The authors of PolitiFact claim that Russia’s hypersonic missiles are considered primitive.
The western air defence systems sent to Kiev didn't detect Kinzhal or Iskander... it comes down to scan rate... when you scan with a search radar it might spin at 12 revolutions a minute, which means it takes 5 seconds for the radar to spin around 360 degrees one time.
When Patriot radar spins around on the first spin it detects Iskander or Kinzhal and 5 seconds later when it comes around again both missiles have moved so far it treats them like separate new targets so it can't work out their proper speed or trajectory and while it is working out what is happening Boom.
Iskander and Kinzhal are ground and air launched missiles that are powered by solid fuelled rockets, but they also have Zircon which is scramjet powered and slightly faster and half their weight.
The U.S. versions are expected to have sophisticated abilities to glide, be launched by aircraft and maneuver to avoid defenses. Experts say they are a couple of years from being deployed.
Things that have not been deployed yet are always better, and in a few years when they are deployed Zircon will be better and they likely will have a few more upgraded systems. They are planning new scramjet powered Kh-31s for example which will also be rather impressive.
Keep in mind the Zircon is intended to hit ships... a version that carries a small tactical nuke... it could be less than 2KT because it is accurate and can evade being shot down so you can pretty much assume a direct hit so a very small nuke warhead would be plenty and much lighter than the 200kg warhead it probably carries to sink ships, which means it could probably carry rather more fuel and fly rather further to its target.
Hypersonic missiles have received heightened attention since Russia began deploying them in Ukraine. But they have existed for decades; since the 1950s, some missiles have qualified as hypersonic by traveling more than five times the speed of sound (or around 4,000 miles per hour). These include intercontinental ballistic missiles, known as ICBMs, which can carry nuclear warheads from one continent to another.
What they are missing is that the Iskander and the Kinzhal that it is based on is not just fast... it actually carries sensors to detect enemy radar signals and can launch chaff and flares and actual decoys and can evade incoming radar homing missiles and SAMs by actively manouvering to avoid their attacks.
In comparison very high speed targets like IRBM and MRBM and ICBM and even SLBM warheads also go very fast, in fact faster than hypersonic, but they don't manouver to evade interception... what they do is fall on their target in an obvious and predictable flightpath.
When someone throws a ball to you you watch the ball in flight and work out its trajectory and move your body and hands to where you think the ball will be when you catch it... imagine 5m short of you catching it it turns 30 degrees down and then at 1m it turns 30 degrees left, all while travelling at 150km/h.
You simply don't have time or the brain power to change the calculations and find the new intercept point and actually move your hands to the new interception point needed to catch the ball.
When it is a missile you send your interceptor missiles up to the point where it is going to intercept the current flight path of the Kinzhal and so the Kinzhal is flying at 3km/s and your Patriot is streaking up at mach 5 or mach 6 to meet it and then you detect the Kinzhal turn 10 degrees because it detected your patriot missile system... well interception is 4 dimensional maths... the interception point might have just moved 10km, but your missile can't get to the interception point now because it was heading to the original intercept point and to turn and make it to this new intercept point might not be possible in the time available... the Kinzhal missile will blow through the new intercept point in 1.6 seconds time and your Patriot missile is 10km away, so it will take your Patriot missile 6 seconds to turn and get to the new intercept point but in 6 seconds time Kinzhal is 18km away and the Patriot has just run out of fuel and every second the Kinzhal gets about 2km further away.
Launch another Patriot?
Well that Kinzhal has already hit its target... which probably was your patriot battery radar and control vehicles.
Hypersonic missiles travel so fast because when they reach space, gravity hurls them to hypersonic speeds.
Iskander and Kinzhal never reach space, that is bullshit.
"It's not hard to make a ballistic missile hypersonic," said Brendan Green, a University of Cincinnati professor who has studied nuclear issues. "Nature will do this for you."
