Golden Dome for America

It's American doctrine to adopt HET-SD (self destruct) for land based AAA, because obviously raining metal poses a significant hazard in both the short and long term.

You'd see proliferating DEAD (Directed Energy Air Defense) system protecting civi infrastructures connected to fusion plants instead. Cant believe Black Ops 2&3 predicted this ages ago.
 
Dilandu said:
Don't be absurd. They would develope ICBM even without Hsue-Chu Tsien; it would just took them more time. They got all the basics from R-2 missile (the Soviet major improvement of German V-2 design, licensed to China) and they also received at least some data about R-5 IRBM. The Hsue-Chu Tsien contribution was very valuable, of course, but not irreplaceable.
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Correct. No single individual ever is, to any major technological development occurring worldwide simultaneously, like rocket and missile development in the latter half of the 20th century.

But some people have to look for every single opportunity to ride their political hobby-horse.
 
overscan (PaulMM) said:
Ed's statement about how Trump imposing sanctions and reducing exports to the US will hollow out their economy is also wrong I think. Check what percentage of China's output goes to the US - its nowhere near as much as you probably imagine There are 184 other countries in the world outside the US walled garden of imagined superiority, several of them with more people than the US. China can weather the tariff storms fine.
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Do you work in the - non-A&D - technology sector? Because it doesn't sound like it.

US policy, among other factors but by far the most important, has been driving a massive exodus from Chinese manufacturing at a growing pace. This has been going on since the late 2010s, roughly, but has demonstratively accelerated. It's not just a matter of the US economy and what it buys direct from China, it's the ability to sell anything in the US. If it has products that came from China, then they get tariffed. Thus, manufacturing is moving out of China on a massive scale. I very much DO work in the civilian technology sector, and have for 30 years, and the trickle of reverse-offshoring that began several years ago grew into a rivulet after COVID and then a stream and is becoming a torrent. I can say with certainty the tariffs are driving sourcing decisions at hundreds of major technology firms, and much of the manufacturing is relocating to the US or North America more broadly, but SEA will most likely be the primary beneficiary. Presently, hundreds of billions of dollars in manufacturing capacity are relocating out of the PRC and this will likely touch the trillion mark within a few years. This will most definitely have a substantial negative impact on their economy.

I have no idea what "walled garden of imagined superiority" is supposed to mean, but it sounds rather nasty. I thought this forum was supposed to have some standards of decorum.
 
Dynoman said:
A system designed to protect large cities and the US's silos could be obtained more cost effectively than a nationwide defense system that protects every square inch of the country, requiring significant R&D of upwards of a trillion dollars to implement. From a politic perspective, in order not to destabilize the MAD theory, that appears to have been adopted by most nuclear responsible nations, a defense system that protects major cities, which are the targets for most bad actors, and the US's silos, using an Iron Dome-type system, and the current ABM systems already in place would be a better all-round system in my opinion.
Considering that the more immediate nuclear threat to the nation is from non-nation state bad actors that could smuggle across an open border a WMD device into a city or cities to create carnage for the benefit of their own radical politics. No space-based system could stop such a threat.
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Indeed. There are dozens of potential threats a space-based system would be useless against. Just like a homicide detective is useless, or practically so, in dealing with cyber-crime, or fixing a transmission. Therefore we should have neither, by the same logic.

In reality, yes there are a multiplicity of threats, and they have each have their own degree of likelihood, and they have their own defenses against them. Very few of those threats are capable of wiping out half or more of the US population at a blow. The degree of the threat indicates the appropriateness of expense against it. For me, rendering ballistic missiles useless is a laudable goal, one far more worthy than investing hundreds of billions in a new ICBM and a new SSBN. Communists rarely said anything worthwhile, but Andrei Gromyko was quite right when he said that defense is moral, offense is immoral. Holding millions of my fellow man hostage under threat of nuclear holocaust is immoral. It is shocking to me how many people seem to think murderous immorality is just fine if it costs a little less.

But the whole "smuggled device" thing is a chimera - there are ample defenses already in place against such a scenario. Just as there are a multiplicity of defenses against dozens of other means of delivering a hypothetical nuclear device, most of which are focused on preventing crazies from getting a device in the first place. But the principle threat, the one that can kill hundreds of millions, has been left entirely undefended by a matter of political choice .

Christus regnat.
 
Dilandu said:
Don't be absurd. They would develope ICBM even without Hsue-Chu Tsien; it would just took them more time. They got all the basics from R-2 missile (the Soviet major improvement of German V-2 design, licensed to China) and they also received at least some data about R-5 IRBM. The Hsue-Chu Tsien contribution was very valuable, of course, but not irreplaceable.
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In my opinion, all Tsien did was take ideas from the winged V-2 windtunnel models, Wsserfall wings and a couple of ideas from the Silbervogel, a great intellectual feat.
 

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Some ICBMs could be intercepted in the boost phase without satellites. All of North Korea for example could be pretty easily covered by ABMs, lasers, or railguns based in South Korea or on ships in the sea of Japan or submarines in the Yellow Sea.

Also, because warheads targeted at missile silos and command and control bunkers necessarily will need to detonate on or very close to the ground, they could be destroyed with very short-range defense systems.
 
Sferrin said:
The same could be said of any development program.
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Quite true - but the question is, is Starship a development programme, or an experimental programme?

The recent RUD of an entire Starship assembly on the test stand would tilt me towards ‘experimental’.
 
starviking said:
Quite true - but the question is, is Starship a development programme, or an experimental programme?

The recent RUD of an entire Starship assembly on the test stand would tilt me towards ‘experimental’.
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That's not really a question at all. That is obvious. It's a development program.
 
Justo Miranda said:
In my opinion, anti-missile defenses do not have much of a future, it will be enough for the enemy to secretly accumulate several thousand ballistic missiles and fire them in a single salvo to saturate the system. The Germans learned it on the Kammhuber Line and the Israelis are learning it now, even though the effectiveness of their defensive system is 90 percent. It is not enough; it would be enough for several nuclear warheads to get through. I believe that future anti-missile systems should consist of directed energy weapons, capable of firing many shots without the need to pause for cool-down.
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View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wp4St9pToeA
 
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exclaimedleech8 said:
Wait, the guy blows up 5/6 of the solar system killing who knows how many people and they brush it off like him wrecking a company car?
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There are two types of people: those who see the advantages and those who see the disadvantages.

In the movie the weapon cannot be deactivated because of the energy source used, one of those quantum nonsense, in real life a directed energy weapon can always be deactivated before it annihilates the solar system.

And there aren't many options, that or losing the next war.:confused:
 
starviking said:
Quite true - but the question is, is Starship a development programme, or an experimental programme?

The recent RUD of an entire Starship assembly on the test stand would tilt me towards ‘experimental’.
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Even production rockets RUD.
 
Scott Kenny said:
Even production rockets RUD.
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Sure - but Starship is 0 for 9 regarding the whole system - 0 for 10, if we include the recent RUD.

If we consider just the booster - I’d say we were in a development programme. However, considering Starship and the whole system, it’s still experimental.
 
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