[flamberge]

Explain how radar can discriminate the energy of an explosion please

The radar track shows the dispersion of fragments, from which the energy of the explosion can be inferred.

A recording of the radar track was posted on YouTube for a short time. It very clearly showed a high-speed object colliding with TWA-800. It very clearly showed the breakup of the aircraft.

The video was soon taken down. The posters were arrested and threatened with Federal prosecution. They went silent after that.

Recovered wreckage shows burns and residue in the first-class cabin which are only consistent with rocket engine blast.

Reconstruction of the wreckage (yes they pieced almost all of it back together) shows a distinctive puncture on the right bottom of the fuselage, just at the mid-point between wing and cabin.

The damage is consistent with a radar-guided missile impact with failure of the warhead to detonate, or a late detonation, after the missile passed through the fuselage.

[Alberta's Child]

There was a very interesting scenario posted here on FreeRepublic some years ago involving two objects in the air ... a drone used for training exercises and a new type of surface-to-air missile that tracked an aircraft's radar signature (not its heat source) before exploding and shredding the aircraft's skin with small tungsten-carbide cubes.

Whoever posted this scenario speculated that the drone simply got too close to Flight 800 (which was flying lower than normal, as I described in a previous post above).

[UCANSEE2]

The damage is consistent with a radar-guided missile impact with failure of the warhead to detonate, or a late detonation, after the missile passed through the fuselage.

Or a DRONE which has a dummy warhead.

[pfflier]

The radar track shows the dispersion of fragments from which the energy of the explosion can be inferred.

How big do you think the fragments have to be to reflect a radar signature in an air traffic control environment? Entire airplanes are lost (become invisible) when their transponders are turned off. Only occasionally can they can be seen by skin painting and only when ATC maxes the gain intentionally.

The radar can show a debris cloud but that would be fairly brief and I'm pretty sure even the best trained operators cannot discern velocity of individual fragments in the debris paint.