Something to consider when discussing versus or "what if".

[Sea Skimmer]

Compare this with something more creative like the British Starstreak, which splits apart a and fires a trio of tungsten penetrators against aircraft rather than explosives.

That horrible movie Behind Enemy Lines had a fake SAM sort of like that. FYI though those penetrators still explode, they'd be even (more) useless if they didn't, and the fragmentation in normal ones is usually tungsten too. Also a really bad concept, building a long history of combat failed tactically implausible British MANPADS of pure dumb. Reactive metal explosive fragmentation though, oh boy is that going to be effective and would look very good in a movie. But anyway I do agree with what your saying in general.

The whole topic of explosions in movies is unendingly annoying to me personally, and I think directly linked to low creativity. Most places only allow gasoline and a few other flammable materials for filming, meaning they never produce the visual effects such as the shockwave of a high explosive. They look like a ball of gasoline. Then even when explosions are 100% pure CGI they still get made this way because its what everyone is programmed to 'expect' and I'm sure most movie directors really have no idea as to the difference or what it implies. Meanwhile real HE blasts give a much more complex effect, and frankly a far more impressive one since they still make fireballs anyway, but we seldom get them like that in movies. It probably doesn't help that so many people think mushroom cloud and shock wave = nuke. The end result is a lot of lame, and major difficulty being creative with weapons in the first place. People dont want smoke in the shot. That's got some real justification, though rather less when your movie is stupid long anyway.

Another problem is the simple intensity of battles in movies. People want time for witty banter and stupid hero moves that require the enemy to simple be unable to aim or fire. Even the more realistic aiming war movies tend to come across very poorly on this, and Cross of Iron remains the only movie I know that actually felt like a real major battle might. It didn't need CGI either; though it did have an unusually favorable filming location to make it possible.

For a perfect example of super fail, look at the M1 tanks firing at Godzilla in the latest movie. Horrible to the point I kinda wonder if they actually did just not have budget for that bit of CGI.

[biostem]

A good number of Sci-Fi games like X3 and Master of Orion have weapons like black hole guns...where they shoot miniature black holes at the enemy. Those would be rather neat to see on screen. Well...the impact anyways. Would be hard to see the black holes themselves...

Thor 2 had those "implosion grenades", which kind of had the same effect...

[Adam Reynolds]

That horrible movie Behind Enemy Lines had a fake SAM sort of like that. FYI though those penetrators still explode, they'd be even (more) useless if they didn't, and the fragmentation in normal ones is usually tungsten too. Also a really bad concept, building a long history of combat failed tactically implausible British MANPADS of pure dumb. Reactive metal explosive fragmentation though, oh boy is that going to be effective and would look very good in a movie. But anyway I do agree with what your saying in general.

I had forgotten that movie. The absurd pursuing missile was almost comically. I can't believe I payed to see that one in theaters.

Actually, while they still explode, the missiles used to shoot down an airliner during the intro to the video game Alpha Protocol also did the separation piece in a similar manner to Starstreak.

Has Starstreak ever gotten kills in combat? In fairness it's not like the British Army has had to face air attack. Though didn't WW2 anti-aircraft guns outdo Rapier missiles in the Falklands?

The whole topic of explosions in movies is unendingly annoying to me personally, and I think directly linked to low creativity. Most places only allow gasoline and a few other flammable materials for filming, meaning they never produce the visual effects such as the shockwave of a high explosive. They look like a ball of gasoline. Then even when explosions are 100% pure CGI they still get made this way because its what everyone is programmed to 'expect' and I'm sure most movie directors really have no idea as to the difference or what it implies. Meanwhile real HE blasts give a much more complex effect, and frankly a far more impressive one since they still make fireballs anyway, but we seldom get them like that in movies. It probably doesn't help that so many people think mushroom cloud and shock wave = nuke. The end result is a lot of lame, and major difficulty being creative with weapons in the first place. People dont want smoke in the shot. That's got some real justification, though rather less when your movie is stupid long anyway.

For somewhat realistic explosions, one of the few examples that comes to mind is Children of Men. Even several otherwise fairly good war movies used mostly gasoline explosions, though it was mostly the older ones.

For a perfect example of super fail, look at the M1 tanks firing at Godzilla in the latest movie. Horrible to the point I kinda wonder if they actually did just not have budget for that bit of CGI.

