosphere. With atmosphere there's a big risk of air friction tearing the missile apart. Fifth, most hypersonics are rockets which means that they're burning 3-8x the fuel as an air breathing engine depending on what kind of fuel is being used. This is why the Waverider is so important, it's got an airbreathing engine that works at hypersonic speed.
>>64391194Ballistic missiles have been hypersonic for as long as ballistic missiles have existed. Thirdies saw the hype about hypersonic missiles in the early 2010s and decided they could pretend to be superpowers by rebranding their ballistic missiles as "hypersonic weapons," which is sort of true but not actually what anyone means when they talk about hypersonics. The US is still at the forefront of hypersonic missiles development, so you won't see any real thirdie hypersonic missiles until they can copy from the American one.You picture isn't a Zircon by the way, it's a Boeing X-51 Waverider. Someone relabeled the picture to make it look like Russia actually achieved something.
>>64391194
>>64391884fwiw:>detectionYeah, no such thing as stealth hypersonic below like, 200-300km of atmosphere. It's not even really the heat either, not that that's irrelevant, but literally the definition of plasma is that it's ionized atoms, there's no avoiding radar returns or anything else with that (literally emits its own light too). That said, if you're coming straight down at orbital velocity or better you can cross that distance in 20-40 seconds which isn't a whole lot of reaction time given the relative velocities involved. Plasma and ablative shield required anyway also means lasers are going to be pretty worthless at anything below ludicrous energies.>commsFWIW though this has been solved by spacex (not that NASA couldn't have if they cared but easier now), plasma sheath isn't full wrap there's a "shadow" behind the object moving through throw the atmosphere, you can get a signal out and back through that. That's why you can get high res Starship video throughout the entire reentry sequence. So in principle it's straight forward to have external guidance, missile doesn't need to see anything itself, though given the speed involved inertial guidance is probably going to be fine most of the time.>altitudeNeither normal reentry vehicles or even HGVs are supposed to be at low altitude for long enough for it to matter much. That's of course also a weakness vs air breathing.>rocket equationYes this 100%. When people talk about the challenges of hypersonic weapons they're talking about air breathing. That said even in the US I could see arguments that Starship or later could make the entire category obsolete before it even gets going.
>>64391194two feet wide but thirty feet long? that seems silly
>>64391884>>64391571>>64392668This was the twatter impllesivehttps://x.com/zhao_dashuai/status/1962861051395158168>dvanced high-power, multi-band radars can "burn through" the plasma sheath, lower radar frequencies are less affected by the plasma sheath and can "see" through it.>Plasma sheaths are transparent to longer infrared wavelengths, which means Imaging Infrared guidance (IIR) can see through it.
>>64393331This seems like, if it does work, it would be wildly vulnerable to any kind of relatively low powered dazzler if it's locked into a narrow bandwidth.
>>64392668>Plasma and ablative shield required anyway also means lasers are going to be pretty worthless at anything below ludicrous energies.I'm not sure that's true. At extreme velocities even tiny deformations in shape can result in dramatic, violent changes in aerodynamics. A pulse laser taking a chip out of your nose cone could conceivably cause near instant violent disintegration. See: Columbia. And Columbia had substantially better margin for error re: it's ablative armor than a single use missile would.
>>64393499Eh? You have to get the laser through the plasma sheath and still deliver enough energy on a tight enough point, it's going to diffuse big time and that's just going to add some heat. Colombia like all space shuttles was a dog shit design with an aluminum under that was extremely sensitive to any burn through, you can again see the difference vs Starship which is stainless steel and has made it back to the ocean just fine every time even when tiles were spiraling off and bare metal was exposed all over. The challenge they have is trying to do everything economically with rapid reuse.But that doesn't matter for a weapon system. There isn't any "cone" in a reentry vehicle normally it'd be a flattened tear drop, with a big use-once ablative shield on the bottom. A big plasma shockwave forms in front along with vacuum, then there is the ablative shield, then steel behind it. In a pure KE weapon you don't even need anything hollow, just dumb mass, even more steel basically which is going to be basically immune lasers, but even if there is some explosive buried in there it's going to be a bitch to heat up all the other metal and ablate away enough shield (which will interfere with the laser the whole way) quick enough. Kinetic interceptors make more sense, but if it's up against something like SS then you're losing on economics big time. It's impossible to match $/kg/delta-v using expendable solids or hypergolics vs a high ISP methalox reusable.We'll see how it all works out in the end of course but if I was a foreign adversary worried about the US military I'd certainly be more then a touch nervous at the thought of them being able to take hundreds of tons at a time to 7km/s for <$100/kg. You can come up with military things to do with that sort of capability.
>>64393481That and the plasma sheath would fluctuate due to atmospheric conditions, causing the radar to glitch out now and then.
>>64393988>things to do with that sort of capabilityORBITAL DROP SHOCK TROOPERS
>>64394436Yeah, you could, though even with a bunch of mass budget devoted to countermeasures and decoys that is one thing where games are ironically realistic: it'd be dangerous as fuck, WW2 beach landing loss levels. So it's hard to see a situation justifying it at this point. I could however see drops of armor and weapons and logistics, if you're merely trying to get a bunch of expert but unarmed humans somewhere that's actually pretty doable. The challenging bit is getting them there with firepower and keeping them in firepower. But if you can have a "tourist group" get themselves 50 miles behind the front lines then drop in a couple thousand tons worth of fully fueled armor and uniforms and weapons and suddenly now it's mechanized infantry (and if some gets shot down no lives loss) that'd be neat.Though depressingly just having drops of drones will probably be our super gay modern war reality.
>>64393988>Kinetic interceptorsBtw, is it possible for rim-161 to be reutilized as a rapid land-attack/anti “-ship precision strike weapon ? The seeker is a IIR, after all.And yes, I know about darpa ArcLight
>Chinks reaching for as many barely viable targeting methods as possible meanwhile Skunkworks has figured out how to fully bypass the blackout.Source? You'll see.
>>64397146Very unlikely. Not only is it very expensive, valuable both in terms of costs but also essential for fleet defense but there are also much fewer of them in the fleet at the time.Seeker is also likely unusable for surface targets because it's designed to work in space, not in the dense air of the lower atmosphere. Not to mention the issue of maneuvering at low altitudes if it's going on a sort of ballistic path.It's also not going to be a lethal enough weapon for ships and many surface targets because its interceptor is designed to crash into really fast missiles that would subsequently disintegrate on their own, not burrow into steel bulkheads or concrete.Basically SM-3 is a very specialized exo-atmospheric weapon, for use in space exclusively and it's not going to be good for things outside of it, even if it was economically viable to do so. SM-6 has some 400km range against air targets and probably about 100km more against surface ones and is known to have anti-ship capability from the design board, so there you have it, an actually viable high speed solution that's already been in place over a decade ago instead.
