StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Are there any plans for more stories set in the Interstellar Highway era?

XaLEv wrote:Are there any plans for more stories set in the Interstellar Highway era?

Yes.

phongn wrote:

XaLEv wrote:Are there any plans for more stories set in the Interstellar Highway era?

Yes.

Hawt...

XaLEv wrote:Are there any plans for more stories set in the Interstellar Highway era?

I have two more stories drafted in outline. They both follow on from the end of Interstellar Highway and deal with some of the issues left unresolved at the end of that tale.

They are some way down the pike though. I'm going to finish of "Eye of the Beholder" and RotV next, then the two stories that will follow (on current plans) are Winter Warriors (Set in the Kola Peninsula and Barents Sea 1945) and A Mighty Endeavor (set largely in India 1940-43). After that, it depends what stories start hammering inside my head demanding to be let out.

Nice.

This felt vaguely like a conclusion...

Great Work Mr. Slade, and I find it odd that someone would actually mention my hometown ferry in that verse...

Redleader34 wrote:Great Work Mr. Slade, and I find it odd that someone would actually mention my hometown ferry in that verse...

Thank you. The source of the reference to the fate of the Staten Island Ferry goes back to The Day (9/11) when there were a series of studies initiated on how to prevent a further attack of that type. Back then, it was assumed that similar attacks were going to be regular features of the security environment. Anyway, there was a Red Team meeting to discuss possible ways of defending against aircraft used as extemporized cruise missiles. One idea was to mount twin 40mm guns on the roofs of various prominent buildings. The immediate objection was that firing 40mm guns from New York buildings at low-flying targets would probably do more damage than the attack they were supposed to stop. Another was that some nut-case would probably hijack one of the mounts and use it to assassinate an unfaithful significant other. There were others as well, including the possibility that the NYPD would use them for traffic law enforcement.

A Red Team meeting, by the way, is a type of brainstorming session where people are encouraged - actually required - to come up with the weirdest ideas they can think of. Even if they know that idea is completely unworkable. The idea is that discussing a damned stupid idea can often throw up a good idea nobody would have thought of otherwise. Surprising how often it works too. I was at an ABM Red Team meeting once where some guys from Martin Marietta came up with the idea of spinning an ICBM as a way of beating laser-based anti-missile systems. Now, Martin Marietta (now part of Lockheed Martin) knew ballistic missiles and they were perfectly well aware there are good physical reasons why we can't spin them. However, in the discussion of why we can't spin them, a sub-thread gave a new approach to precision homing systems that does work.

The discription of the attack against Iraq and the differance against Iran got me thinking. Is there a way to use physical terrain to complicate approach from high altitude aircraft? Intuition tells me that the higher up the plane will be, the less it will be affected by some installation being placed in some valley.

Ace Pace wrote:The discription of the attack against Iraq and the differance against Iran got me thinking. Is there a way to use physical terrain to complicate approach from high altitude aircraft? Intuition tells me that the higher up the plane will be, the less it will be affected by some installation being placed in some valley.

Indeed there is. The nav-attack radar on the aircraft doesn’t point straight down, it scans down and ahead, typically, the maximum angle of depression is around 40 degrees. Some modern radars do better than that because they are electronically-scanned rather than mechanically scanned. 40 percent is a good figure to work with thought. This means two things. One is that there is a large blind zone directly under the aircraft, the other that the radar pulses are striking the ground at an oblique angle. So, if we have a sharp-sided hill (a cliff-faced one or an escarpment) and the target is nestled at the foot of that sharp slope, it will be shielded from the radar pulses of an aircraft approaching from the other side of the hill until it is in the blind zone under the aircraft. This is called terrain shadowing and it’s a real problem.

Now, that only works if the aircraft is approaching from a direction such that the hill is between the aircraft and its target. The aircraft can deal with it by overflying the target and approaching form the other side. The catch is, hills don’t usually come alone so there might well be a situation where the target is actually between two hills and its shielded from two directions. If we look at a map of Iran, the country is covered with areas just like that. In the south there is the Kuhhe-ya Zagros and in the north the Kuhhe-ya Al-borz (I have a 1:100,000 scale map of Iran on my office wall that has every OTL air defense installation in the country marked on it, fighter control zones, missile batteries, guns, the whole shooting match). Both areas have long, sharply defined ridge lines that run northwest to southeast. A target situated between those lines is very hard to find.

One might thing, if one flies parallel to the lines so the radar scans down the valleys, it’ll be possible to detect targets nestled in the valleys. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way; the radar pulses get distorted by echoes from the sides and everything gets scrambled up. This can be assisted by relatively simple techniques such as scattering radar reflectors everywhere (to make a radar reflector, get three pieces of timber about 8 feet long and nail them together so that they form x, y and z axes at 90 degrees to eachother. Then stretch tinfoil between them so that they form three interlocked diamond-shaped planes. The completed structure should look like three kites having an intimate affair. It’s that easy and gives a massive radar signature). Also, stretch radar reflecting nets over the target and one can hid ethe valley completely.

