Right: the fantasy Mach 4 missile that maneuvers with the engine shut down, does not experience compression heating from hypersonic flight, survives Mach 4 impact with tungsten 20mm shells, can track an enemy through a cloud of 100 incoming 20mm shells, and can maneuver with zero turn radius without losing energy.

I'd like some of that.

Phalanx CIWS was prototyped in 1973 and has been in service since 1980. Shooting down incoming missiles with machine gun fire has been viable for a very long time.

> Mach 4 missile that maneuvers with the engine shut down, does not experience compression heating from hypersonic flight

Well, if it's only Mach 4, it won't ever experience hypersonic flight, so that's pretty much a given.

> Phalanx CIWS was prototyped in 1973 and has been in service since 1980. Shooting down incoming missiles with machine gun fire has been viable for a very long time

Sure, if you are firing at much slower missiles and you've got a platform big enough to mount a rapid-rotating turreted Vulcan on, and even then it's not super reliable which is why it's being replaced or supplemented in newer deployments with systems based around the Rolling Airframe Missile.

Has Phalanx ever been tested against a supersonic missile?

Also, there is no way to install such a system on a fighter airplane.

The entire airplane is that system.

It has nearly the same gun, 20mm in both cases. It has fancy radar. Basically, a modern fighter plane is a flying CIWS, if it has the software to do so.

> Basically, a modern fighter plane is a flying CIWS, if it has the software to do so.

No, it's not, because it can't change targeting axis fast enough; you'd have to have a turret mounted gun plus software, which is simply not feasible for a fighter.

Also, a major surface warship can afford to expend a lot more weight of ordnance defending against a single missile than a fighter can without sacrificing whatever mission it was protecting itself to accomplish.

Turn rate of a CIWS varies from 50 to 115 degrees per second.

The F-22 can sustain over 30 degrees per second. The exact value, and the instantaneous value, are both classified.

That isn't way off. Limits are in place to prevent pilot blackout, but since we're discussing an AI pilot here, the limits could be removed.

But how many rounds are usually expended per missile intercept?

How many rounds does an aircraft carry?

Can CIWS intercept a Mach 3 missile while on an aircraft flying above Mach 1 (a relative speed of Mach 4+)?

Is it a good tactic to point your aircraft nose at an incoming missile?

Why hasn't this been done already?

Back when I was playing the game the Moskit and its derivatives made the CIWS obsolete. The short engagement range meant that the debris of the threat would impact and mission kill.

The larger 30mm and RAM were created to extend that range. We planned to engage when the thermal plume was detected on the horizon.

The higher speed of ballistic threats meant that the pK of the SM-3 was pretty low. Luckily finding ships at sea is hard.

In a fight against a first line threat it was best to be in a boomer.