Russia and other developments in Hypersonic Research

The Norwegian company Nammo has unveiled a ramjet powered artillery shell. Why would an artillery shell need a ramjet? Just to increase range?

Pretty much.

If they can create a small enough ramjet motor, they can take out some HE payload and replace it with fuel and greatly extend firing range of any gun without making it longer and heavier and much more expensive.

Most 155/152mm shells weigh about 40-50kgs each, while many targets require payloads that size because rounds don't tend to directly hit targets.

If you can increase the accuracy to the point where you get direct hits, your payload requirements become much smaller... with a 152/155mm calibre shell that is the width of heavy anti tank missiles, so make it long and put a shaped charge in the middle and at the rear and you can get amazing armour penetration... all you then need to do is fill the gaps with some sort of terminal guidance and a ramjet motor and empty space for extra fuel and you get a really potent weapon for use against a wide variety of hard targets. For soft targets just have one explosive charge of perhaps 10kgs or so with a semi shaped charge design to destroy light armoured vehicles with a diving top attack design.

The thing is that a lot of targets don't need a huge warhead if you deliver it accurately... sometimes a large payload is counter productive in COIN type ops, and small payload allows much greater space for extending range by large amounts... a good reason to use a 155/152mm calibre gun is its range, so extending it much further makes it even more useful.

Imagine in a Syria like campaign if you had 10kg HE shells with Koalition... the current shells have a range of 70-80km with accuracy... imagine a 10kg HE warhead model with a ramjet and a 160km range and accuracy... a single battery could control an enormous volume of ground space with the ability to reach out and hit individual targets like tanks or Toyota light trucks.

Top attack and a 10kg shaped charge of 152mm calibre would be plenty of penetration with a direct hit, and 10kgs would obliterate most civilian vehicle... you could use UAVs with lasers to mark the targets so precision should be excellent, costs wont be too bad, and you could design it so the laser target marker can be coded to set the fuse... standoff for the HEAT for best penetration, and tiny delay for an unarmoured target to penetrate the target before exploding, which would obliterate any civilian vehicle.

Of course for some targets you might want heavier payloads of HE, but even then a ramjet could increase range to perhaps 100-120km or so...

Regarding defending against hypersonic missiles... a high flying airship is an efficient way of keeping an eye on your borders, but even if they got a days warning it is not good enough... the real problem isn't lack of reaction time to intercept... the problem is that even if you detected it and tracked it from launch to impact with no interference at all, it does not fly a straight or a smooth ballistic curved path, so you can project an intercept point ahead of it based on the location and speed of your defending missiles, but the next time it turns or climbs or descends or speeds up slightly or slows down slightly all your calculations for intercept are now very very wrong.

If the target is a ship doing 5 knots and your interception missile is a mach 4 missile then the target is not moving very fast so even if it makes a drastic turn or change of speed then the very high speed missile will get to the interception point and quickly locate the target as not being there but being less than one nautical mile that way... but because of the enormous speed of the missile it can cover the distance in less than a second so it can still hit the ship.

If the ship is moving at 3km per second and your interception missile is moving at perhaps half that, then the closing speed is 4.5km per second... the target is powered so it can turn dozens of times and not lose speed... the interceptor is likely a rocket and if it has to keep turning and changing direction it will rapidly lose speed... by the time the target gets near the interceptor the interceptor might not have the energy or the time to reach the intercept point... remember if it is half a second late or half a second early it will miss... if it is early it can't stop, and obviously if it is late by half a second the miss distance will be over 2km... even fitted with a nuclear warhead you might not stop it...

Hole wrote:This powerful SPY-1 radar couldn´t see slow flying drones allegedly coming from Iran.

They managed to detect and shoot down an Iranian airliner before....yeah A.I. will increase the rate of destruction for civilian airliners lol!

Some interesting bits I found on twitter about Kh-80, from the user kranek1

Apparently it came with it's own ECM suite, which was expected. I already mentioned that Kh-80 had a plasma cloud generator, but also had an additional ECM suite on top of that. Kh-80 had it's own towed decoy to boot!



  

The Kh-55 was considered a stop-gap until the Kh-80/90 was developed. Apparently the publicized/declassified potential launch flight of Kh-80 if used in war:

With the available information, we can make some reasonable guesses as the defensive suite on hypersonic weapons like Zircon.

