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Missile Defense

Russian military leaders have expressed concern about US plans for a national missile defense system. Will defense technology be limited by possibilities for a strategic imbalance? Is this just SDI all over again?

dirac_10 - 12:15pm Jun 12, 2001 EST (#4850 of 4880)

alty53 - 11:29am Jun 12, 2001 EST (#4842 of 4849)

To Dirac 10: I have you figured for a bright and articulate early 20's white boy living in a comic book fantasy world of naive assumptions about the technology fix and about big power politics......

Nah, I'm an old man that realizes that large numbers of ruthless thug dictators that can destroy America with a push of a button is not a good thing.

But the facination with me personally is certainly flattering, if not a little "embarrasing".

space is just another battle ground where if you get your forces to the field first, you will most certainly prevail in battle.......

As Nathan Bedford Forrest said, you gotta' be the furstest with the mostest. You betcha.

that is the geopolitical strategy of the Bush crowd and your unsupported denials to the contrary will not change that......

Of being first to do a NMD? I certainly hope so.

and by the way........it took Kepler more than twenty years to plot the eliptical orbit of Mars.......

This may come as a shock to you, but we can calculate orbits much better than Kepler. The math is elementary.

you are at a ground based tracking station and have a half hour to plot and track a 30 meter long missile

It won't be 30 meters for 30 minutes. And it will take a tiny fraction of a second to do it.

coming at you with a variable velocity

The velocity is easily calculated. Ballistic stands for sitting duck. It is not practical to put a big rocket in orbit to alter the ballistics.

on a variable trajectory and heading for an unknown destination

The trajectory and destination is an open book once the rocket quits firing.

while at the same time your location is also moving at about 1000km per hour.......

My location? In the case of a laser, the speed is a lot less than 1000 km/hr. And the intercept is a piece of cake. Guided missles hitting things is a well beaten path.

solve the problem smart boy........

Why on earth would you think it would be a problem? No speed of light limitation. The electroinics is certainly fast enough.

No one on this forum has ever stated an engineering, much less physics, reason that it would be a problem. You aim at it and you hit it.

Duh.

rshowalter - 12:17pm Jun 12, 2001 EST (#4851 of 4880)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

A real pro.

_ _ _ _ _

"Honorable warriors": MD1219 lunarchick 3/21/01 5:20am

The Japanese did this, and other things, and we, knowing what we'd done with bombs, condoned it -- and now, nuclear weapons make this seem almost quaint. Rape Camp by Dawn Riley http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?13@@.ee79f4e/1512

dirac_10 - 12:20pm Jun 12, 2001 EST (#4852 of 4880)

smartalix - 11:41am Jun 12, 2001 EST (#4843 of 4850)

He can't even sort out the difference between intercepting an incoming warhead and intercepting the ICBM during boost.

You were apparantly totally oblivious to the option of boost phase intercept.

My hero, Donald Rumsfeld, the best man in the executive branch since Bill Clinton, plans on doing it all. No axiomatic system is complete. You need lots of axioms, and need to keep adding to them. In other words, it's like plywood. Any one system will have weaknesses. Together, they are much stonger.

The one thing we can expect is the unexpected.

dirac_10 - 12:22pm Jun 12, 2001 EST (#4853 of 4880)

rshowalter - 11:46am Jun 12, 2001 EST (#4845 of 4852)

My own judgement is that dirac is a real professional.

I can't fool you. They don't even realize why I'm here.

But you know, don't you?

rshowalter - 12:23pm Jun 12, 2001 EST (#4854 of 4880)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

I'm glad Carl Levin is from MICHIGAN -- where they know how forgiving the real world is not.

If any one system has weaknesses, and you put the systems together -- the odds of a mess are VERY high.

dirac_10 - 12:24pm Jun 12, 2001 EST (#4855 of 4880)

smartalix - 11:49am Jun 12, 2001 EST (#4846 of 4853)

If he is, he is a sloppy one.

I notice you have been running from the physics like a scared rabbit. Just vague statements and personal insults.

We understand, believe me we do.

dirac_10 - 12:29pm Jun 12, 2001 EST (#4856 of 4880)

rshowalter - 11:51am Jun 12, 2001 EST (#4848 of 4855)

Perhaps he's meticulously serving the people who pay him -- muddying the water, degrading the discourse, prefenting closure.

They actually think I'm here to discuss missle defense. But, we know that pointing out that no one has any physics reasons whatsoever that it won't work is not the goal, and we know they won't listen to your warnings, don't we?

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