Oreshnik missile system (IRBM)

>The temperature of "Oreshnik's" destructive elements reaches 4,000 degrees Celsius.

>Everything at the epicenter of an "Oreshnik" explosion disintegrates into elementary particles, essentially turning into dust.

Putin can not be any more explicit. These are nukes.

I sincerely hope beyond all hope that NATO strategists don`t buy into their cope-praganda intended for the masses. Otherwise NATO and in the long term everyone is fucked.

Nope - no nukes are involved

I guess if you ignore the subtext the penetrator will magically turn into a 3 ton bomb after penetrating several stories underground

That would mean the shock wave would be most powerful on the initial impact with the intensity rapidly tapering off as the penetrator deccelerates through the target. Highly counter-intuitive as you want the exact opposite effect to happen.
Plus the Yuzhmash site was already Iskandered a couple times. Oreshnik would have to have superior penetrating power + after-effects if the strike is to make any sense at all.

With all due respect to China. They have made incredible progress, they are a technological powerhouse, they make excellent weapons. Huge impressive shipbuilding production, etc. However, it is doubtful that they will reach the level of development of Russian ballistic and hypersonic missiles such as 3M22, Avangard or currently Oreshnik, which also has some maneuvering units, etc.

I am not suggesting China is the ballistic super power of the world, I am saying all IRBMs are hypersonic by their nature... it is like saying an artillery piece can fire supersonic shells when the range gets beyond about 10km or so... it is a necessity.

And the real point is that an IRBM, which China has plenty does not need super manouverable metal ground penetrators when the warheads are airburst nuclear.

The first warhead can be detonated outside the atmosphere with an EMP effect that will ionise the air over an enormous range so any follow up warheads will reach their altitudes and detonate without any chance of being intercepted just like warheads from the most modern and most capable maker on the planet.

For some time the Chinese were ahead of Russia simply because the INF treaty prevented Russia or the US from developing such weapons, but I would say the Russians have stepped ahead using their knowledge in other range categories and are now ahead in IRBMs and MRBMs too. Iskander shows they were head and shoulders ahead of all of HATO too... in attack and defence.

Russia has been developing a line of hypersonic missiles for 50 years. Now they have achieved a breakthrough.

You are missing the point... the special stuff in the Hazelnut is the payload and terminal phase munitions... but there is nothing IRBM about them.... they are the payload stage you could put in any missile from SRBM, MRBM, IRBM, ICBM, and SLBM... the difference is that the SRBM has a single rocket stage, the MRBM and IRBM probably have a two stage rocket and the SLBM and ICBM probably have a three stage rocket system.

With their new scramjet technology they could have SRCM, MRCM, IRCM, ICCM, and SLCM... where rocket motors are largely replaced with scramjet engines and wings... (ie short range cruise missiles, meduim range cruise missiles, intermediate range cruise missiles, and intercontinental range cruise missiles and of course sub launched cruise missiles...)

The rocket and scramjet powered missiles could carry nuclear or conventional payloads, while the nuclear rocket propulsion of the Thunderbird I would guess would be nuclear warhead only, so dooms day weapons and strategic weapons only really.

They were working on the hypersonic Kh-22 and its modernizations, Meteor missiles, etc.

Well technically their anti radiation Kh-31 is already a heavy Meteor missile and fitting it with scramjet engines instead of ramjets should allow a triple speed and significant range improvement fairly easily.... with a weapon that can be carried by tactical aircraft...

China is also working and making huge progress, but they have not reached the level of development of Russia in this respect.

This is true, but they don't need to be better than Russia because it seems western air defences are not that amazing and really struggle with even standard Russian weapons like Kh-22M and Iskander...

The implications are insane. For ICBMs, even hardened Soviet nuclear silos can only handle surface detonations - nobody designed against an earth penetrating weapon that will produce most of its damage through a ground shock from below the ground - look how thin the side walls are in this SS-18 silo:

When it comes to shockwaves moving through the ground thicker silo walls would not help. That is why instead of making the silo walls thicker they invested in interception systems that would detonate enemy warheads above ground where they would not cause shockwaves...

Putin can not be any more explicit. These are nukes.

No they are not.

It is their high velocity that generates that heat... if they were nukes then the temperature would be millions of degrees... like the core of the sun... rather than 1,000 degrees less than its surface.

I sincerely hope beyond all hope that NATO strategists don`t buy into their cope-praganda intended for the masses. Otherwise NATO and in the long term everyone is fucked.

They need to continue calling Putins bluff till it escalates to the point where more of the top elite Orcs get barbecued in their bunker... they are all happy to see the conscripts get killed in enormous numbers... it is very rare for the top people... the elite that run things and make the big decisions that have deep safe bunkers to hide it... to get what is coming to them.

Isn't this about the temperature of the plasma flying in the warhead's atmosphere, or the kinetic charge?

I would guess they achieve these temperatures boring their way through the target... like a drill bit cutting metal...

I guess if you ignore the subtext the penetrator will magically turn into a 3 ton bomb after penetrating several stories underground

Well it ends up at 4,000 degrees C with material being knocked aside a hypersonic speeds... which is faster than they would be moving if they were being moved by an explosive like HE...