That is accurate, but S-500 missiles will already intercept targets moving at 7km/s and the S-400 Russian SAM can already hit targets moving at 4.8km/s which is faster than Kinzhal or Zircon which are closer to 3km/s.
A more sophisticated type of hypersonic missile would be one that could "travel at a low level, to glide, to be launched from aircraft, to maneuver to avoid defenses," or some combination of those traits, said Lance Janda, a Cameron University military historian.
What a moron... flying low through the thickest part of the atmosphere introduces the risk of flying into things including but not limited to birds and buildings and hills.
The west is not able to intercept Iskander or Kinzhal or Zircon even if they were given a memo to tell them when it was going to be launched.
Iran warned the US about its ballistic missile strikes on US based in Iraq and they didn't shoot down any missiles despite those missiles being simple ballistic rockets... ie they didn't manouver... they just went really fast.
The hypersonic weapons the Russians are talking about are not just fast.
One way these weapons can achieve long ranges with limited fuel is by deploying wings that allow them to "glide" for thousands of miles and maneuver without propulsion, at least for a limited time, Janda said. These are the kinds of advances that U.S. hypersonic missiles are expected to include.
Iskander and Kinzhal and Zircon are powered all the way... if this Janda fool knew anything about aerodynamics he would understand the body lift derived from bodies flying at faster than Mach 5 makes wings literally a drag.
Such missiles might be targeted at an aircraft carrier, a command-and-control center, or even a high-value individual, said Iain Boyd, director of the Center for National Security Initiatives at the University of Colorado Boulder.
That is exactly what the Russians will use Zircons for and currently and for the foreseeable future the US Navy wont be able to stop them.
U.S. engineers were at the forefront of hypersonic research in the late 1950s, but the Vietnam War crowded out that research because hypersonic aircraft weren’t relevant to fighting in the jungle, The Wall Street Journal reported Sept. 18. A lack of testing infrastructure has since slowed the pace of development.
But they would be too white for getting the job done now...
If the US does eventually put the Dark Eagle into service in Europe, then Russia will just make good on their promise and mate an Avangard upper stage on a Yars lower stage and manufacture the Rubezh. Russia said they wouldn't be the first ones infringing on the INF Treaty limitations in Europe. But if the US does it then the Russians will (easily) counter this.
Actually modifying the Iskander with a second stage with an added solid rocket booster to get it into the air with a scramjet motor with the front portion being a large fuel tank to absorb the heat of the flight and pump heated fuel to rear mounted scramjet... flying at 40-50km altitude after travelling 1,000km it could dump its now empty fuel tank and continue at mach 10 at 50km altitude with its scramjet motor burning from a full tank of fuel for perhaps 2-3 thousand kms more to its target...
And the US gave up on it once they had ICBMs.
They US had to keep their nazis to develop their entire space programme set of rockets...
Ramjets are way more fuel efficient than rockets so this was expected to have the required range. This eventually led to the Burya ramjet powered cruise missile flying at Mach 3.
Before ICBMs were proven to be possible both sides worked on large cruise missiles with speeds of mach 3 or thereabouts (materials would not allow them to fly much faster) and flight ranges of 3 to 5 thousand kms. They would be probably rather straight forward to shoot down because they didn't manouver and were rather large objects driven by enormous solid rocket boosters to get them airborne and with ramjets to maintain flight speed to the target... they were mostly fuel.
The US equivalents were weapons like the Navaho and the Snark... all money dried up when ICBMs stopped exploding and started landing long distances down range.
ICBMs promised uninterceptable speed but also the potential of satellites in space.
The choice of where to spend money was clear.
The US had aircraft carriers so Soviet work on high speed cruise missiles never stopped and has led to Onyx and Zircon... two very potent missiles with enormous growth potential.
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or Canada to pay for goods&services abroad. Not worrying about conversion rates, transactional risk etc. As a seller, I was charged with provision - very generous - but I accepted it as a cost of operations.