1.) Probably would have an aerosol dispenser system. Probably borrowing the design from Topol-M, with a chemical composition of sodium-lithium.

2.) Will likely have a decoy dispersal system. Either a towed decoy system like on Kh-80, or DIRCM like system. Will likely have a full ECM suite integration.

3.) Within the ECM suite it could have the ability to project and reflect its radar signature of the surface of water like the P-700 Granit series.

4.) Will likely have a plasma cloud generator.  

5.) Guaranteed to have the gimbaled thrust-vectoring derived from Iskander, with no less than the ability to make 30g turns.

6.) Will likely have the wolf-pack software algorithms. 


This doesn't even include the auxiliary external options from land, sea, and air assets. Maybe Mindstorm could chime in?

It may have forward looking passive radar and IR sensors to detect enemy air defence systems so it can fly around them.

Remember that video of the nuclear powered unlimited range cruise missile that was shown to detect ground and air based radar and fly around the signal rather than right over it.

But of course its high flight speed and the fact that it does not follow a predictable ballistic path makes it almost impossible to intercept anyway.

That was the Avangard warhead doing that. And it will be out by end of this year in service.

Apparently the U.S. waver-rider was a failure in more ways than one. The wave-rider didn't even have sufficient space for a warhead. Even if it was a test object, you can't just not take in to account for no warhead space in the final equation:

If I recall correctly about Mach 5 the kinetic energy from impact starts getting bigger than any practical warhead energy

Edit: BTW @popular_cranks... JLENS is a cancelled, dead program.

hoom wrote:If I recall correctly about Mach 5 the kinetic energy from impact starts getting bigger than any practical warhead energy

Edit: BTW @popular_cranks... JLENS is a cancelled, dead program.

Then they can't demand a reduction of hypersonic missiles if theirs have no capability to carry a nuclear warhead. Besides that what if they have to strike hardened bunkers? All other munitions designed to destroy hardened bunkers have a delay reaction warheads.

Ah nuke warhead would be a different matter I assumed you meant conventional explosives.
But also X-51 is an ostensibly civilian project but really part of Prompt Global Strike which was a conventional global assasination blackmail program not nuke.

Putin announced the continuation of the development of advanced weapons in Russia

“These are missile systems that fly along the flat trajectory with hypersonic speed. Nobody has hypersonic weapons yet. They will certainly appear in the leading armies of the world sooner or later. But we will have something already by this time. I’m already I know that. [I know] what our scientists, instructors and engineers are working on, "Putin said.

https://tass.ru/armiya-i-opk/6994292


Putin: when others have hypersonic weapons, Russia will have a newer

No one has hypersonic weapons either. But it’s of course, in the leading armies of the world, of course, it will also appear. But we’ll also have something by this time. I already know what our scientists, designers and engineers are working on, "Putin said.

https://ria.ru/20191013/1559723690.html

He means hypersonic manouvering weapons that fly like planes rather than ballistically like a fired artillery shell.

Like the difference between a Scud missile and a cruise missile... track the Scud for a bit and you can pretty much work out where it is going and what it will hit and also a really good idea of the exact path it will be taking and when it will get there. With a cruise missile you can track it all the way, but you wont know its way points or the settings for altitude or speed in its autopilot... you wont have any idea what its target is or even when it will hit it.

A ballistic weapon is like a thrown rock... it is accelerated to speed and then it follows a basically ballistic path to impact with no major deviations in trajectory.

What he is talking about is more like an aircraft like a bomber which flys level but has its own course programmed in and can change direction and speed at any time at will so you never really know where it is going or where it is going to be at any one time... chaos.

Many countries have hypersonic ballistic weapons... but they have largely ballistic flight paths and can therefore be intercepted by the various ABM systems in service today.

