I think EM railgun will play a role to defend against supersonic missiles . it's projectile can reach from zero to 6 Mach in 10 milliseconds ,giving it a safe impact distance away from the ship .
Actually that is not a great idea... the APFSDS round from a 125mm tank gun goes from zero to 1.8km/s which is about mach 6 in the length of a 5-6m long barrel so less than 10 miliseconds I would guess...
And how often to armies promote tanks with APFSDS rounds as anti aircraft weapons?
A round can't correct its trajectory like a missile.
Lasers and some sort of hard kill (like on tanks) are the future.
Indeed.. the closing speed of an incoming Kh-32 with an outgoing mach 6 weapon will be mach 11 or about 3.3km/s, but even the slightest change of trajectory by the Kh-32 after the EM gun round is fired means it will miss... and the Kh-32 could fly in a loose spiral trajectory and no rounds fired at it will connect...
As you mention only a laser because it reduces the intercept time to so close to zero that the lazer could be kept on target even if it moves, and of course hard kill, but compounded by the fact that hard kill systems reduce armour penetration to the level where the kinetic target can no longer penetrate the heavy armour of the target... in the case of a ship against a 2-7 ton incoming round means you would need to go back to WWII battleships with heavy belt armour over its entire surface... which is not really practical.
Russian AshM's have been known to be armored with titanium to make them resistant to shrapnel.
The Granit has an angled titanium plate protecting the warhead... if you set off the incoming missiles warhead the tiny fragments rapidly slow down and protect the ship very effectively... the Phalanx uses DU rounds to penetrate the titanium plates used to protect warheads in the hope of setting off the warheads.
the speed of these new missiles makes Phalanx useless... in the half second such a missile would take to cover the effective range band of the Phalanx it simply couldn't fire enough rounds to assure a kill...
Indeed the lead required would mean that any shots fired by the time it gets to about 800m would be fired in to the ship you are trying to protect... so a quarter of a second to shoot it down... a 7.5 ton anti ship missiles with 50 cal DU rounds.
Lasers are the only theoretical interceptors of hypersonic missiles that are guaranteed to overcome any non-ballistic maneuvering since no chunk
of metal, composite and ceramic will ever approach the speed of light. But lasers are nowhere near the sci-fi level required to have the
energy density to do the job.
Exactly... lasers have a long way to go before they are more effective than missiles or guns, but that is no reason not to use lasers too... they wont get better if they stay in the lab... or they will get faster as they are made and new ideas to make them better and more efficient can be worked on in the field as well a the lab.
The ideal would be an energy beam weapon that sets off HE or remaining propellent...
To be clear the US believes that shooting at high speed air targets needs high velocity rounds... their 20mm gatling gun they use for their fighter aircraft fire light projectiles at about 1km/s muzzle velocities... which sounds fine because it means it shoots flatter and gets to the target faster, but the problem is that there is no level of velocity that could get a solid projectile to a target intercept point fast enough to mean the target has no time to manouver in any direction or speed up or slow down.
The much more sensible idea is lower velocity but high rate of fire... widely used with small arms. When shooting at birds and other small fast targets you use a shot gun.... not very fast projectiles but lots of them scattered all around the point of aim so that if the target dips or weaves or speeds up or slows down after you fire you are still going to get pellets on target due to their spread around the point of aim.
Larger calibre slower rounds can often be more effective than smaller lighter faster rounds if they have proximity fuses...
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Big_Gazza