That would mean the shock wave would be most powerful on the initial impact with the intensity rapidly tapering off as the penetrator deccelerates through the target. Highly counter-intuitive as you want the exact opposite effect to happen.

Inserting a 4 thousand degree rod into most buildings is going to start fires and damage things even if it does not explode.

This isn't an office building, this is a place where they made SS-18 ICBMs... there will be fuel storage areas and machine shops and other things that likely will burn when heated to 4,000 degrees.

Note even stone burns at 4,000 degrees C... everything known to man burns at that temperature.

>It is their high velocity that generates that heat... if they were nukes then the temperature would be millions of degrees... like the core of the sun... rather than 1,000 degrees less than its surface.
The fireball can be that hot. A mach 10 impact will not explain materials disintegrating to their elementary particles - only the intense radiation of a nuke can do that.

>They need to continue calling Putins bluff till it escalates to the point where more of the top elite Orcs get barbecued in their bunker... they are all happy to see the conscripts get killed in enormous numbers... it is very rare for the top people... the elite that run things and make the big decisions that have deep safe bunkers to hide it... to get what is coming to them.
These subhumans matter not a whit. All the decision making happens in NATO HQs.

>This isn't an office building, this is a place where they made SS-18 ICBMs... there will be fuel storage areas and machine shops and other things that likely will burn when heated to 4,000 degrees.

So it will have compartmentalization, robust firefighting equipment on standby like a warship loaded with energetic ammo and fuel. Like a warship one would need hundred kilos of high explosives minimum to even stand at making a dent.

Thankfully in the early 60's atmospheric nuclear tests were banned but only to move underground. The Nevada desert was the US's first choice for these underground tests - literally hundreds such test were performed. Not all were strictly military like project Sedan. The Soviets had similar civil nuclear engineering projects like Project Plowshare where they flattened a forest to make room for a canal.

Project Sedan involved a 100 kt nuclear warhead exploded at nearly 200 meters down. The result was a famous crater 100 meter deep and 390 meter wide. The explosion lifted a dome of earth 90 meters into the air before it vented, displacing 11,000,000 tons of soil!

All previous plant species have never recovered, but interesting enough a tumbleweed known as Russian Thistle seems to have settled around the crater.



Here is another underground test in Nevada of smaller yield showing the imploding cavity that is formed underground.

An impact fast enough to vaporize heavy metal will produce a massive explosion on the surface.

A mach 10 impact is well within the hydrodynamic regime where Tungsten flows like a liquid forced against another liquid. Its basically a twice faster APFSDS arrow.

>The details are that the impactor detonates into a heavy vapour that amplifies the impact in the ground. The blowback into the atmosphere
is minimal. So we do not have an intact penetrator but we also do not have a pure gas.

So its not a monolithic penetrator but a stream of particulated heavy metal - like a shaped charge except it has more or less the same velocity throughout? Interesting.

You lose the inherent robustness of a solid piece of penetrator but the higher the impact velocity the less the mechanical properties of the material becomes and the more it acts like liquid anyway.

I imagine you can introduce a little brake to reduce the velocity of the rearward elements somewhat, make it stretch a couple times. Add a charge to the middle so at the predetermined depth it blows up and stops the subsequent particles causing a collapse in the metal stream...

So it will have compartmentalization, robust firefighting equipment on standby like a warship loaded with energetic ammo and fuel. Like a warship one would need hundred kilos of high explosives minimum to even stand at making a dent.

Yeah, because compartmentalisation and robust fire fighting equipment will protect a tank 100% when an APFSDS punches through the armour and hits the ammo and detonates it like a bomb.

I would
say that the impact vapourization is equivalent to rapid heating much higher than 4000 C.

Sounds to me like the 4,000 degrees is a result of the impact with the target... whether that be concrete, soil, stone, or whatever.

It would be a peak temperature that would start the material vapourising of course but if you have ever put a frozen turkey in a hot oven... after 30 minutes at very high temperatures you can burn the outside while the turkey remains frozen inside a few cm deep.

Metal is a good conductor of course but it would not vapourise instantly either.

The danger of most meteorites after they land is not that they are super hot, but that they are super cold. Perhaps billions of years in the cold of space, a few seconds flashing through the atmosphere might temporarily heat the surface to a high temperature, but after hitting the ground the surface temperature drops as the core cools the surface to the very low temperature of the space rock.

I would say it is a maximum we can talk about - it still makes a 4t warhead - hell of a weight.
At some point it is clueless to increase the weight of a warhead - it is a warhead speed that makes a difference.
Pioneer warheads' speed reached more than 7.4km/s - it is much more effective to invest in retaining that speed when in the atmosphere rather than increasing the weight...

I remember reading a document in the 1990s where the Germans were talking about armour penetrators for APFSDS rounds and they mentioned that in terms of penetration energy is not the be all and end all because sometimes adding speed means when the penetrator hits the target the penetrator is vapourised and becomes less effective as a penetrator and not more effective.

