Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Intercepting a ballistic missile?

I'm encouraged by the laser systems they just deployed on some Navy vessels. Pinpoint accurate, rapid fire, and about $1.50 a shot. Gotta think they can (or have) scaled these up for missle defense as well.

I suspect that some of the launchpad failures by the Axis of Evil members might well have been "assisted" by similar devices, but we'll never know.

Some of these targets would be about 2-3x higher altitude than even a bomber aircraft can travel. Even if you could, by the time you found out one was inbound, you would have minutes to act, and there would be no way in hell of getting a plane into position to shoot.

That's correct, the multiple independent re-entry vehicles necessitate hitting the target in the exo-atmosphere while it's a single target. Hence my previous comments about the physics challenges of actually getting a weapon in position, up to that altitude, and still maneuverable with little to no use of aerodynamic control (ie wings/fins etc).

Well don't over look a shotgun loaded with a load of dried black eyed peas.

Or rock salt.Going fast enough they do hurt.

Takin' delivery on a .45-70 shortly, I'm willing to help.

Are the THEL systems still operational ?

Shooting down a terrestrial anti-ship cruise missile, coming straight at you at 1 nautical mile is worlds apart from shooting a mach 5, crossing geometry target, hardened to survive atmospheric re-entry, at 200-300,000 feet, and having to account for the refraction of the laser through a massive atmospheric gradient. So in short, that system wouldn't be the starting point. It would need to be a grid of systems that were all space based, and none of us has/had the clearance to know what's going on with that right now.

BeanMan: As a child and teenager I lived quite close to a Nike Missile "defense site".
About every three years the brass at the sites would allow the folks living near the sites to tour, inspect and learn about the Nike Missiles.
I went on a few of those tours.
I actually touched some Nike Missiles down in their shallow silos.
The tours espoused the fact that these Nike Missiles were fast and would fly out and home in on approaching Russian bombers and fly into them before they could get to our cities and our military bases and air fields in the Puget Sound area.
Decades later LONG after the Nike Missiles became obsolete and were removed I learned that those Nike Missiles did not need to "strike" anything!
They were all equipped with small nuclear (atomic?) warheads and once within 5 to 8 miles of Russian bombers they would detonate (over my house?) and the shock wave would shatter the Russkies bombers!
I hope my tax dollars have been spent to protect us from attacks of this nature nowadays.
I don't know, but I have positioned myself to live out the rest of my life far from any defense facilities - that gives me some peace of mind.
Where I previously lived not only were there many military bases and Air Force facilities but also U.S, Navy nuclear submarine bases nearby!
I moved away from that missile magnet area and am quite content to live where I am, protected from nuclear blasts by 7 mountain ranges that surround me and I have a quasi-bomb shelter built right in to my home.
Again I hope we have some kind of ballistic missile protection system but don't know for sure.
Hold into the wind
VarmintGuy

Would probably need to wait until January 20th before it would be allowed to be shot down.

I could tell you the answer, but then I'd have to kill ya.

A friend that's an old hand with Raytheon was commenting about as close to the edge of "classified" as he could, after the second or third successful test of an anti missile system that nailed a missile fired by the USN offshore, and targeting the Barry Goldwater range.
His call out was that it equated to hitting a bullet in flight, with another bullet.
When you start creating clouds of high velocity debris for the target to fly through, you're shooting at a bullet with a shotgun.

Outlaw, thanks for the savvy commentary today.

GTC

Having taken place in an invasion in '03, I would prefer a first strike.

Invasions are over rated, and they suck for those involved.

Please spend money when you drive through!

Fascinating. Thanks for posting!

Thank you for your service and sacrifice(s).

I think we'll need the lasers for the Hypersonic Maneuverables.

Absent space based lasers, I always wonder why they don't upsize the shotgun concept. Launch a cloud of steel ball bearings at the incoming missiles. Say 500 lbs of 1" steel balls, mounted on top of the interceptor missile. This of course is for high altitude intercepts, where air resistance is nil. A hit by one ball at that speed is going to wreck the incoming weapon.

So long as we do it while we still have more stealth bombers then the Norks have nukes.

A few years back there was a lot of noise about mounting those anti-missile lasers on a big multiengine jet.

Followup reports have been scarce with the present tenant of the Executive Office.

The Strategic Defense Initiative, aka Star Wars, was incredibly successful. An ICBM fired from Vandenburg and aimed at Kwajelein Atoll was struck by a laser fired from the NTS near Las Vegas. SDI also produced huge "black " budgets that financed other rarely discussed projects.


mike r