Posted on 03/26/2017 6:53:13 PM PDT by sukhoi-30mki
Russia has developed an “unstoppable” hypersonic missile capable of destroying the Royal Navy’s most sophisticated warships, the Sunday People can reveal.
Kremlin military chiefs claim they have built an anti-ship cruise missile capable of travelling at between five and six times the speed of sound - 3,800 mph to 4,600mph.
Now experts fear the missile, called the Zircon, could sink the Royal Navy ’s two new £6bn state-of-the air aircraft carriers in a single strike.
The missile flies more than twice the speed of a sniper’s bullet and is almost impossible to stop.
The cruise missile is powered by a “scramjet” - an air-breathing jet engine that can reach incredible speeds.
A swarm attack involving a dozen missiles against the world’s most modern warships would be devastating, experts believe.
The Zircon missile is believed to have a range of up to 500 miles and can be fitted with a series of warheads from high explosive to nuclear.
It can be fired from land, sea and submarines and could prove to be the most important and deadly weapon of the 21st century.
(Excerpt) Read more at mirror.co.uk ...
Retaliation would not just be for the carrier.
There are roughly 5000 folks onboard a carrier.
You don’t take out the missile you go after the delivery system before it launches.
I imagine they are working on the premise that if the USA cannot defend against these weapons then they would not need to build an arsenal of planes or tanks or take up large defensive positions. If they can develop anti-missile technology capable of stopping US or NATO (or anyone’s) missiles while we cannot stop their missiles, they have checkmate on the board. We will always need to be capable of either knocking their missiles out, or having non-interceptable missiles of our own... preferably both. We need a MAD stalemate at the very least.
With a CIWS?
Oh dear, oh dear, what could possibly stop this magic Russian missile?
A one half inch depleted uranium ball round.
Think grape shot.
A shock wave of sufficient density to either:
Turn the missile slightly sideways at 4600 mph to cause body failure from resultant extreme stresses.
A shock wave of sufficient density to destroy the missile as it hits the shock wave.
A shock wave which would blow out the ramjet.
There are other solutions involving lasers that I won’t bother with.
Ivan loves to brag.
Time will tell.
It would be a big cloud of rapidly decelerating kinetic energy that would be small enough for shipboard armor to withstand. Or it could simply deflect it into the ocean assuming it’s a sea-skimmer. Point is, CIWS has a better chance of stopping it than C-RAM does and it can try to stop more missiles than the C-RAM system we idiotically replaced the Phalanxes with.
And just how many of those do they have in service?
That’s correct. Zero.
No silly, if it is air launched, say from a bear bomber, shoot the damn thing down before it launches. If it is sub launched sink the GD sub before it gets into missile range. If the enemy launches a missile at a cvbg then that means something went wrong with the whole strategic/tactical mission planning.
Not so sure of the big cloud.
A few of the big chunks would be dangerous. I would want to run to the other side of the ship, for sure.
Sure but it has to be economically practical.
This is economic compared to the target but not to the counter measure.
It is standard ROE: If you take out an American carrier you have committed yourself to existential nuclear war.
Because it is coming.
Close In Weapons System
wow!
4600 mph and heavy enough to sink a ship, too?
amazing!
America didn’t nuke North Korea, North Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan. I doubt one air craft carrier getting heavily damaged is going to set off a nuclear war.
Type 65. They've had them since the 70's. Bigger than ours with 2x the explosive payload. Runs deep and looks up to follow the wake into the stern of a carrier and disable the screws.
You are not going to sink an AC carrier with one conventional missile hit. Not even 25 hits. You will damage it severely and it will need ship yard repair time but it will fight again.
Only if you have the right person in charge would that happen. With the wrong person, I wouldn’t bet on it. I wish I were joking.
Look, we already had the equivalent of two aircraft carriers blown away. But this was much worse, these were civilians, thousands, who were targeted right in the middle of New York.
And the U.S. did what? Secure it’s borders? No. And instead seizing Saudi Arabia and it’s oil, we went into a 10 year long war in Iraq, spending trillions on a “compassionate war” which helped loot the American treasure and killed a bunch of our people. In every direction, at the rate we were going, the U.S. would cease to be a lone super power and we would be lucky if the wheels didn’t come off.
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