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Comment by cabirum | Hacker News Reader

A modern ICBM (see: Sarmat) carries multiple independently targetable warheads (or hypersonic gliders), equipped with active missile defense countermeasures and decoys, striking from arbitrary direction (eg flying over south pole on a non-ballistic suborbital trajectory).

Now try to shoot that down.

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> Shiva Star was also used to develop an experimental weapon known as MARAUDER for the SDI effort between 1989 and 1995. The idea appears to have been to create compact toroids of high-density plasma that would be ejected from the device using a massive magnetic pulse.[2] The plasma projectiles would be shot at a speed expected to be 3000 km/s in 1995 and 10,000 km/s (3.3% of the speed of light) by 2000. A shot has the energy of 2,27 kg of TNT exploding. Doughnut-shaped rings of plasma and balls of lightning exploded with devastating thermal and mechanical effects when hitting their target and produced pulse of electromagnetic radiation that could scramble electronics, the energy would shower the interior of the target with high-energy x-rays that would potentially destroy the electronics inside. The tests cost a few million dollars a year.[3] The project became classified, and no information about the fate of the project has been published after 1995.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiva_Star

Just saying, there's a reason most of the modern research on ABM tech is super classified. It's not hard to hit a missile at any speed when you're shooting a plasma cannon at .033C

I do not understand, how can plasma travel at 3.3% the speed of light in the air? Wouldn't it still need to fight the pressure of the air and by that definition the moment a projectile at 3.3% the speed of light bounces against of speck of air that plasma will immediately release most of it's energy dispersing in various directions?

This would be a space-based weapon.

Hypersonic gliders imply no decoys (can't run decoys in atmosphere at those speeds. If you could, they'd weigh as much as the real thing, so they'd just be the real thing). Arbitrary directions require extra range, which reduces your warhead throw weight. So, you're losing warheads to that, which is a win for the defense in a sense again. Also, I'm not sure what these active countermeasures are.

Lastly, we're talking about Russia now, which... /me points at Ukraine, doesn't exactly have the best of reputations for equipment anymore.

Yeah, you want to bet everybodies life on that?

No. I don't want to bet my life on Putin remaining sane. That's why I support BMD.

We can try to shoot the rocket on the first phases of flight, while it's flying in one piece.

The Sarmat isn't even in service though, and it might not even be functional. In fact, it probably isn't functional considering the lengthy delays.

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