Nearly every bit of combat in that movie seemed off to me. An even bigger issue is that it seems that literally everything they mentioned in terms of nuclear weapons was the exact opposite of true. The two biggest isssues to me were modern dial a yield being more powerful than what was available in 1954, when the largest American nuke was detonated, while it was actually for the opposite purpose of making explosions smaller. This continues with the military deciding to use a mechanical timed detonator rather than a conventional one to allow it to be used in the presence of an EMP. Why in the world would a nuclear detonator not work in the precence of an EMP that is created by a nuclear detonation.

[Simon_Jester]

By the time the nuclear device has created the EMP, the detonator has long since done its job (and gotten vaporized). While detonators might be EMP-hardened just so the warhead would be able to function more reliably in a nuclear combat environment, it would not be more or less vulnerable than any other electronic device of similar configuration and function.

Aside from that, yeah, sounds like a load of laughs.

[Sea Skimmer]

Has Starstreak ever gotten kills in combat? In fairness it's not like the British Army has had to face air attack. Though didn't WW2 anti-aircraft guns outdo Rapier missiles in the Falklands?

Yes the 40mm Bofors had more kills then 24 Rapier fire units, which managed all of one kill dispite facing heavy air attacks from elevated positions for over a week. Mind you were talking about a single digit number of Bofors guns, all in single mounts, having been deployed and only then on certain amphibious ships which had no radar fire control for them. Rapier at the time had no VT fuse and a bunch of other problems (like it existing).

The mighty Blowpipe missile in the war was used by both sides, and actually did shoot down IIRC one jet and one helicopter, but this was with 50+ fired. The whole idea of a human operator physically tracking the target to a guided missile kill is completely asstarded, even if you dont as in Blowpipe, have to steer with a thumbstick (litterally this is like the Stagger ATGM, but against a plane!). The British kinda just ignored factors like 'enemy might shoot back' and such in designing these things. Much Britishness comes out of all of it. Seacat was originally like this too, but the RN learned right quick that they better make the guidance automatic with radar and a computer. Just still SUBSONIC.

For somewhat realistic explosions, one of the few examples that comes to mind is Children of Men. Even several otherwise fairly good war movies used mostly gasoline explosions, though it was mostly the older ones.

That did do a better job then average yeah. Anyway my original point which I notice I kinda didn't put into the post, was just that typical debators have very warped perceptions of what is 'right' in the first place, and frankly terrain considerations strike me as being low down the list of those. I don't think people have a hard time with the idea that a swamp is a bad place for tanks; but its just detail like that is totally irrelevant to typical debates. On the other hand understanding that the term 'directed energy weapon' includes musket fire, people don't do so well and then problems spiral outward.

Nearly every bit of combat in that movie seemed off to me. An even bigger issue is that it seems that literally everything they mentioned in terms of nuclear weapons was the exact opposite of true. The two biggest isssues to me were modern dial a yield being more powerful than what was available in 1954, when the largest American nuke was detonated, while it was actually for the opposite purpose of making explosions smaller. This continues with the military deciding to use a mechanical timed detonator rather than a conventional one to allow it to be used in the presence of an EMP. Why in the world would a nuclear detonator not work in the precence of an EMP that is created by a nuclear detonation.

More relevant would just be that by the 2000s non of the US nuclear warheads left would have supported a long delay timer. So needing to change the fuse would be reasonable, just not for that reason given. Super unreasonable though is the idea of arming the damn thing before it was in position though. Oh and that endlessly pesky issue for movies that a nuke WILL NOT explode if you simply blow it up with conventional explosive or gunfire. You would need to worry about the non trival amount of conventional explosives perhaps killing or wounding you, but a nuclear yield bigger then 1-4 POUNDS (this is possible) isn't happening. A single point detonation of an implosion device actually can induce a slight bit of nuclear reacton, it just has absolutely no chance of causing a chain reaction.

Now, as for the EMP, strong enough radiation actually will take out a nuke warhead fusing, this was the basis of an actual tactic called 'pindown' in which a belt of ICBM air bursts above enemy silo fields could prevent a launch, without requiring heavy targeting of the silos themselves. Most of the appeal of that was in the era before highly accurate ICBMs though, as well as being political, such an attack could neutralize part of the enemy deterrent without causing mass casualties.

However the radiation levels required to make this work would cause humans beings to drop unconscious, even if we were just talking about microwaves and other radio emissions people generally think of as EMP, and not the far more effective gamma and neutron emissions which are actually responsible for many of the nearly mthical superpowers people equate with 'EMP' .