Russian Hypersonic Missiles May Be the Reason for Donald Trump’s Wish to Buy Greenland

https://www.highnorthnews.com/en/russian-hypersonic-missiles-may-be-reason-donald-trumps-wish-buy-greenland

PENTAGON: US To Match Current Russian Hypersonic Capabilities …In 2040

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Although hypersonic weapons might seem like relative newcomers, known advantages of these weapons are both self-evident and multi-faceted as they can be fired from much greater stand-off ranges while having vastly increased ability to defeat, circumvent or simply destroy enemy air and ballistic missile defenses.
USAF Research Laboratory is working round-the-clock on hypersonic weapons designed to come in the next 10-15 years, in order to “expand USAF’s mission options” in the next decades, as an increasingly contested airspace is emerging, limiting US strike capabilities.
The Pentagon has been aggressively pushing for hypersonic weapons development, especially after Russian advances in this field have left the US trailing behind. Given the implications associated with firing weapons able to travel at over five-times the speed of sound, a number of programs have been underway (reportedly, there are up to 8 US hypersonic programs currently underway).
Right now, the most optimistic estimate is that an initial set of more primitive US hypersonic weapons will be operational by the mid-2020s. In late June 2019, USAF conducted its first prototype hypersonic missile flight test, with a B-52 bomber launching a sensor-only prototype of the AGM-183A ARRW (Air-Launched Rapid Response Weapon).
Despite some initial success with basic hypersonic design testing and development, there is still much more work to be done when it comes to refining the technology needed for current and future hypersonic weapons flight. Engineering a weapon to fly at 5+ times the speed of sound primarily relies on its ability to survive and neutralize (or at least minimize) the heat generated by extreme speeds.
An area of focus relates to several complex aerodynamic challenges, such as managing the airflow surrounding the vehicle in flight. Referred to by scientists as a “boundary layer”, the airflow characteristics of a hypersonic weapon’s flight trajectory greatly impact the survivability and stability of the system – most of which relate to temperature, as excessive heat at such speed can incinerate the weapon.
Increased heat also brings other challenges, as it increases the weapon’s thermal signature, making it easier to detect and track. For this reason, hypersonic weapons – and ICBMs as well – are constructed with specially engineered heat-resistant materials.
“The larger the nose radius, the smaller the heat transfer on the nose of the vehicle. Trajectory shaping, i.e., velocity and altitude, can also be used to manage the total heat transfer on a re-entry vehicle while meeting other input requirements and constraints, e.g., range, maximum deceleration, and time of flight. Hypersonic weapons have different constraints and requirements compared with reentry bodies. HGVs(Hypersonic Glide Vehicles) and HCMs(Hypersonic Cruise Missiles) will tend to have sharp leading edges, i.e., a small nose radius, which will increase the heat transfer,” a RAND (Speier, Nacouzi, Lee) essay states.
”Also, most hypersonic weapons need to travel for long periods of time at high speeds, when compared to a re-entry body traveling at relatively short distances, therefore, two of the major parameters in the total heat equation, velocity and time, cannot generally be reduced,” the RAND paper states.
Many hypersonic weapons are engineered as kinetic energy strike weapons, meaning they will not use explosives but rather rely upon sheer speed and the force of impact to destroy targets. In addition, hypersonic missiles can also be armed with both nuclear and conventional payloads.
US Armed Forces are currently faced with both tactical and strategic implications of hypersonic weapons. How can carrier strike groups “project power” within a striking range of hypersonic missiles? How can mechanized armored columns maneuver without being badly crippled by hypersonic attacks? How can fighter jets maneuver to avoid impact by hypersonic SAMs, which Russia already fields?
What’s more, low orbit satellites, ICBMs and ballistic missile defense weapons such as ground-based interceptors are also vulnerable. The variables through which hypersonics alter warfare are basically limitless. The dangerous implications for aggressive Western-style warfare are extremely serious.

https://geopolitics.news/anglo-america/pentagon-us-to-match-current-russian-hypersonic-capabilities-in-2040/

thegopnik wrote:

The AI shit is just stupid because it is just a missile that makes decisions that are best to reach their goals(hitting land targets, i

and on millions of cases it trained before going online. So you say a human operator can perform better in such situation?

hoom wrote:If I recall correctly about Mach 5 the kinetic energy from impact starts getting bigger than any practical warhead energy

Edit: BTW @popular_cranks... JLENS is a cancelled, dead program.

