How to defeat Hypersonic threats?

Krepost wrote:The purpose of an air defense system is to mitigate and lessen the effectiveness of the opponent's air strikes.
Shooting down their aircraft is a bonus.

By forcing the enemy aircraft to fly lower, their range/combat radius is diminished and they are now exposed to all sorts of short range air defense systems.
So, the 400km range of the S-400 has already reduced the effectiveness of the enemy airstrike... without even firing a missile.

400km is the missile engagement range, detection range is around 600km, if i recall.

Does the U.S. potentially have an advanced secret weaponry with which to counter at least some of Russia’s advances in hypersonic missiles?

andalusia wrote:Does the U.S. potentially have an advanced secret weaponry with which to counter at least some of Russia’s advances in hypersonic missiles?

No.

The latest idea is to create an aerosol covering of particles that would destroy a hypersonic warhead. Don't know how practical that is. Might not work on a windy day.

calripson wrote:The latest idea is to create an aerosol covering of particles that would destroy a hypersonic warhead. Don't know how practical that is. Might not work on a windy day.

The "aerosol" would have to be ball bearings. Any actual aerosol even if made out of metal particulates would not stop a warhead. At best it would
cause some ablation. The term aerosol has a specific meaning in terms of physics and it is not just lumps of matter in air.

calripson wrote:The latest idea is to create an aerosol covering of particles that would destroy a hypersonic warhead. Don't know how practical that is. Might not work on a windy day.

Highly unlikely because Russian strategic warheads incorporate aerosols/cosmosols in their design lmao!  If that's HATO's new strategy than.....

https://www.russiadefence.net/t7211p350-burevestnik-nuclear-powered-cruise-missile#305306

https://www.russiadefence.net/t2758p475-russia-and-other-developments-in-hypersonic-research#264485

Lasers are probly the only option at the moment.
Deploying a number of those systems to your various bases is the only real move nato could make.

Cons to this are that they defenitily aren't gonna be mobile and of course say goodbye to your defenses if the powergrid go's out, i doubt they can deploy big enough backup generators to support those lasers.

And guess who supplies europes powergrid with gas.

Lasers are scifi hyped weapons. Their energy is nowhere near instant melt or vapourization level.

Non-ballistic missiles frustrate lasers just like they frustrate missile interceptors. The targeting mechanism
cannot predict their path and even if the stepping motors aiming the laser can achieve rapid target lock,
the precious fractions of a second cost much in terms of heating of the target. The need to paint the target
for long enough to do damage to it is a show stopper for this approach.

Reagan's SDI faked laser ICBM interception potential in static ground tests. They could not even achieve
burn through under ideal conditions without hacking a local re-focusing. What a joke.

There is a physical constraint on lasers that are not of the Teller nuclear bomb one time use only variety.
They have to be weak enough not to destroy themselves. The lasing requires resonating the light beam in
what amounts to a mirror chamber (which can be a solid crystal). A laser powerful enough to varpourize
targets will also vapourize itself. The answer to the question as to why any laser can do any sort of melting
of targets is that the target is absorbing the photons while the laser is not absorbing enough to melt itself.
This shows up as the time it takes to melt the target and its absorption properties. A highly reflective
coating will defeat the laser on any time scale that matters. If you want instant melt, then the photon
density required is so high that even marginal self-absorption by the laser will destroy it.

The core problem is that a scramjet powered weapon is going to be flying as high as it can practically... and what limits the height of clouds would also limit the effective heights clouds could form and remain at for any period of time...

Currently rocket powered Kh-32s operate at 40km altitude... I would be surprised if Zircon operated lower than that, because very high altitude means low drag... the air would be very thin but the enormous speeds the missile is flying at means a decent volume of air would be going through the engine to compress heat and burn...

Lasers are probly the only option at the moment.

Not really viable... the target would need to get too close for it to be effective... most ground based battlefield lasers hit targets out to 2-3km or so with enough energy to bring them down... that would mean it starts to get effective one second before impact which is not really long enough to destroy it reliably and have the wreckage disperse enough to not do any damage.

I would say long range SAMs like SM-6 fitted with a nuclear warhead flown into the path of incoming threats and then command detonated would be their only defence... which is probably going to upset a few allies... who might get to see a real firework display.

Obvious problem is that all these nukes going off relatively high up in the atmosphere is going to seriously effect the radar performance of ground based systems against the next wave of missiles...