Feasible idea for missile defense?

Discussion in 'General Science & Technology' started by banana, Mar 16, 2005.

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  1. banana Registered Member

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    I was thinking just now of the failures of the US missile defense system, and the idea came to me of using, instead of explosives, something similar to the principle of the tesla coils in Red Alert. Perhaps the interceptor missiles could be armed with a giant capacitor to store an electric charge of a magnitude of, say, around half that of a lightning bolt so that it would be capable of an enormous electrical discharge striking an enemy missile from a considerable distance. I realize that the electrons can be deflected by a strong magnetic field, but the discharge might still heat up the surrounding air sufficiently to destroy the incoming missile. Can some physicists comment on whether or not this will work?

    p.s. to the best of my knowledge this idea has not been previously suggested. However, if it has already been discredited then I apologize for starting a thread on it.
     
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  3. Roman Banned Banned

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    The other missile wouldn't be grounded, and so the electricity would actually head for the earth, not the enemy missile.

    The best bet for missile defense (even though it's pretty useless) would be to scramble jets with lasers to take out incoming missiles. Nothing they launch at us would be faster than a laser, anyhow.
     
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  5. phlogistician Banned Banned

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    Or, a larger airborne platform, on patrol, with a laser in it. A solution currently under development. Where's Stokes Pennwalt when you need a laser expert?
     
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  7. Roman Banned Banned

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    I found out that all tests using mirrors to defract or deflect large lasers have failed. Slight irregularities in the mirror lead to a lot of feedback, very quickly, as Stokes has said.
     
  8. Chatha big brown was screwed up Registered Senior Member

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    Build a sattelite with laser guided panoramic vision and suspend that sucker in inner space. This way no missle can hide under radar detection.Electromagnetic chaffs can be used to destabilize enemies cordinates.
     
  9. cosmictraveler Be kind to yourself always. Valued Senior Member

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    Well all they would have to do is make the surface of the incoming missle mirror coated then it would just bounce or reflect the laser right off of it.
     
  10. Baron Max Registered Senior Member

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    How many failures were experienced in making other great inventions that we use every single day? ...the internal combustion engine? ...the telephone? ...the electric light? ...the computer? ...and a myriad of other inventions that make our lives what they are today?

    Baron Max
     
  11. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    I have a book that came out during the Reagan era, called- Beam Defense, an alternative to Nuclear Destruction. It suggests the use of particle beams to destroy incoming missiles. These ideas have been going around for a long time. I think the whole idea is flawed, it assumes that the possession of nuclear weapons by anyone is inevitable, and also rationalizes our own weapon stocks. We should be working to get rid of all nuclear weapons in the world.

    Of course, our present missile defense system is just a giveaway to defense contractors, it doesn't work at present, and could easily be thwarted by numerous kinds of countermeasures, and doesn't protect at all from suitcase bombs, or dirty bombs.
     
  12. Odin'Izm Procrastinator Registered Senior Member

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    very fast interceptor missiles it the cheapest method... or lasers... which is already in progress by some of the best minds in the american defence program so there really is little point in posting inovative ideas as it has already probably been discussed many times over.
     
  13. phlogistician Banned Banned

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    Common misconception. Mirrors won't save your missile however. No mirror is perfect, and no weapon can be kept perfectly clean, and no mirror works for all wavelengths.
     
  14. talk2farley Registered Senior Member

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    THEL, as I recall, is yet to miss/fail/whatever. Does it qualify as a "large" laser?
     
  15. Nasor Valued Senior Member

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    I don’t know anything about missile defense, so maybe someone can explain this to me. Why is it so hard to make a missile that knocks out an ICBM? It would seem to me that since we already have surface-to-air missiles that can reliably hit super-sonic jet fighters that are actively maneuvering around and trying to dodge, we really ought to be able to hit a missile or warhead that’s simply falling downward in a relatively predictable ballistic trajectory. What makes hitting an ICBM warhead so hard?
     
  16. talk2farley Registered Senior Member

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    Nasor - its roughly equivalent to catching up to a bullet train on foot, and then knocking it off its tracks, within a 10-minute window of opportunity.
     
  17. Blindman Valued Senior Member

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    A good sized ICBM can carry a dozen or more warheads, plus many dummy warheads plus the final stage booster witch could be destroyed to produce even more radar signatures. The size of individual warheads are much smaller then a jet fighter This swarm will come down over hundreds of square KM's, you're going to need a lot of lasers, interceptors and luck to shot this lot down. There could be many ICBM coming down all over the place, the shield would be over run in minutes. Not to mention the cloud of radioactive debris from the ones you did hit raining down.

    The best defense is to shot them down during the boost stage, when they are a coherent whole, with a large supplies of orbit stationed fast interceptor missiles, or orbiting lasers, most likely nuclear powered. The nations of the world are not going to allow that so the best shield you have is an early warning system and a bunker.

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  18. Odin'Izm Procrastinator Registered Senior Member

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    when and if the defence is set up, it will still not counter fast launching manuverable missiles like the Topol-m / n. Multi warhead ICBMs carry up to 10 warheads (including dummies) and are a figment of the past for the leading nuclear powers. I will also have to slightly disagree, it is visable that the bush admin dosnt care what the rest of the world thinks, and the star wars system will be built.
     