E = TNT equivalent  of 1 kg  =  4.184 megajoules

Ek of 1kg = 0.5*mv2  

Ek > Etnt

0,5mv2 >  Etnt

v >  sqrt( 2Etnt/m)  ~ 3000  m/s  

So about 10Ma

GunshipDemocracy wrote:

thegopnik wrote:

The AI shit is just stupid because it is just a missile that makes decisions that are best to reach their goals(hitting land targets, i

and on millions of cases it trained before going online. So you say a human operator can perform better in such situation?

I changed my mind on this when I realize missiles can use multiple sources for better decisions, I have seen the light so apologies on my part.

I believe that the only weapons to surpass scramjet missiles in terms of being impossible to intercept are railguns with nuclear shells. To be honest I would like to know where Russia stands in railgun technology, there was alot of circle jerking about the U.S. Navy fielding 100 mile railguns, while the Russians literally have a fucking howitzer, a god damn howitzer that has a slightly longer range than this, they are also already ahead of having more force and power with tank cannons as well. Now I am hearing stories about 1000 mile + railguns.

Reason this is obviously impossible to intercept is that J-band frequencies or higher are needed for tracking accuracy. Attenuation effects higher frequencies than X-band, shells already have a stupidly low RCS, and I believe that in the infrared field it has a smaller heat signature than scramjets which are bigger and have an exhaust. Covered in a plasma shield moving at hypersonic velocities there is not much time to intercept it.

Only source I got is this. https://www.armyrecognition.com/weapons_defence_industry_military_technology_uk/russian_railgun_based_on_electromagnetic_forces_successfully_tested.html

GunshipDemocracy wrote:

thegopnik wrote:

The AI shit is just stupid because it is just a missile that makes decisions that are best to reach their goals(hitting land targets, i

and on millions of cases it trained before going online. So you say a human operator can perform better in such situation?

Millions of cases? Don't make me laugh. They are lucky if they can afford a few hundred cases. You know that they actually have
to launch a missile to properly train the neural network. Doing it in a simulator is not going to get the needed sensitivity. Reality
will always through more failure modes at any device than any simulator can hope.

So-called AI is a current fad and everyone and his dog is telling everyone else and his dog how great it will be and how the world
will never be the same. The problem is that the I in AI is not actual intelligence. These are glorified regression fitting algorithms
with more parameters to tune. The AI neural networks are tiny by contrast to mice brains and are more primitive than those of
insects. No human built AI in the coming decades will reach the ability to anticipate or realistically predict critical situations and
come up with solutions. They will remain reflexive response devices that will fail when faced with real world scenarios not trained
into their marginal capacity networks.

thegopnik wrote:

I changed my mind on this when I realize missiles can use multiple sources for better decisions, I have seen the light so apologies on my part.

Im not happy about it but a human has no chances in any specific field with machine. Not yet in generic case but in specific like AAD? yes.


A scientific paper from 3 years ago

Abstract

The game of chess is the most widely-studied domain in the history of artificial intelligence. The strongest programs are based on a combination of sophisticated search techniques, domain-specific adaptations, and handcrafted evaluation functions that have been
refined by human experts over several decades. In contrast, the AlphaGo Zero program
recently achieved superhuman performance in the game of Go, by tabula rasa reinforcement learning from games of self-play. In this paper, we generalise this approach into
a single AlphaZero algorithm that can achieve, tabula rasa, superhuman performance in
many challenging domains.

Starting from random play, and given no domain knowledge
except the game rules, AlphaZero achieved within 24 hours a superhuman level of play in
the games of chess and shogi (Japanese css) as well as Go, and convincingly defeated a
world-champion program in each case.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.01815.pdf

is this news for this thread? pls advice. Thx

https://tass.ru/armiya-i-opk/7631565

The Pantsir-S air defense system received a hypersonic missile

His missiles are not equipped with homing heads

MOSCOW, January 29. / TASS /. The Russian anti-aircraft missile and cannon system "Shell-S" received the latest hypersonic missile. About this in an interview with TASS said Valery Slugin - chief designer for air defense systems Instrument Design Bureau named. Shipunova (part of the "High-precision complexes" of the state corporation "Rostec").

"There are two missiles, they are struggling with the whole range of targets. One is standard, the other is newly developed, it is hypersonic - its speed is 5 Machs and more," Slugin said.
According to him, the new missile flies faster to the target, which increases the rate of fire of the complex, as the firing channel is freed faster. "In addition, you don’t need to put a lot of explosives in the warhead to disperse the fragments - higher impact speed, higher fragment efficiency," the designer added.