As a case in point when the Soviets were working on how to protect their satellites in orbit from space junk potentially moving at speeds of 20km per second or more, they realised the solution was not super thick layers of aluminium armour... a paint chip sized object can punch a hole in a 75mm thick piece of aluminum armour at 20km/s and a 75mm thick armour capsule around satellites and space stations is simply not practical in terms of weight. The solution they came up with was actually a 2mm thick aluminium sheet that is spaced about 1m away from the outer shell of what you are protecting. The impactor hits this thin sheet and the armour and the impactor vapourise so when they hit the outer skin of whatever the thin sheet was protecting it still has very high velocity but it also has very low mass... like a gas impacting rather than a penetrator and it can't penetrate the next 2mm thick layer of aluminium.

The German tank gun makers came to the conclusion that about 3km per second is a speed limit where increasing velocity increases penetration much less than increasing mass of the projectile. So adding more energy to the penetrator can be done by making it faster or making it heavier and making it heavier improves penetration and its ability to retain speed moving through the atmosphere too.

So for example a 57mm anti tank round from a Soviet 57mm anti tank gun can penetrate targets a 122mm gun can't penetrate at close range the penetration massively reduces with range and at 2km the 122mm is vastly more effective in the anti armour role... plus its HE round is vastly superior... though shell capacity and rate of fire would favour the smaller calibre.

An impact fast enough to vaporize heavy metal will produce a massive explosion on the surface.

An APFSDS round might create a shower of sparks but no explosion when hitting a tank armour target. The concentration of energy in such a small place would lead to the projectile penetrating through the target if it was a building or structure on the surface.

There would certainly be a crater... check out this:

The details are that the impactor detonates into a heavy vapour that amplifies the impact in the ground. The blowback into the atmosphere
is minimal. So we do not have an intact penetrator but we also do not have a pure gas.

I would expect the results to vary based on what is hit... a bunker structure where there are layers of strong material with air pockets between like spaced armour might help to break up a penetrator but a heavy mass moving at very high speed is always going to penetrate rather deeply into any medium... short of making each layer out of Uranium or hardened tungsten a heavy penetrator is going to reach rather deep levels in most targets.

How are you making the distinction between the payload and terminal phase munitions? The later is part of the payload along with decoys.

By definition the payload is the terminal phase munition... in the sense that the bullet projectile from a round of ammunition is the payload and also the terminal phase munition that hits the target and delivers the damage.

With the speed of this weapon and its ability to manouver to evade interception and directly hit the target accurately, I rather suspect decoys and jammers and other such things would just be wasted space and redundant.

Sensors on the warhead bus to alert the warhead bus to incoming active radar homing threats and passive IR sensors that also warn of incoming missiles trying to intercept the missile would make sense to make the missiles manouvers more effective and more timely, but decoys and jammers would probably be less useful.

So its not a monolithic penetrator but a stream of particulated heavy metal - like a shaped charge except it has more or less the same velocity throughout? Interesting.

We don't know for certain, but most models to evaluate armour penetration generally treat very high speed penetrators as liquids or plasmas anyway, so the way the armour and the penetrator deforms on impact is similar for APFSDS rounds and for HEAT plasma beams.

HEAT plasma beams act like fluids but are essentially hard gasses, while in this case the penetrator is solid but at temperatures where they are not totally solid at the point of contact/work on the armour/protection surface.

You lose the inherent robustness of a solid piece of penetrator but the higher the impact velocity the less the mechanical properties of the material becomes and the more it acts like liquid anyway.

Different materials act differently... a comet might explode 10km up in the atmosphere leaving no crater because the object is basically a dirty iceball and the pressure of the atmosphere rips it apart before it reaches the ground. In comparison a rock with an iron core could make an enormous crater.

The point is that these objects are not shaped nor are they designed to penetrate whatever they hit like these missile munitions are.

If you don't think that makes any difference then ask yourself why tank shells include armour piercing rounds let alone APFSDS rounds if material and size and shape and velocity don't matter.

I imagine you can introduce a little brake to reduce the velocity of the rearward elements somewhat, make it stretch a couple times. Add a charge to the middle so at the predetermined depth it blows up and stops the subsequent particles causing a collapse in the metal stream...

There are likely a range of clever things they could design it to do... a common cannon round is frangible where a penetrating projectile is designed to break up just after impact so it penetrates a little and then breaks up and spreads out like a HE Frag round but without explosive. Very good for use against light structured targets like aircraft, especially if they have armoured skins.

Generally, at a speed of over 7 km/s in the case of an RV with an ICBM, it enters the atmosphere. Later, the warhead slows down during braking in the atmosphere. Of course, the RV is designed to lose as little energy as possible. However, at the ground level, it is already about 2 km/s.

You are talking about a nuclear warhead where they want it to naturally slow down so it does not over heat and require more heat protection. It essentially aerobrakes like the Space shuttle entering the atmosphere. A kinetic penetrator would not have aerobraking because it benefits from its high speed and so slowing down is the last thing they will want it to do.

...The impact on the target in this missile attack is astonishing.

Interesting animation, but it seems to show the impact of a nonshaped non penetrating blunt impactor... like a meteor or something.