I mean take the faraday cage. Everyone assumes that's perfect protection against EMP/HEMP right? Well actually its not, at all. Or perhaps against low levels, but that isn't the point. Because energy captured by the cage will reradiate into its interior which means your gaining a level of protection a bit like armor, not immunity like magic. The basic design guides for this, available online thanks to the US government, indicate that four or five layers of protection can be needed for a facility close to a nuclear blast. And solid ground isn't actually solid protection either.

But movies and most people online vs actual nuclear weapons and effects is like a bus into a canyon level of fail.

[Sea Skimmer]

By the time the nuclear device has created the EMP, the detonator has long since done its job (and gotten vaporized). While detonators might be EMP-hardened just so the warhead would be able to function more reliably in a nuclear combat environment, it would not be more or less vulnerable than any other electronic device of similar configuration and function.

To be useful in realistic situations a nuke has to be highly hardened, nuclear weapons, delivery and C3I systems are the only stuff anyone really does truly harden on a consistent basis. All military weapons triggering systems have to be able to pass HERO requirements though against accidental ignition, which already confers a very basic level of resistance to HEMP, simply not required of civilian electronics, and simply to avoid being damaged by emissions from friendly radars, radios and high power ECM gear on fighters and bombers. A single aircraft jammer pod can be 1-10kw radiated power and internal systems on bombers even more powerful in some instances, tens of kw. This kind of energy is hazardous to humans at close range. Some wavelengths will just burn your skin like a microwave oven (2.4 GHz), others more or less do the same thing HEMP does to electronics, except inside your very low voltage brain.

The amount of hardening you can put into a nuclear bomb is constrained by weight and volume limits, but a lot of physical tricks exist to simply make the circuits inherently resistant to damage as opposed to relying purely on shielding. It also helps that since the actual physics package is small, its ability to absorb EM radiation out of the air is likewise limited. Stuff plugged into long cable runs is far more vulnerable. You measure the microwave effects in watts over area, and that just adds up and up. So smaller = better. Also coil effects apply, so a coil of wires in a cable run will act exactly like the coils in a ignition coil or a generator ect.... but this can be avoided inside a weapon.

Against gamma and neutron effects the same physical resistance issues apply, but being physically small makes no direct difference to the effect as they don't compound. Or at least mostly don't compound, neutron activation could cause further gamma ray exposure, but a lot of neutron activation will poison the fissile material anyway by transmuting enough of it into other elements that the chain reaction cannot be sustained. Which is why nuclear warheads are absurdly logical for defensive weapons, but the effective radius of a kiloton range SAM warhead for this purpose in some stuff Shep found years ago was still only ~300m. That was 1950s data though, before most hardening or HEMP effects were understood at all. It may not be a truly accurate value for a modern warhead with a quarter inch of Tantalum around it or similar.

[Lord Revan]

A good number of Sci-Fi games like X3 and Master of Orion have weapons like black hole guns...where they shoot miniature black holes at the enemy. Those would be rather neat to see on screen. Well...the impact anyways. Would be hard to see the black holes themselves...

Thor 2 had those "implosion grenades", which kind of had the same effect...

it's not a matter of not being able but rather if you want to do it right you need high quality CGI or very complex(and expensive) practical effects.

[Adam Reynolds]

That did do a better job then average yeah. Anyway my original point which I notice I kinda didn't put into the post, was just that typical debators have very warped perceptions of what is 'right' in the first place, and frankly terrain considerations strike me as being low down the list of those. I don't think people have a hard time with the idea that a swamp is a bad place for tanks; but its just detail like that is totally irrelevant to typical debates. On the other hand understanding that the term 'directed energy weapon' includes musket fire, people don't do so well and then problems spiral outward.

That is obviously rather massively true. One of the biggest issues that I see is that of range. I don't know of any examples of proper BVR air combat shown in film.

More relevant would just be that by the 2000s non of the US nuclear warheads left would have supported a long delay timer. So needing to change the fuse would be reasonable, just not for that reason given. Super unreasonable though is the idea of arming the damn thing before it was in position though. Oh and that endlessly pesky issue for movies that a nuke WILL NOT explode if you simply blow it up with conventional explosive or gunfire. You would need to worry about the non trival amount of conventional explosives perhaps killing or wounding you, but a nuclear yield bigger then 1-4 POUNDS (this is possible) isn't happening. A single point detonation of an implosion device actually can induce a slight bit of nuclear reacton, it just has absolutely no chance of causing a chain reaction.

That really would have been a clever solution. This was mostly done in the movie The Peacemaker with Geroge Clooney and Nicole Kidman. Instead of disarming the nuke entirely they simply let it explode after removing part of the explosive lens from it.

Now, as for the EMP, strong enough radiation actually will take out a nuke warhead fusing, this was the basis of an actual tactic called 'pindown' in which a belt of ICBM air bursts above enemy silo fields could prevent a launch, without requiring heavy targeting of the silos themselves. Most of the appeal of that was in the era before highly accurate ICBMs though, as well as being political, such an attack could neutralize part of the enemy deterrent without causing mass casualties.

I was just thinking about this when you posted it. Wasn't this also a potential issue with the American ABM system? That it could make the ICBM's it was defending useless?

[Adam Reynolds]

A good number of Sci-Fi games like X3 and Master of Orion have weapons like black hole guns...where they shoot miniature black holes at the enemy. Those would be rather neat to see on screen. Well...the impact anyways. Would be hard to see the black holes themselves...

Thor 2 had those "implosion grenades", which kind of had the same effect...

it's not a matter of not being able but rather if you want to do it right you need high quality CGI or very complex(and expensive) practical effects.

Another interesting one was the time grenade in Tomorrowland. It froze time within a sphere and stopped an energy weapon from hitting our heroine. What was interesting was that it then trapped her hand within the sphere. When it began collapsing, she was in the path of the weapon burst.

[Eternal_Freedom]

That is obviously rather massively true. One of the biggest issues that I see is that of range. I don't know of any examples of proper BVR air combat shown in film.

I dunno if it counts as "proper" but Air Force One did feature F-15's firing on Russian MiGs from a very logn range, far enough that the MiGs apparently weren't aware of the American fighters until the first two planes exploded.

[Simon_Jester]

That did do a better job then average yeah. Anyway my original point which I notice I kinda didn't put into the post, was just that typical debators have very warped perceptions of what is 'right' in the first place, and frankly terrain considerations strike me as being low down the list of those. I don't think people have a hard time with the idea that a swamp is a bad place for tanks; but its just detail like that is totally irrelevant to typical debates. On the other hand understanding that the term 'directed energy weapon' includes musket fire, people don't do so well and then problems spiral outward.

That is obviously rather massively true. One of the biggest issues that I see is that of range. I don't know of any examples of proper BVR air combat shown in film.

The trick is portraying the BVR combat as anything other than a sudden ambush of nameless mooks by protagonists (or, for that matter, mooks). You'd really need to make a lot of it be about the radar and jamming environment, I think.

Not sure how to dramatize the use of an ECM pod...

[Sea Skimmer]

That is obviously rather massively true. One of the biggest issues that I see is that of range. I don't know of any examples of proper BVR air combat shown in film.

Air Force One; F-15s fire AMRAAMs at long range and only kill two of the six MiGs they are engaging. IIRC some of the MiGs escape after a mildly realistic close fight too, rather then USA freedom making a clean sweep of the Kazakhistani terror planes.

But in fairness actual BVR is pretty rare in real life so far, though its certainly be done enough to prove it works and make people who cite stuff from the Vietnam War fools. The first combat use of AMRAAM though at something comically close like 3nm range, but one battle in the Gulf War saw three Iraqi planes destroyed almost simultaneously by Sparrow shots. Indeed Sparrow was the biggest killer in the war, but not always at BVR ranges. Keeping in mind visual range can be as high as 20nm depending on the weather and aircraft types (older ones made a lot of smoke), and that some IR guided missiles can go well beyond visual range in a head on engagement. The DAS system on the F-35 also kinda raises questions about what BVR even means, since it can display stuff directly on the pilots helmet he'd never see on his own. The older IRST systems on say the MiG-29 had much less range, IIRC the Russians cited a 8nm lock on range for the 1980s versions vs a fighter, though they've no doubt improved on that by now. More or less it was an aid to a dogfight and not a passive search sensor the way it was often made out to be.

That really would have been a clever solution. This was mostly done in the movie The Peacemaker with Geroge Clooney and Nicole Kidman. Instead of disarming the nuke entirely they simply let it explode after removing part of the explosive lens from it.

In Broken Arrow the NEST team that finds the first bomb has a guy who immediately says its procedure to destroy the bomb rather then risk its capture. He then gets shot by an infilitrator in the team. That movie also had someone behind it who clearly knew more then average about nuclear effects, since they have the EMP effect (actually source region effects) of the nuke that goes off affect stuff through the ground as it can at close ranges, and the bad guys protect their stuff simply by turning it off which also has a high probability of working. Still wasn't fully realistic, but I think the people fully knew this rather then just ignoring the tech advisor completely or having dumb ones.

I was just thinking about this when you posted it. Wasn't this also a potential issue with the American ABM system? That it could make the ICBM's it was defending useless?

If you fired enough nuclear ABMs yeah you can't launch, however the assumption back then was that nuclear silo missiles would not be fired immediately, they would wait out an enemy first strike and then launch later, its not like the enemy cities can run away and hide. This was a major part of the point of a silo based force and its very expensive silos and hardened command and control system, because launch on warning (fire while you only see missiles coming) is extremely dangerous least it be an accident, perhaps run into an enemy pindown attack, and was just generally very inflexible. As long as the silos were reasonably protected against direct attacks delaying launch was perfectly good planning. The problems cropped up when more accurate ICBMs and MIRV warheads made massed anti silo strikes plausible, and the US never actually resolved that issue with the insanity that was the MX basing strategy debate. Mind you reliable satellite warning only appeared in the late 1970s, before that ground based BMEWS radar based systems could only provide 10-15 minutes warning time which was just not enough for useful decision making. And warning of an SLBM attack could be even less for some targets, which is why ultimately all US ICBM silos were clustered in the mid west away from water. Originally some were much more spread out, including some in New York and a couple active Atlas pads were right on the coast at Vandenberg for a while, as well as coffin launchers elsewhere in California.

The US did have an insane forward scatter radar from the early 60s onward, with antennas in Europe and Asia, which could sorta try to warn of an attack launch, by detection ionization trails of massed ICBMs, but it was super unreliable and could really only be a 'heads up' to look at other sources of information. And really even the satellite systems were the same thing, just rather more dependable about it and much more resistant to possible communist interference. Only the first latest warning satellites deployed in the past decade can actually track missiles and warheads in flight and thus confirm they are real objects, and not say, conventional explosions on the ground. The 80s satellites could mistake suddenly appearing stuff like afterburners and B-52 bomber strikes as missile launches, software filtering being a rather limited thing back then.

So yeah, in the era nuclear ABM was a big thing it wasn't a big deal for the ICBM force. The big deal was how to get past enemy nuclear ABM, and nobody ever had a good solution to that one if the enemy employed high yield warheads. The nuclear blackout of the warheads would progressively blind the defensive radars, but enemy warheads would still have a real chance of being killed by the same blackout radiation blobs, and networking radars together provided a way to see 'around' the spots. And that was also why the ultimate US system had large numbers of Sprint point defense missiles as a lower tier defense. A further tier below that was supposed to come out of HIBEX-UPSTAGE to defend the radar sites themselves from possible crazy commie superhardened saturation attacks. 400 G linear and 300 G lateral acceleration. Might get the job done! Also makes most Sci Fi look like an utter joke.

Not sure how to dramatize the use of an ECM pod...

Yeah that'd be why movies mostly just use chaff and flares, if any such thing occurs. But much of value of chaff in the present day is as a means of reflecting jamming. Pure chaff is too easy to filter out. Actually we also have had ejectable jamming cartridges for planes since the early 1980s, but those generally only work against very specific threats. Probably possible to make a modern one that is tuneable though given how much MMIC chips have improved on cost though.

Flight of the Intruder sorta managed to get across basic RWR-ECM stuff, along with the 'golden BB' killing the bombardier without wrecking the plane and other tidbits of realism. Not a very good movie overall but not because of that. It seems to just often be the case that movies that get anywhere with technical accuracy then also have basic storytelling problems that make them unappealing. Some of them are just not made to appeal to a wide audience, which doesn't always mean bad either, but well, it's nice to get both. And I'm not convinced its impossible, because people are pretty interested in this whole 'real life' thing too.

[Lord Revan]

it's not a matter of not being able but rather if you want to do it right you need high quality CGI or very complex(and expensive) practical effects.

Another interesting one was the time grenade in Tomorrowland. It froze time within a sphere and stopped an energy weapon from hitting our heroine. What was interesting was that it then trapped her hand within the sphere. When it began collapsing, she was in the path of the weapon burst.

I've yet to see that film so I'll have to take your word for it, that said it's another (presumebly) high budget movie meaning they could afford the CGI or practical effects to make it work and not look fake.

which was kind of my point, sure it can be done but it's expensive to do so so must series simply don't have the budget for it and movies producers might think it's not worth the expense.