Slugin noted that the Pantsir missiles are not equipped with homing heads - at ranges at which the system operates, all tasks can be solved through the remote control system of the missile from the combat vehicle.

The Pantsir-S complex is intended for the close protection of civilian and military targets from air attack in any weather, climate and radio-electronic environment, day and night. The armor of the "Shell" consists of 12 anti-aircraft guided missiles (six missiles in two transport and launch containers). Also, the "Shell" is armed with two 30 mm quick-firing cannons.

A board game is not reality. Reality has vastly more degrees of freedom than any board game. And it is the ultimate challenge for any
neural network to map those degrees of freedom. So examples of Chess and Go neural network engines are utterly irrelevant to real
world missile operation.

https://www.zerohedge.com/technology/us-boosts-glide-breaker-program-shoot-down-putins-invincible-hypersonic-missiles

Hilarious, delusional BS from yanqui self-annointed exceptionalists. They think that there will be hypersonic glider interceptors
if they throw a few million bux at some corrupt contractor. Retards.

1) The geometry of the Earth limits the time window for hypersonic missile chases.

2) We are never going back to ballistic kill. Maneuverable hypersonic gliders completely change the interception problem.
It is all about the degrees of freedom. Ballistic trajectories restrict the position of the target to being predictable.
Gliders prevent any predictability.

3) The only way the yanquis could "intercept" Russian hypersonic gliders is theirs were much faster. Good luck with that,
losers. You were still banking on kinetic kill a few years ago. Now you pretend to be god-like experts in non-predictable
trajectory interception.

kvs wrote:https://www.zerohedge.com/technology/us-boosts-glide-breaker-program-shoot-down-putins-invincible-hypersonic-missiles

Hilarious, delusional BS from yanqui self-annointed exceptionalists.    They think that there will be hypersonic glider interceptors
if they throw a few million bux at some corrupt contractor.    Retards.

1) The geometry of the Earth limits the time window for hypersonic missile chases.

2) We are never going back to ballistic kill.    Maneuverable hypersonic gliders completely change the interception problem.
It is all about the degrees of freedom.   Ballistic trajectories restrict the position of the target to being predictable.  
Gliders prevent any predictability.    

3) The only way the yanquis could "intercept" Russian hypersonic gliders is theirs were much faster.   Good luck with that,
losers.   You were still banking on kinetic kill a few years ago.   Now you pretend to be god-like experts in non-predictable
trajectory interception.

x10  

It's articles like this that make me realise that in many ways the US is a paper tiger whose undeserved reputation (as a Superpower) is not based on reality as much as it is on endless self-promotion and the sycophancy of their vassals.   Empires that behave this way are doomed to collapse, and when the US finally goes pop, it ain't gonna be pretty (but it will be IMMENSELY satisfying!!

AI systems generally are black box systems so apart from a few basic rules it uses trial and error to refine its methods and strategies. You can't extract the rules it creates for itself and other than observation you really can't determine its tactics and methods from its code.

I remember in the 1980s the Germans were working on an AI programme to automatically detect an armoured vehicle... a tank... so they got together a huge number of still photos and ran an AI programme over it... the idea being that if it can automatically detect a tank then you can use it to scan a live video feed on a camera on a tank in the field and it could automatically alert the crew to the presence of a tank... enemy or otherwise...

During tests it got to 96% success rate in the lab with still images, so they went to the field test stage and it was terrible its performance was awful... But why?

After years of investigation and testing they realised their mistake... their sample photos with tanks in them were taken on sunny days, and the photos with no tanks were taken on cloudy days and that is what the AI learned to detect if it was a cloudy day or a sunny day... and in that role it was actually rather good.

As you can probably tell the remedy is to change the sample images so sunny day and cloudy day and rainy day and snowy day and even night no longer become a factor... which means very careful selections of sample images... and also images from any environment your vehicle is likely to operate in... like desert or arctic or forest or jungle etc etc.

Modern cameras can easily detect the human face for example and can track it in moving video... and of course Soviet and Russian systems like the tracking systems in Kornet and TOR and Pantsir and Tunguska can also perform such operations too... but it wasn't easy.