Stupid Apollo Tricks

Annachie wrote:Little bit roughish but.

Rather than putting a normal head on a missile, place a PDLC.

Then optimize the control missile for targeting on comming enemy missiles.

With a little care, the flight of missiles can interfly multiple incomming waves on enemy missiles, thinning each wave at least a little by shooting them with the PDLC.

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Nah--mount the PD cluster on a recon drone! That way you get it back.

kzt wrote:No, we and the Soviets had perfectly effective ABMs in the 60s. The Russians still do. They deployed theirs to protect Moscow, we decided to protect the middle of North Dakota. It's that the US government decided that we couldn't use nukes that makes this hard.

Fire a nuclear-tipped ABM and you kill the inbound.

And you do a very good job of jamming your own defenses, you have little chance of hitting the next missile.

Loren Pechtel wrote:Fire a nuclear-tipped ABM and you kill the inbound.

And you do a very good job of jamming your own defenses, you have little chance of hitting the next missile.

You seem think that the people developing and deploying these systems are not perfectly aware of what the effects are. Given that the USSR internally estimated it should be able to defeat 8-12 ICBMs (technically "complex ballistic targets" - which may well be a single warhead+decoys) or up to 40 IRBMs I suspect that they understood how nukes worked. Though they deactivated the exo-atmospheric portion of the system almost 10 years ago without replacement, so who knows.

kit wrote:...
You seem think that the people developing and deploying these systems are not perfectly aware of what the effects are. Given that the USSR internally estimated it should be able to defeat 8-12 ICBMs (technically "complex ballistic targets" - which may well be a single warhead+decoys) or up to 40 IRBMs I suspect that they understood how nukes worked. Though they deactivated the exo-atmospheric portion of the system almost 10 years ago without replacement, so who knows.

You may well be right.

Although there is an unhappy history of the widespread deployment of defective weapons. A good example is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_14_torpedo. Given that from a practical standpoint it is going to be extremely difficult to do an all-up test of such an ABM system I personally wouldn't have a bet-your-capital-city level of confidence that the overall system was going to work -- or even work well enough to matter.

Interestingly, the Russians next-generation ABM system is going to be non-nuclear.

The current Russian A-135 system uses the 53T6 missile that pulls 210Gs! And can maneuver at over 90Gs. Damn.

kzt wrote:

Loren Pechtel wrote:Fire a nuclear-tipped ABM and you kill the inbound.

And you do a very good job of jamming your own defenses, you have little chance of hitting the next missile.

You seem think that the people developing and deploying these systems are not perfectly aware of what the effects are. Given that the USSR internally estimated it should be able to defeat 8-12 ICBMs (technically "complex ballistic targets" - which may well be a single warhead+decoys) or up to 40 IRBMs I suspect that they understood how nukes worked. Though they deactivated the exo-atmospheric portion of the system almost 10 years ago without replacement, so who knows.

And just how much did they know about the effects of high altitude nukes when they built the system??

Loren Pechtel wrote:And just how much did they know about the effects of high altitude nukes when they built the system??

ABM 3 was a 1995 system Iirc.