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Bearing small on board anti missile systems.

Powered, no doubt, by pixie dust. In the real world, things are not so simple.

The reason Phalanx is so big is not just because they wanted it to be bulky. It takes a good sized shell to have a reasonable assurance of a kill on the incoming target. It takes a good sized radar to track the target and (in the case of Phalanx) also track the outbound shells to correct aim. It takes a fair sized magazine to have a chance at multiple targets in the same sector. It takes a good field of regard, which means azimuth-elevation movement, and multiple units in order to provide coverage over a meaningful sector (consider all the turrets on a B-17).

The bottom line is that providing active anti-missile defense is analogous to providing active anti-fighter defense for a WWII bomber. It's heavy, draggy, and consumes a lot of volume/power. Before you get to the point where you have a fair confidence you have an effective defense, you're no longer a 'fighter' or 'attack' aircraft. You're a "Flying Fortress" and cost as much as a (new-build) B-1, yet with the payload/range of an F-35.

My point in the post was that it's not as easy as you assume. The physics/engineering shows that reducing incoming missile probability of kill can be done more effectively with stealth and/or countermeasures such as chaff and flares than with active kill-the-attacking-missile defense. Perhaps that will change some day when particle beam weapons or other 'death rays' mature, but not in the near future.

I’m not assuming it’s easy, and I also assumed increased weight and drag, but missiles are frail, and another vulnerability of theirs is that they have a package designed to go boom.

many of them are going to terminal in on heat. Your anti missile device could target a narrow probability cone for any given one unit and fire flechette clusters or something along that line.

You know, when you think about it, a low tech force fielding a lot of prop aircraft could probably kick ass on a lot of current high tech forces, through numbers and creative means of getting the enemy to waste their very finite SAM capacity.

It’d be interesting to game it out...