Comment Re:As soon as greenpeace touches it (Score 1) 288
Even John Stuart Mill closed the door on Jehovah's Witness.
Have you got flaky plugins installed?
Everyone does. It's called Java.
What performance characteristics make a rocket defense effective? To successfully intercept an artillery rocket of the type Hamas has been firing, an Iron Dome interceptor must destroy the warhead on the front end of the rocket. If the Iron Dome interceptor instead hits the back end of the target rocket, it will merely damage the expended rocket motor tube, basically an empty pipe, and have essentially no effect on the outcome of the engagement. The pieces of the rocket will still fall in the defended area; the warhead will almost certainly go on to the ground and explode."
tl;dr: Terminal intercept is hard. This is something we already know. For boost-phase or midcourse intercepts, however, destroying the rocket booster is more than enough to screw up the warhead's ballistic trajectory, bringing it down well short of the mark (entire cities) where they explode harmlessly in the wilderness. Unfortunately, after a half-hour of searching Google, I was unable to find any concrete data or information on the common intercept profiles of Iron Dome launches, the interceptor missiles capabilities, or likewise. One of the best civilian sources (i.e. people who sell technical information on military weapons to journalists, like Janes,) globalsecurity.org, has a sparse article long on general information and completely lacking hard data or numbers. This indicates to me that the data is simply highly classified and not being published, which makes perfect sense for a new defense system currently being employed against attackers who are actively adapting to it.
This means that, in addition to the ratio of boost-phase/midcourse/terminal intercepts Postol is making very free assumptions about the interceptor's warhead weight, their blast profile, the composition, density and thickness of their fragmentation jackets, density of the resulting fragmentation cloud, the exact range, detonation parameters and capabilities of the proximity fusing systems and the position of the Iron Dome batteries vis-a-vis the launch sites. If interceptors are indeed making frequent "tail chases," this would imply the rockets are flying over the batteries on their way to their targets, and the rockets are in fact performing mid-course intercepts - if they were located near the target area, intercepts would much more frequently be coming in from the front quarter. The latter is highly undesirable because (as Postel notes) its much harder to guarantee a "hard kill" of a warhead as opposed to simply shooting down the entire vehicle, but also because the combined closing speed of front-quarter intercepts drastically reduces the interception window, and thus accurate intercepts. The more time the interceptor has to track the target, compute solutions and make course-corrections, the better its chances of getting as close to the mark as possible.
Finally - and this should go without saying - Postel's entire argument is predicated on (apparently) a handful of contrail pictures with no context, frame-of-reference, or further data, this appears to constitute his "proof." If he has, in truth, analyzed gazillions of contrail images, then he should be presenting his portfolio of images, each one with as much contextual data as is available, along with his analysis. This is what actual, paid military analysts who know what they're doing would do, and indeed what most scientists know to do - document, document, document. If Postel wishes to idly theorize, then by all means, let him theorize: but to post such drivel as an actual argument is an insult to anybody with half a fucking brain.
Suggest you just sit there and wait till life gets easier.
