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Can You Stop a Hypersonic Missile?
61–70 of 94 posts
Re: Can You Stop a Hypersonic Missile?
#62> Ground radar is line-of-sight. The Earth is round. Anything below the horizon is invisible.
That's not true. Ground based radar can see over the horizon (hence the term Over-the-horizon radar) by taking advantage of the refractive index of air, allowing the radar waves to essentially curve along, as well as by bouncing radar waves off the ionosphere.
Given that this is the foundation of TFA's argument, it does not instill confidence.
Re: Can You Stop a Hypersonic Missile?
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
> and yes ofc, I used LLMs to help reformulate some sections ??? Why in the world would that be an "ofc"? If you're trying to establish yourself as a writer and communicator, LLM's are the last thing you want to color your personal voice with. They may have a role in cleaning up interpersonal communication or in helping non-professional communicators shape up their prose for formal occasions, but they are not some ki…
I also don't understand this. After having written something I never felt a need to have it reformulated by anything. What would even be the prompt for that?
Maybe "You are an expert editor. Polish this article for X demographic. Make no mistales."?
But jokes aside, I too prefer genuine human writing. Writing is complex enough that you can see a distinct style even if it's rough. LLMs tend to polish the roughness so much that everything reads like magazine ads.
Re: Can You Stop a Hypersonic Missile?
#64What I'm perpetually confused by is I am relatively certain we developed interceptors for these type of missions in the 1970s. The LIM-49 Spartan and the later "Sprint" missile were designed for exactly this kind of intercept. The Sprint missile was capable of moving so fast it was glowing white hot during its mission. We elected not to deploy these weapons for whatever reason. So saying they don't exist at least in…
The weapon you linked to is an anti ballistic missile. The difficulty is not purely in how fast the target is going, but how much it maneuvers, the duration at which it can sustain those speeds, and the altitudes at which it operates. The article addresses this early on.
Aren't all hypersonic missiles based on re-entry vehicles? The altitudes they operate at are basically 'all of the above'. If someone can launch a low altitude missile that can sustain Mach 5+, I'm not sure what you are going to do against it.
So what are the hypersonic low altitude capabilities for maneuvers for these platforms? I don't deny the maneuver but I have this hard time believe someone just throws out some grid fins while doing Mach 24 at 10,000 ft. If the course changes are done at high altitude I can't see what it matters either.
Re: Can You Stop a Hypersonic Missile?
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
It starts in the very first paragraph. “The headlines say yes. […] The headline is wrong.” And there are numerous such examples. “That was half true. The kill chain ran. The interceptor did not.” LLMs produce staccato, ugly chains of sentence stumps like this all the time. They’re easy to spot, and your essay is littered with them. If anything, spending a week on a project like this seems liable to blind you to the s…
Fair, that's very helpful feedback. > the interspersed animated/interactive models often don't seem strongly connected to the text It's indeed the part I struggled with most. The intent was to make the constraint more "visceral", so that the "the interceptor can't catch up" point becomes something you feel by dragging a slider and wtaching the gap grow. But you're right that I didn't do enough to stitch each properly…
> The intent was to make the constraint more "visceral", so that the "the interceptor can't catch up" point becomes something you feel by dragging a slider and wtaching the gap grow.
I don't know who the target audience is but if you talk about hitting supersonic missiles and kill chains, I don't think you need an interactive example to show that you can't hit a target that's faster than you if it has a head start.
Re: Can You Stop a Hypersonic Missile?
#66What I'm perpetually confused by is I am relatively certain we developed interceptors for these type of missions in the 1970s. The LIM-49 Spartan and the later "Sprint" missile were designed for exactly this kind of intercept. The Sprint missile was capable of moving so fast it was glowing white hot during its mission. We elected not to deploy these weapons for whatever reason. So saying they don't exist at least in…
> We elected not to deploy these weapons for whatever reason.
Russia/China insisted that Americans perfecting the nuke interception game is an existential threat to them, and threatened to do something horrible like retaliating militarily if cities and nations were to be rendered immune to nukes, as if it would remotely harm their own through a magical power in doing so. The US/EU played along with that logic and limited deployments of interceptor techs.
Re: Can You Stop a Hypersonic Missile?
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
> and yes ofc, I used LLMs to help reformulate some sections ??? Why in the world would that be an "ofc"? If you're trying to establish yourself as a writer and communicator, LLM's are the last thing you want to color your personal voice with. They may have a role in cleaning up interpersonal communication or in helping non-professional communicators shape up their prose for formal occasions, but they are not some ki…
I also don't understand this. After having written something I never felt a need to have it reformulated by anything. What would even be the prompt for that?
Have you ever had someone else edit your work, comment on it and provide alternative phrasings or organization? LLMs are pretty good at that, available any time and give instant results, as long as you understand that they work differently from a human reviewer - you can't expect it to be of the quality you'd get from a subject-matter expert or highly skilled writer, you have to lean into the LLM slot-machine model where you just get some alternative options. But it's incredibly useful when you're stuck in a rut with how to conceptualize or explain something, or even when you're not, and just want to visualize some alternatives that come from somewhere outside of your own head.
I think of it like a power thesaurus. Thesauruses get a bad rap for people just using them to look for ten-dollar words, but they're super useful for finding ways to articulate things differently, which can sometimes lead to bigger insights or ideas about restructuring the content.
It's on the author to look at what's suggested by the LLM and decide whether or not to use it, and there's an inherent danger in having one's voice overridden by simply accepting too many of the recommendations as-is. But that's between the author and the tool. I won't make any comment here on the article author's prose or how they maybe did or didn't use LLMs.
Re: Can You Stop a Hypersonic Missile?
#68> Ground radar is line-of-sight. The Earth is round. Anything below the horizon is invisible. That's not true. Ground based radar can see over the horizon (hence the term Over-the-horizon radar) by taking advantage of the refractive index of air, allowing the radar waves to essentially curve along, as well as by bouncing radar waves off the ionosphere. Given that this is the foundation of TFA's argument, it does not…
On the other hand, those only really tell you that something is coming somewhere in that direction, OTH radars don't have the resolution for targeting afaik.
Re: Can You Stop a Hypersonic Missile?
#69Lasers can stop a hypersonic missile, but the challenge is getting a beam on the target through the atmosphere. Some of the old SDI tests solved the problem by flying the laser above most of the atmosphere. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_YAL-1
What is the math on how much additional heat a laser would deliver to a warhead which is presumably designed with some kind of ablative shielding that is pushing through air compressed into a plasma? It seems like the damage from a laser pointed from miles away through atmosphere wouldn't be enough to change anything.
The linked plane was supposed to destroy missiles directly after launch (presumably by destroying the less-protected missile body instead of the entry vehicle).
Re: Can You Stop a Hypersonic Missile?
#70> Ground radar is line-of-sight. The Earth is round. Anything below the horizon is invisible. That's not true. Ground based radar can see over the horizon (hence the term Over-the-horizon radar) by taking advantage of the refractive index of air, allowing the radar waves to essentially curve along, as well as by bouncing radar waves off the ionosphere. Given that this is the foundation of TFA's argument, it does not…
Over-the-horizon radars have very poor resolution, so they are useful only for early warning, not for guiding an interceptor.
For targeting at distance, you need antennas mounted on high masts or airborne radars.