81–90 of 120 posts
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Having hit the water at 60mph. Can confirm, felt like hitting the side of a tank.
There may be some survivorship bias here. Pleanty of people report that hitting water at high speed "feels like" hitting something solid. Very few people are alive to tell us what hitting somehting solid at high speed feels like.
Once you get to the point that you can explode anything you want anywhere on the planet it doesn't make much difference if you can do it somewhat faster. ... and it is getting pretty obvious that being able to blow things up doesn't make much difference anyway in a political sense. Simple terror doesn't work anymore to bring people around to your way of thinking. All the people that can be simply coerced are gone now…
There's nothing 'hypothetical' about them like the article says, both Russia ( http://www.ibtimes.com/russias-secret-hypersonic-nuclear-mis... ) and China ( http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/china-successfully-tests-7000-mph-d... ) have operational hypersonic missiles. Whether they would use them when conventional weapons work just as well and are cheaper is debatable but they already have them.
I sat down with someone not too long ago who is leading the engineering effort on these for a Fortune 500 defense company. It's definitely a thing. It's interesting hearing about the types of materials that needed to be invented to hit a speed like mach 6 without completely disintegrating.
It's not enough to withstand a high temperature, or to try and move the heat away from the surface. At some point you need to dissipate that heat somehow or the payload will just melt. A material undergoing phase change is one of the most efficient ways to do it. This is why ice is so much more effective at cooling a drink than one of those hokey "whiskey stones".
The article frequently mentions the agility of these hypersonics. Doesn't 'flies super fast' usually require 'flies in a straight line'? Do we have suitable materials for control surfaces that can withstand the drag/heat/pressure of an evasive, quick turn at Mach 5?
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I think the nuclear angle is a red herring, and that the real destabilizing aspect of hypersonic weapons is that they can take out carriers, at much lower cost. The entire foundation of US force projection is built upon the carrier battle group. If putting your $5b carrier in the South China Sea makes it vulnerable to getting taken out by a $5m missile, then the balance of power has changed. Obviously there's nuclear…
I believe the common wisdom here is that no nation has remotely accurate targeting location on US carriers. This hypothetical attack would require intelligence and sensing capabilities that don't currently exist. I'm not saying this isn't possible, but right now you'd have to fly an enemy drone or plane near the carrier group to get any accurate targeting information and that plane would be shot down or jammed well b…
What about optical satellite observation?
> would be able to knock out a target’s nuclear capabilities fast enough and thoroughly enough to pre-empt any attempt at a retaliatory strike. Did the author completely forget about nuclear subs?
That said, a sub at missile launch depth is susceptible to a hypersonic weapon from above. With sufficient mass, even a kinetic only impact from the surface could take out those subs. A nuclear depth charge can take out subs down to their crush depth although I don't know if you could deliver it on a hypersonic glider.
The defense for this stuff is lasers of course. An interesting technical weakness of hypersonic devices is that they are on the edge of their energy/drag limits (they are already struggling to travel through the soup of the atmosphere at those speeds). If you can ablate their leading edge with a laser to change their drag profile they may self destruct through atmospheric friction.
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I believe the common wisdom here is that no nation has remotely accurate targeting location on US carriers. This hypothetical attack would require intelligence and sensing capabilities that don't currently exist. I'm not saying this isn't possible, but right now you'd have to fly an enemy drone or plane near the carrier group to get any accurate targeting information and that plane would be shot down or jammed well b…
> I'm not saying this isn't possible, but right now you'd have to fly an enemy drone or plane near the carrier group to get any targetting information and that would be shot down or jammed well before it could determine the exact locale (...) What about optical satellite observation?
Also, in wartime there will probably be decoys and other counter-measures that might be hard to differentiate from satellite resolution. You would want accurate tracking for your $50-100m launch that may or may not start WWIII.
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The article you cite for the PLAN system states that it completed it's 7th test flight. This is not operational. For instance the F-35 only recently became "operationally capable" - but it has been flying since 2006.
And on the flip side, the P-51 Mustang took 149 days from placement of the order to the flight of the first prototypes (and the near-immediate order of a run of 300 further aircraft for evaluation). I'm not disagreeing with you that a test firing is vastly different from serial production, but the F-35 is the poster child for an unreasonably protracted and dysfunctional development process. It's a massively complex s…
http://breakingdefense.com/2016/10/holy-smoke-gm-army-turn-o...
They went from rfp => selection => 1st prototype in 9 months.
Obviously, a car is a bit different than a 5th gen fighter. But still.
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Or nuclear tipped cruise missiles on ships or in-air bombers. The nuclear triad is still unbeatable. The article is pretty terrible in general. Hypersonics won't change the balance of anything, especially considering what a decent sized one can do. If you're delivering nuclear-levels of destruction with hypersonics then your opponent will retaliate with nuclear weapons. There will be no exception for "Oh, you used hy…
> or in-air bombers. It's no longer the case that the US and Russia maintain nuclear bombers in air continuous.
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Very much so, yes. Unfortunately, in a real conflict, you can't just "refloat" your sunk ships and rewrite the game so that the good guys win.
But, would that tactic really have worked or was it just exploiting some less-tested close-battle rules that didn't actually represent reality? As in, those tiny torpedo-boats are incredibly flimsy and a CIWS fires a lot of bullets. When they wrote the rules did they just arbitrarily assign a carrier a certain number of attacks per round? Because four attacks doing d100 damage aren't like one-hundred attacks doing d4…