Posted on 04/10/2025 10:35:03 AM PDT by bitt
Add to that the ability to make sats stealthy. I saw that 40 years ago
With some ion thrusters they can change orbit and keep the enemy guessing
The USA perfected MARV warheads in the 1980s this means the tech for mach 20 reentry and 100+G maneuvering was proven tech even back then. You don’t need to deorbit you put a hypersonic lifting body heatshield around the nose of a Pebble SDI use the delta V to push its vector to an intercept point of the upper atmosphere you flip your HGV upside down so the loft vector is towards earth this allows you to pull Gs earth wards pulling the HGV deep and steeper into the atmosphere it will.rapidly shed orbital velocity down to mach 15 or so then you can really start to pull G deep into the troposphere even down to ground level no hypersonic missile cruising at 100,000 feet would be safe from such a HGV shrieking down on it at mach 15+ from above. Down to seaskimmers you would still be close to mach 10 just like the original MARV concept used for ground attack. How much retained velocity is variable as you can pull more Gs higher up to bleed energy off or pull a steep down curve and keep as much as possible for a deep high speed intercept. This would also allow you to shoot down aircraft from space and attack ground targets by sheer kinetic penetration alone. Here again you have a small bursting charge to scatter heavy metal pellets into a killzone or keep it as a single chunk and slam into the ground at mach 10 and pulverize virtually anything short of a hardened bunker under meters and meters of concrete.
Ion thrusters tend to be slow...megawatt level microwave plasma on the other hand can pull real Gs and rapid inclination changes and or altitude changes as well. You need either a fast spectrum nuke reactor onboard or huge thin film solar with football field sized capture areas the first case is stealthy the latter not so much. But neither could be caught by ground launched interceptors as the delta V mismatch is too high. Only another megawatt scale hunter killer sat could chase it down.
I retired over 20 years ago
Sounds like you are tuned in to the latest concepts
Ad astra
Thanks for the update. I knew something like this was in the process.
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