  19. talk2farley Registered Senior Member

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    If your aiming for the independent re-entry vehicles, yeah, you've already lost. But their are three phases of ICBM flight-life, each lasting approximately 8-12 minutes (assumeing an intercontinental journey). Boost and mid-course are the ideal kill zones. Terminal phase hit-to-kill is your last shot, a desperation move, andcan obviously be swarmed and easily overwhelmed. Its no different than the tiered air-defence approach taken with CVNBGs. You don't put all your weight on Phalanx or equivalent CIWS, or your carrier becomes a sitting duck.
     
  20. Nasor Valued Senior Member

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    Why not use very small nuclear warheads on the interceptor missiles? Then you wouldn't really have to intercept so much as just get in the general area.
     
  21. talk2farley Registered Senior Member

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    Nasor, funny you should suggest that. The United States HAD a missile defense system way back in the 50s and 60s, that involved detonating a large number of low-yield nuclear warheads in the upper atmosphere, along the path of incoming Soviet ICBMs. However, such systems were made illegal by treaty and dismantled. They haven't really been considered since. I wish I could recall the name of the program...
     
  22. Odin'Izm Procrastinator Registered Senior Member

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    The program was canceled before it was even compleated.
     
  23. Stokes Pennwalt Nuke them from orbit. Registered Senior Member

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    Cool idea but it wouldn't work because as Roman said the incoming threat is electrically neutral, and once the bolt touched it it would achieve an equivalent charge rapidly. To deliver energy to the target you would need it to remain at a constant electrical potential difference while the charge was being delivered. The whole point being that the delivery of the charge, concentrated on a small surface area, will heat it up and do damage. Electrical discharge weapons are inherently unrealiable because of the uncertainty of a target's potential and its ability to resist change in that potential.

    Your kill vehicle will also have to be grounded in some form too, or else it will assume a charge of equal capacitance, inverse that of the energy it is projecting. This could result in the projected charge banging a U-turn and coming right back to neutralize itself against the most lucrative target in the area - the defensive vehicle - not the intented one. That's not good. Ion rocket engines have this problem too, unless the exhaust is neutralized before ejection.

    Also, you're talking about engagement outside the atmosphere. Propagation of a charged particle beam is very difficult to do in a vacuum over longer distances because the similarly charged particles will repel themselves and the beam will diffuse rapidly. In the atmosphere an electron beam will blast a channel of ionized gas through the air, and these ions will actually form a sort of hardened tunnel wall to contain the electrons. In space this will not happen and you would end up with a big electrostatic cloud with very little direction. I know the CRT you might be using to read this post kind of refutes that, but I'm talking distances much longer than what can be easily compensated for by some magnetic focus coils.

    Hey dude, you could probably do as good as I could judging from your bit about reflection and what not. Radars are actually my forte.

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    I'll just post the official media site for the Boeing YAL-1 Airborne Laser: http://www.boeing.com/defense-space/military/abl/flash.html

    It's actually scheduled for its first in-flight live shoot-down sometime this summer. Tentatively at least, but it's actually been moving right along from what I hear.
    I have asked myself this same thing many times (but probably for a different reason).

    But it's really an issue of the speeds involved. A RV just goes so damn fast. Hitting it with a small nuclear weapon would be no problem, and for a high explosive warhead, not really much more either. But we're trying to do it with a rod of steel, and the two are moving towards each other at a net closure rate of over 20,000 miles per hour in some cases. The margin of error is incredibly tiny.

    An analogy we'll currently use is to tell people to imagine themselves standing on the fairway at a golf course. Tiger Woods knocks a drive over your head. That tiny golf ball is sailing overhead, 200 feet above you at 200 miles per hour. You have to draw your 9mm pistol and hit the golf ball with a single shot. That feat would require roughly 1,000 times less accuracy than the HTK interception of an ICBM in the midcourse phase.

    Of course, we're using an array of computers whose collective intelligence is probably greater than everybody posting in this thread, and the "bullet" in this case is a missile that can be actively fed telemetry and guided into the target, but you get the idea.
    It was called Safeguard, and it was the American's single defensive system allowed by the 1972 ABM treaty. It was a layered defensive system that used the Spartan missile (a modified Nike-Hercules) with a small (1-2kt) warhead to intercept missiles outside the atmosphere. If the Spartans missed, the Sprint took them out down around 50-60,000 feet. The Sprint was so fast it passed through Mach 10 at around 5,000 feet of altitude, and glowed incandescent due to atmospheric friction like an ICBM RV will do. It had the same low yield nuclear payload as the Spartan.

    Layered defenses, like the ones being built now, give you more chances to engage an incoming target. There is a level of redundancy inherent in them that makes them a lot more reliable than if you were using one interceptor fired once per threat. As an example the Patriot will allocate anywhere between three and five defensive fires per one enemy TBM, and the newest Patriot has an unclassified HTK rate of 85% against a missile like a Scud. You just can't be too safe in some cases.

    Anyway, Safeguard was operational for all of one day in October (I think) of 1974. During the final rollout it became known to politicians how much it cost us and they shitcanned the program. By the time news of this got to North Dakota, where it was being set up around some of the 129th's missiles at Minot, Safeguard was already online. So they turned off the power almost exactly 24 hours after they had spun her up and that was the end of the saga.

    The Soviets built a similar system (the Galosh is what NATO calls it) that used small nukes, but it wasn't layered. They deployed the Galosh around Moscow and, to the best of my knowledge, it is still operating in Russia today.

    Edit: Check out these links for more on the two missiles. I'm a big fan of Cold War tech, and these are among my favorite relics of that era:
    Sprint
    Spartan
     
    Last edited: Mar 29, 2005
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