Re:Princeton lab simulates nuclear war
by orbifold on Saturday October 22, 2022 @09:58AM
(#33298357)
Russia has hypersonic reentry vehicles, they are pretty much impossible to intercept (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RS-28_Sarmat), each of these MIRV contains 10-15 nuclear warheads or an unspecified number of hypersonic glide vehicles (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avangard_(hypersonic_glide_v... )with nuclear payloads. They figured out the hydrodynamics to make the hypersonic glide vehicles work, I believe the US is roughly a decade behind on that. Note that this requires genuinely hard math to do and the US funding on this was temporarily suspended because it was thought to be infeasible.
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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prompt_Global_Strike
Suggests that the US is not behind. If Wikipedia has that information it is likely that we’re already several decades ahead, in fact.
Re:Princeton lab simulates nuclear war
by orbifold on Saturday October 22, 2022 @04:00PM
(#33301618)
The publicly known US tests of hypersonic gliders all failed or rather disintegrated, as I said there is a genuinely hard problem to be solved here and the US stopped research into it in the 80s for quite a while.
Re:Princeton lab simulates nuclear war
by jandrewrogers on Saturday October 22, 2022 @02:09PM
(#33300578)
There is nothing that makes hypersonic reentry vehicles uniquely difficult to intercept, I'm not sure why anyone would assume that. The US considered this a solved problem in the 1980s.
As for the US being "behind", the US was developing and testing endo-atmospheric hypersonic missile platforms as far back as the 1980s. Russia et al designed hypersonic weapons with significantly compromised terminal guidance performance, a compromise the US will not accept in operational systems. Terminal guidance is the hardest technical problem when designing long-range endo-atmospheric hypersonic weapons. That the US is starting to move these systems toward production after 30-40 years of research suggests that they've solved the problem of terminal guidance to their satisfaction.