The plasma screen effect is real, as is evidenced by the degradation of radar tracking and communications to re-entry capsules descendimg from orbit.
I agree, but I don't think even flying at mach 9 at 40+km altitude would achieve that sort of compression.... ablative materials on reentry vehicles are needed to stop the craft from burning up the way satellites performing the same reentry burn up to stop them from hitting the ground and damaging things there.
The effect is frequency dependent however and the Russians look to have successfully solved how to both provide hypersonic wepoans with terminal guidance and in-flight datalinks. I don't give a flying fck what the seppo trash have to say about the issue.
I am no seppo fan, as far as I have heard the only mention of plasma has been from very specific companies and organisations within Russia, and I have never heard any mention of such a slow platform being linked with plasma stealth. AFAIK the Russians have not mentioned it either in conjunction with any of their anti ship or land attack missiles.
If you can make a scramjet operate at such speeds then it is actually more useful to manouver to evade interception rather than try to make it radar invisible because any idiot can say... well plasma stealth might make Zircon invisible to radar waves, but a cheap IIR sensor on your missile will detect it from enormous distances... and with excellent angular precision.
Those croooked liars can't even process the fact that they are behind the curve, and they will say anything in a bid to maintain their theatrics about "US technological superiority".
Totally agree... for decades Soviet tanks were crap because their main guns didn't have rifling so they must be inaccurate... except as the Soviets worked out the two most potent anti tank rounds fired from a tank gun are APFSDS and HEAT... neither of which benefit from rifling... the former has a Sabot and the latter has reduced penetration if it is spin stabilised. The BMP-2 was called junk till they introduced the Bradley which is an American BMP-2. The AK-47 was useless when western countries had FN FALs and G3s and M14s, but then they all changed to assault rifles too... and for some reason their new rifles were even better than the Soviet ones.
Ekranoplans and rocket powered torpedoes, anti tank guided missiles fire from large calibre guns from tank guns through to artillery pieces were all bad ideas that will never work till the Soviets got them working.
Tracking is quite an issue. Even for fighter radar tracking another fighter that changes altitude fast it can lost track.
Really?
Sounds rather unlikely except in exceptional circumstances... like an F-14A tracking 6 targets at a time, where one target moves out of scan range of the other 5 and drops off the screen... or perhaps an aircraft trying not to fly towards a target and trying to keep the target on the very edge of its radar screen to avoid a high closing speed...
Radars aren't those huge semi spheres you can imagine it's mostly a a small radar cone that need to be moved either mechanically or electronically. Going at mach 10 and chabge direction makes you go out of that area very easily specially if you are very close to the radar with chaffs released around you.
Going at mach 10 means you are flying pretty straight and your ability to pull a very hard turn is not realistic... it depends on what radar mode you are in... if you are scanning for targets then very high speed targets moving significant distances before they get scanned again can cause problems, but tracking radar normally has a beam following the target at whatever speed it happens to be moving at... from a distance even 3km per second allows you to follow it with your eye, but up very close it would be a problem, but it is a problem that solves itself because it wont be very close to you for very long anyway.
Computing is also challenging. At mach 10 you move 3.4 meters per millisecond. Let's take a refresh time of 30ms for your radar soft which is very good and you move more than 100m every refresh of the radar soft. Chaffs will create other targets making the soft takes longer time to compute. That's already enough to have the AD missile explode few tens meters away.
High speed is challenging, which is why it flys at such speeds in the first place, but the problem of speed is compounded by manouverability and the ability to freely manouver.
A Scud missile is moving quite fast but it is falling so its flight path is predictable and you can get an interceptor within a certain distance and have a proximity fuse spray the interception box with metal fragments... the speed of the fragments added to the speed of the target means the target will be shredded most of the time...
The S-400 can engage targets moving at 4.8km per second... which is half as fast again as the Zircon manages to move, but the S-400 is also designed to hit ballistic targets and not manouvering free flying targets.
If you launch a mortar bomb or artillery shell with a few measurements you can quickly calculate the range and trajectory of that round and interception and even just working out what the target is can be quickly calculated in real time.
Conversely you detect a fighter or bomber taking off from an airfield... you have not idea where it is going or what its target is... you know its flight envelop and flight performance but you don't even know how high or how fast it will fly for this mission.
Chaff and flares and decoys released by the weapon as well as jammers and sensors to detect incoming missiles and ground based air defence systems all make interception harder.
That is why Kiev has not intercepted any Iskanders during 3 years of conflict, despite having all sorts of new western air defence systems.
Now the INF treaty is gone Russia can now extend their range, upgrade the propulsion to scramjet so they fly even faster and make naval versions for their ships and coastal defences. Having such missiles with ranges of 3-4K kms would be very useful... and the terminal flight speed and precision means even conventional warheads would be effective.
Modern torpedoes are designed to explode underneath large ships... this creates a huge bubble of gas underneath the ship which floats to the surface and lifts the ship. Of course no ship is structurally strong enough to be lifted out of the water at one point like that with the rest of the structure being supported so it essentially breaks the back of the ship and sinks it. If it had hit it it would make a hole that would fill with water but a very large ship might have enough floatation to remain on the surface, but break the back of a ship and it will sink.
A hypersonic missile could have a warhead that is armour piercing and to come down nearly vertically on its target ship... punch straight down through all the decks and when it reaches water it can explode and sink the ship that way. Nearly vertical attacks are very hard to deal with because most radars doing point straight up and most CIWS guns can't point straight up either.
What "seppo trash" was saying in the link I posted is that plasma will not have the effect on a hypersonic weapon that people expect, thus refuting the idea that plasma can make a weapon blind or invisible to enemy radars.
As desk plasma balls show the reentry plasma created by super compression of the air as the object enters the atmosphere generates enormous temperatures... which creates a plasma, which is a state of matter that is not solid, or liquid or gas, it is something else. Desktop plasma globes are not thousands of degrees Celcius and do not require ablative surfaces for you to touch them.
Plasma globes use exotic gases contained inside a glass ball through which very high voltage electricity is passed to also create plasma.
So you have two ways of making plasma stealth... heating your aircraft to several thousand degrees Celcius and hope it does not melt or set fire to other parts of the aircraft, or pass enormous voltages of electricity through the air in front of the aircraft to create a plasma field.
The problems with an electric generated plasma field is that a plane or missile moving at very high speed will pass through it very quickly which reduces its effect of absorbing radar and radio waves.
As I mentioned above, taking a large radar return component of any aircraft... the nose radome for the radar antenna, and putting a container in there filling the empty space with exotic gasses in a way that the flight speed of the aircraft wont blow it away and the only things in front of these exotic gasses are the glass container... zero RCS, and the radar transparent nose cone of the aircraft... also zero RCS.... so the enemy radar waves go through the nosecone, through the glass and as they pass through those exotic gasses with a high voltage electric current running through it they are absorbed and even the most powerful signal if it reaches the radar antenna of the aircraft and is strongly reflected back it has to pass through the plasma again and it likely wont even make it through.
Hense the stealth of the aircraft is massively increased.
Of course you would only activate the exotic gasses when you are being scanned so you can't be tracked.
You can't use your radar while you are using the plasma stealth so you are blind to such radar waves though wing mounted radar antenna can still be used of course...
It could also be used when incoming enemy missiles like Patriot are sent your way to massively reduce your RCS, while retaining your IRST view of the incoming threats.
It is not something you would leave on all the time but would be useful when you are attacked from the front.
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