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Laser Shoots Down Artillery Shell In Flight
An anonymous reader writes "The Mobile Tactical High Energy Laser is a joint project between the US Army and the Israeli Defense Ministry, with much of the work being done by TRW. Tuesday they had a spectacular success when they shot an artillery shell out of the air."
That's why they're called TESTS. This is like complaining to the Wright Brothers, "That's nice but it's not as hard as carrying 50 people across the Atlantic non-stop." It's all hard, of course, so one has to expect little steps like these.
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
Nope. This isn't _Star Trek_...
(1) To feed people, first you need to wipe out the bastards using food as a weapon -- a real problem in many conflict zones. Mogadishu, anyone? Recall what happened when the lightly-armed UN handed out food? It got seized by the militias. In other places, it'd be the government that'd confiscate the food.
(2) Your peace is not their peace. Radical Islamists want the world to be Moslem. Some others would prefer there to be NO Moslems. Some prefer equality of opportunity, while others prefer equality of poverty. Some want a modern world, while others will only be happy with a Year Zero Khmer Rouge-style approach. You can't make them all happy, simultaneously.
At any given point in history, probably a large portion of the human population is Thoroughly Pissed Off. Are you going to tell them to just completely change their value systems and surrender?
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
They make it sound as if an artillary shell is a HARDER taregt to hit than a rocket. Rockets accelerate, tumble, and move erratically. Artillery shells move in well understood, computable trajectories. They probably had the damn flight path of the shell computed before they fired it. It's one thing to shoot down a shell when you know it's path ahead of time, another entirely to get a fix on an unknown, erratic rocket and destroy it.
You are right that it is easy to compute the trajectory of an artillery shell if you know the speed (and this you can measure by radar). You just solve the same equations that the artillery battery did before firing. These computations are very well understood. That being said, I disagree with the statement that (cruise) missiles are easier.
First of all, rockets don't really "accelerate, tumble, and move erratically" that much. They can be mostly considered like an artillery shell with a constant forward force. A cruise missle may make one or two smooth turns during its flight, rocket artillery not a single one. If you are firing a laser it is a safe bet that the missile will keep on the same path for a couple of more seconds - and remeber, the laser reaches its target instantaniously so it is easy to cancel or readjust your beam.
Now a couple of factors that makes it harder to kill the artillery shell
-It is much faster than a (cruise) missile -It is smaller, about one third of the size -It is not particullary sensitive. The shell is basically a piece of metal shaped like a cone travelling only by momentum; the cruise missile has little wings, complex control systems and yes, it burns rocket fuel.
I think this is quite revolutionary. I venture guess they will put these bastards on Aircraft carriers. Not a hostile shell, missile, airplane or UAV will come within miles. And there are nuclear power plants to drive them.
Tor (served in the Swedish artillery)
This wasn't rigged. Everyone was told ahead of time that the target missle had a GPS receiver on the warhead as well as a C-band beacon.
Just because the unfairness was pre-published doesn't mean the test had scientific validity.
The purpose of the test was not in acquisition and tracking, but in the kill vehicle technology
That's plenty difficult, but easy compared to the target identification problem. A chain is as strong as its weakest link. There's still no plan for how the acquistion can work and not be defeated by simplistic countermeasures. Without that, the high speed missile impacts are worthless.
(Ok, not quite worthless- there is one EASY way to solve the detection problem: give up on kinetic kill, and just load the anti-missile missile with an atomic warhead. You don't need to worry about which fragment contains the enemy bomb if you can just liquify everything in a 10km radius. For some reason, the Pentagon hasn't wanted to take this plan to the American public...)
Honestly, peoples hostility to this program in current time has me baffled.
What's so odd about an fighting an expensive program that'll never work?
Regardless of if the TBM can work mechanically (kinetic kill) and tactically (satellite detection of launch), there's no way it will work strategically.
Scenario 0: Terrorists. A small, well funded group acquires an atomic warhead. Either they're supplied by an "axis of evil" state, or they loot one from a under-defended Russian bunker. Now they've got 600 lbs of pure destructive power- why bother attaching it to a missile, which is expensive, risky, error-prone, and open to detection- when they can simply carry it into their target city with an SUV / powerboat / Cessna? If they did launch a nuclear ICBM, a pair of Tridents would glaze the entire originating nation before the first mushroom cloud has faded.
Scenario 1: Nation. A large country developes nukes and strikes the US. For each warhead, they fly out 3 dummy missles and maybe mix in some MIRV technology as well. The dummies can be cheap, they don't even need real guidance. Remember, atomic weapons are NOT kinetic-kill. You can (conventionally) explode the rocket in midflight, or otherwise jink and be evasive, without reducing your destructive power. (Accuracy doesn't matter with a 50 megaton bomb). As long as the first bomb is detonated anywhere with line-of-sight to US defensive sensors/satellites, it will disrupt enough radar to make cover for the rest.
Any nation big enough to build & fire a few ICBMs is also big enough to make enough dummies to swamp any TBM defense system. (Our existing atomic warheads provide a strong deterrent protection, of course)
Scenario 2: A lone madman. Some lunatic gets hold of a Russian missile silo, and on the spur of the moment fires a warhead at NYC.
This is the only place where the TBM plan could concievably help, and its so unlikely compared to the other scenarios that its hard to argue that TBM is cost effective. (Unless you think the expenditure would help the economy, which is actually likely). But much better would be to solve scenario 0 & 2 at the same time, by reducing nuclear proliferation worldwide. I won't get into the steps to do that- there's two well-documented approaches, neither one attractive to the American mood.
Ah yes, and the Wright brothers failed because their flyer wasn't a 747 or a Concorde.
Get real. You develop a complicated system a piece at a time and you test the pieces as you develop them. You bring several pieces together in a "technology demonstrator" and then, maybe, just maybe, you move on to a prototype and only if that works do you develop a fieldable system. You are using the criteria for a multiple fieldable systems to criticize the demonstration of a component and, on top of that, you are criticizing said system because it may not be able to do something its not intended to do. Shheeeessh. I suppose you also don't like seatbelts in your car because they won't save your sorry behind if someone fires an anti-tank missle at you.
I haven't heard a single missle defense person claim we're safe now. We're just a little further down the road to maybe developing a system that might be able to keep us safe from a specific threat.
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben