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Can You Stop a Hypersonic Missile?

https://protortyp.github.io/posts/can-you-stop-a-hypersonic/
24•protortyp•1h ago

Comments

RealLadyGaga•24m ago
Yes, I can.
jMyles•22m ago
With maturity and adult spending decisions and lasting motions to transcend warfare as a method of resource distribution, of course you can.
superkuh•20m ago
>Every “hypersonic intercept” the press has reported in the last three years was a different class of weapon: an air-launched aeroballistic missile, a quasi-ballistic short-range ballistic missile with a maneuvering reentry vehicle, or in one case a MIRV bus on an intermediate-range ballistic missile that the press could not stop calling hypersonic.

Most people understand that no demonstrable air breathing lift-generating hypersonic missile actually exist. This article goes on to claim that various never launched paper-tigers created for sabre rattling propaganda do actually exist. But it also says they've never been successfully tested. And they haven't. This is a really hard problem.

"Can You Stop a Hypersonic (air breathing/lift generating) Missle?" is actually, "Can you Build a Hypersonic (air breathing/lift generating) Missle?" and the answer is "No, so there's no need to stop them." Conical rockets that travel at hypersonic speeds have existed since the 1950s and will continue to exist and be used as weapons though.

So, tldr; going hypersonic isn't special or new, but air-breathing or lift generating while doing it would be, if it existed, so nation states sabre rattle about fake weapons.

ale•19m ago
“A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.”
bos•16m ago
This is an exhausting and dispiriting article to try to read because of its short, choppy, clearly AI-generated sentences. The topic is interesting, but whoever caused it to be penned didn’t seem to care enough to make it appealing to read.
protortyp•7m ago
Curious which parts specifically felt that way for you? I spent over a week on this, and yes ofc, I used LLMs to help reformulate some sections, but "didn't seem to care enough to make it appealing to read" isn't it. Happy to look at the spots that felt choppy if you can point them out.
piazz•3m ago
“Honestly” / “the honest answer is” are huge LLM tells.

Spend enough time arguing with Claude and hearing that combination of words starts making you wince / twitch uncontrollably.

That said I enjoyed the article!

sidewndr46•15m ago
What 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 case of the US is more like saying we threw them out because they were deemed useless. But the problem doesn't really seem unsolvable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprint_(missile)

MisterTea•8m ago
Spirit is a nuke. Not really something we want to be detonating in the atmosphere.
sidewndr46•7m ago
I think you meant to say "Sprint". In any case, if you're being attacked I think the consequence of high altitude fallout is pretty small compared to dying.
visviva•3m ago
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.
fjrorkr9for9•5m ago
I think this discussion is adressing wrong points. The question is not "can you maybe stop single missile" but: can you reliably and cheaply stop 20 missiles every day for weeks? Oreshnik in well run serial production and non atomic configuration costs around $10m per missile, and Russia can manufacture 25 every month (according to Russian sources).

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