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Comment by willmadden | Hacker News Reader

On this Mario podcast they're saying Iran shifted manufacturing from drones and rockets to ballistic missiles was because the drones were so easy to intercept. Many of Iran's ballistic missiles travel at mach 15. That's way too fast to intercept reliably. Some are slower. I don't know what was used here.

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Mach 15 seems to fall into "hypersonic" weapon territory. Did they develop their own tech or buy it from Russia?

"Hypersonic" is a misnomer, most long range rockets hit hypersonic speeds. "Hypersonic" refers to steerable hypersonic glide vehicles that can turn to make them harder to intercept. There is no evidence yet that any of them were used in this attack.

If it's the Fattah-1, it was developed in-house by the IRGC.

Having said that, I have no idea if there was some tech transfer from Russia to Iran to enable it.

I doubt it, Iran has such capabilities themselves. Apart from their insane regime they have a lot of smart people. Ballistic rockets burn a few seconds and then just follow their ballistic path, which is quite predictable.

Cruise missiles are harder to intercept because you don't know where they will hit. They can change course on short notice which ballistic missiles cannot do after burning their fuel.

Ballistic missile warheads have flown at these speeds for many years. The term "hypersonic" when it refers to missiles is frustratingly imprecise; hypersonic in the sense you're using it refers to more modern weapons capable of substantial maneuvers and not restricted to a ballistic trajectory. Iran is incapable of producing these types of weapons.

Note that plain old ballistic missile warheads are quite challenging to intercept. Past operational systems used nuclear warheads on the interceptors.

Even Nazi Germany's V2 was almost hypersonic. "Hypersonic" is an abused term from Russia to make old missiles sound better than they are.

Supersonic as a novelty refers to supersonic cruise missiles. Ballistic missiles are something different. Larger range but unguided after they burned all their fuel. But they do reach supersonic speeds.

Cruise missiles have a lower range but can change course. This makes interception more difficult since you don't know for sure where they will hit. The difficulty in intercepting ballistic missiles is that they are very fast and supersonic cruise missiles would make up for the weakness of being generally slower.

The only guided munitions in WW2 I know of were naval torpedoes, I think everything else was still unguided.

There were guided bombs in WW2, radio command and even IR experimentally.

There were radio-guided gravity bombs during WW2, the V-1 cruise missiles was also radio guided as well as the V-2 ballistic missile.

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