Posted on 05/31/2017 7:26:01 AM PDT by C19fan
Russia has launched five successful flights of a hypersonic jet that is capable of destroying an aircraft carrier with a single impact, according to a new report. The Zircon cruise missile travels between 3,800mph and 4,600mph - five to six times the speed of sound - and puts Russia 'half a decade' ahead of the US', the report says. This makes it faster than any anti-missile system, including those that are expected to appear in the next two decades.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
At Mach 6 it wouldn't need a payload. The airframe itself is a Mach 6 projectile.
Works the same way damage wise.
Thermal energy doesn’t care what the material is at 4600mph, a defect that allows heat buildup is still a defect.
Again, damage is damage, it will do the trick.
The question is how much damage is needed. If the designers put in some tolerance for potential damage, yes the additional heat will cause more wear on the surfaces, but may not necessarily cause loss of the vehicle.
No control surface I have heard of could withstand the dynamic forces acting on it at 5k mph. Hypersonic flight is gravely dangerous and has only been attempted at altitudes that take it out of the atmosphere. The X-51 is probably the most recent hypersonic aircraft and it flew at Mach 5.0 for under 2 minutes and that was at 70,000' MSL. The fuel required was significant and needed to be cooled for flight.
The only plausible method would be terminal re-entry from a ballistic trajectory but then we are talking ICBM or similar platform. If that is the case, then the news story is grossly incorrect.
1” grape shot in its path will do the trick. Or a shock wave.
At 4600 mph the tragectory is completely ptedictable. Should be an easy shot.
Iirc, we recently successfully tested a 4600 mph anti ship missile.
I'm thinking without fuel, it's range is 0.
At 4600mph, there’s not much room for tolerance to damage.
And it would have to fly high up to minimize drag and friction.
(The AIM-54 phoenix missile flew at mach 5, it would clear the launch platform, then climb up to thinner air and do its homing burn, then do a terminal dive on the target.)
We have ship borne missiles that can reach into low earth orbit.
I am the father of the modern hypersonics movement. Yes those speeds are possible. Our target was Mach 8. The weapon actually has to slow down to about Mach 4 for impact as the backend of the warhead (solid metal) will try to catch up with the front end and greatly limit the damage it will do. Once it is lined up in the terminal phase, it is almost unstoppable. No amount of lead shot at it will even phase the warhead. I arranged for one to be sent into a dome of solid granite. The first foot or two shattered around the impact point. The surprising point was that it bored a nice clean 30 plus foot hole into the granite. Which means it was essentially vaporizing. DARPA and NASA really messed up the effort by going off design on some dead ends. The design is for Mach 6 to 8 and run on JP fuel. I have been busy with other things, but the last I knew was they were working on the challenge of keeping it lit. There are a couple of ways and they should use both.
This is a change the nature of warfare weapon if it can be produced. The Russians have been into hypersonics for a long time with little to show for it. I would take any claim with a grain of salt; but I would watch very closely.
This story might be fake and might be true, just like our own recent test intercept of an incoming ICBM. Both sides are posturing toward war, and we have no way of knowing fact from fiction. What we do know is that Putin declared a decade ago that Russia could not afford to match our strategic defensive capabilities, and would instead focus its more limited resources on strategic offensive weapons.
There is also a wiki page for it, FWIW.
> Fake news?
Nope. We were developing similar weapons as far back as the 70s when the Democrats put a stop to such weapons after Nixon. The Russians have caught up and may have surpassed us.
It would seem uniform ablation would be difficult.
Yes, uniform ablation is hard to get. If you ever have the chance to look at an old Apollo capsule after reentry, the heat shield looks like the end of a cigar.
I don’t know what they are using to minimize heat transfer. At Mach 6, the temperature of the air over the missile will be ~4,000 deg F, so there are some materials that would slowly ablate at these temperatures, which would reduce the surface roughness.
I really can’t speculate too much more at this point, but from what I know, I think that the speed is not ‘fake news’. As for being “unstoppable”, it may be for the British navy.
P4L
They’re already deployed.
I did work on a Mach 8 (6000mph) surface to air missile system once. The hardest part of the design was keeping the guidance surfaces (fins) from melting off. Luckily we only needed to survive for about 20-25 seconds to get to the target.
Worked on the X-30 National Aerospace Plane from 88-92. Yep. There are plenty of materials that will already take Mach 10.
See my book, “The Quest for the Orbital Jet.” (https://www.amazon.com/Hypersonic-Revolution-Studies-History-Technology/dp/1478146176/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1496250410&sr=8-1-fkmr0&keywords=The+quest+for+the+orbital+jet+Larry+Schweikart)
Note this edition says the author is the “US Government” Nope. (https://www.amazon.com/Hypersonic-Revolution-Technology-Aero-Space-1983-1995-ebook/dp/B00T0ZT214/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1496250248&sr=8-1&keywords=The+quest+for+the+orbital+jet)
No, hypersonic missiles have been around for a long time. From 88 to 92 I worked with the National Aerospace Plane X-30. We had materials that would sustain well over Mach 10 that were SUPER lightweight.
Our problem was the scramjet that we couldn’t get above Mach 8 at the time. Since then, they’ve had a lot more success.
(Our goal was Mach 25!!)
They’re already deployed.
But are they of much use against a lot of the weapons in use today?
The X-30 was still exo-atmospheric. I have read about hypersonic, non-ballistic missiles but they have not hit the 5k mph that the article is talking about. I do believe that the theoretical limit of scramjet was Mach 8 as you stated but once again, these are for the upper reaches of the atmo since the air density is conducive to such speed.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.