Re: Cult spacecraft Part One: The Little Spaceplane That Couldn't



Monte Davis wrote:

Sorry about the unintentional clip BTW :-[
The question I posed was "Never mind the Tom Clancy waves of anti-ship
missiles. Never mind the attack subs shadowing surface combatants, the
attack subs shadowing boomers *and* attack subs, etc. Given these
figures, what reason is there to believe that ICBMs alone couldn't
deal with most carrier groups within an hour?"

That would require retargeting them to hit a moving target.
I assume that all targeting info is already preloaded into the command centers as to target options to attack with latitude and longitude already worked out and ready to be entered into the ICBM guidance system with just a few simple button pushes.
But that won't apply to something in the middle of the ocean, so it might take some time to work out a targeting solution on it and transmit it to the missile command center.
Actually, a SLBM might be better to do this with, as it needs to be able to plot a new trajectory to its target as the sub moves.
Even then, Derek Lyons (who served on a boomer) stated that this wasn't something you can do in a hurry, and IIRC it took around 15 minutes or more to get the SLBMs ready to go once a go decision was reached and the targets selected, because you had to spin up and align the gyros.
They might have improved that by now (laser ring gyros).
I once read that the Soviets did indeed give their ICBMs the ability to hit targets at sea, as they considered ICBMs to be something along the line of super artillery.
What I got was hemming, hawing, handwaving and pregnant silences.

I suppose it could be that since then, warheads have become much less
accurate, capital ships have become much faster and tougher -- or that
terminal guidance would be jammed by flying pigs. Wouldn't it be
pretty to think so?

Looking at the BOR type lifting body warheads coming out of the Buran bomber: http://www.buran.fr/bourane-buran/img/bor_bur.jpg
.....shows a problem...although they do increase cross range to carrier task forces that can be hit, if they glide all the way down to the target they are going to be sitting ducks for interception by a Standard Missile.
One thing you could attack with these would be submarines.
That may figure into the discovery that both we and the Soviets made about how the underwater terrain of the ocean is mirrored on its surface by subtle shifts in its height due to varying gravity forces through the water that are transmitted to the surface*, and how a sub that is underway will create a hump and dip in the water behind it that a RORSAT can detect. There is also the thermal upwelling that would be detectable via IR as the sub's reactor-generated steam is cooled by circulating seawater through the steam re-condensation circuit that would work for submarines at rest also.
You move and the radar finds you; you sit still and the IR can catch you.
It's stuff like that that makes one realize why the Soviets were keen on hiding their Typhoons under the arctic icecap where radar and heat sensors would bounce off the ice above them.

* That's literally a mirror image BTW... underwater canyons show up as bumps on the surface, and mountains as dips.
That was a major US Navy secret until the Soviets mentioned it in the open press around a decade back.
One thing that neither side has yet confirmed is that you can use a "Mass Detector" to navigate our subs through shallow waters without active sonar emissions - this got mentioned in the book "The Hunt For Red October" but the Navy told them to take it out of the movie version if they wanted their help in making it.
This was somewhat pointless, as a prototype of the system was carried aboard the Submarine "Triton" when it circled the Earth way back in 1960, and was described in her captain's book about the voyage, "Around The World Submerged".
As to what the secret system is that allows them to track American submarines without the use of even passive sonar is a interesting question.
I suspect they are using some sort of a technology that allows them to detect a sub the way a shark can detect its prey at great distance by picking up the electrical emissions of its muscles moving.
That's so sensitive that a shark could pick up the electrical field generated by sticking two wires from a 9 volt battery's terminals into the water several miles apart.
Their system probably picks up electrical effects of the the machinery working inside the sub as it passes into the water through its hull.

Pat
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