Now, it doesn’t end there, there’s a lot of things we can do to negate such defenses but note a few important things. One is that ICBMs or SLBMs couldn’t have done the strike described in RotV at all – the bombers were circling, looking for their targets. Missiles can’t do that. Another thing, missiles come in at an oblique angle and on fixed trajectories. If something is in a deep valley or on the wrong side of a high, steep-sided hill, it can’t be hit by an ICBM at all. There’s a lot of things in Iran that are VERY difficult for us to get at.

Now, suppose we go in low? Well, it doesn’t make a lot of difference, the same bits of concealment work regardless of altitude. Also, low down one has to worry about flying into the ground (not a problem at 80,000 feet). Low-level bombers use radar altimeters to prevent that – only there’s a problem there as well. Fire chaff form mortars, the radar altimeter interprets it as a hill and flips the attack aircraft up to avoid said hill – straight into AAA fire.

So terrain is a very important factor indeed. Just south of the Dasht E Kavir in Iran, there’s a mass of jumbled terrain where one could hide a lot of things. Its odd down there, lots of little patches of hilly ground with very sharp curving ridges, I’ll pick this up again tomorrow

[quote="Stuart]One is that ICBMs or SLBMs couldn’t have done the strike described in RotV at all – the bombers were circling, looking for their targets. Missiles can’t do that. Another thing, missiles come in at an oblique angle and on fixed trajectories. If something is in a deep valley or on the wrong side of a high, steep-sided hill, it can’t be hit by an ICBM at all. There’s a lot of things in Iran that are VERY difficult for us to get at.[/quote]

Picking this up from last night. The major problem with ICBMs in this context is that their trajectories are quite limited. All ICBMs are fuel-critical, they have enough fuel on board to get their warheads to their targets with none left over. The design margin built into them is very small indeed. Now, the most fuel-efficient trajectory for a missile to get from one point to another is a ballistic arc that follows a Great Circle route. Anything that deviates from that route is going to have a hefty fuel cost associated with it. By and large, we don't do it. There's a massive economic driver towards keeping ballistic missiles as small as possible and we don't want to get into what happens when we ignore those drivers - that's when entire nations go broke. In some cases, SLBMs for example, enlarging missiles is absolutely prevented because the diameter of the launch tubes is set by the submarine; changing those tubes means scrapping the boat and building a new one.

So, we've got a very limited number of routes. A few variants on that have been tried; the most commonly-mentioned was one called the Fractional Orbital Bombardment System or FOBS. That uses an oversized booster to put a warhead into a partial orbit so it can approach its target from an unexpected direction. The most common application was for teh USSR to toss one southwards so it approached the US from over the South Pole. Real-life experience quickly showed that the FOBS system was grossly uneconomic and unreliable. It turned out that those prolonged flight paths were fuel-expensive to an absurd level and there were major costs in terms of accuracy due to geophysical variations. So, FOBS was abandoned.

Anyway, back to topic. There's only a very limited number of flight paths that take us from the missile fields in the Dakotas to Iran and most of them are perpendicular to the ridge runs, not parallel to them. That makes target acquisition and attack very difficult. It's quite easy to see a reentry vehicle landing the wrong side of a ridge and the subsequent event leaving its target unprocessed. We could use SLBMs of course- especially Trident which is very accurate when properly equipped or crusie missiles (the latter having problems all of their own) but from a target selection point of view, the geography of Iran makes it a very problematic target set.

Now, suppose we go in low? Well, it doesn’t make a lot of difference, the same bits of concealment work regardless of altitude. Also, low down one has to worry about flying into the ground (not a problem at 80,000 feet). Low-level bombers use radar altimeters to prevent that – only there’s a problem there as well. Fire chaff form mortars, the radar altimeter interprets it as a hill and flips the attack aircraft up to avoid said hill – straight into AAA fire.

Flying into the ground is a very severe problem, every year a plane or two gets lost at Red Flag that way. There's even a name and acronym for it- Controlled Flight Into Terrain or CFIT (pronounced see-fit so when you hear an Air Force guy saying 'old Frankie has just done a see-fit' it doens't mean he's had a health evaluation. Well, actually he has, but a very final one.) Normally aircraft doing low-level penetrations do it in terrain following mode. that is the radar altimeter feeds below-and -ahead data into the aircraft's autopilot so that said aircraft maintains a set height above ground. Terrain following systems have three settings, hard soft and normal which determine how violent the pull-ups to avoid terrain features are. A hard ride is VERY rough indeed. Despite that, the systems do go wrong sometimes and can be fooled. For example, if the terrain following system is set to a hard ride and a cliff suddenly appears ahead, the effort to avoid said obstacle can cause the wings to come off. It's happened.

Another problem with terrain following is that it depends on that radar altimeter (plus good maps) and the radar altimeter is an active system. That means it can be detected, giving warning of approach, or jammed. Back in 1991 over Iraq, an EF-111 was being hunted by a MiG-23. Ther were down at low level and the operator on the Sparkvark got into the radar altimeter of the MiG via its sidelobes and persuaded said fighter to fly into the ground. There was a big row about whether that counted as a kill or not. There are ground detection and jamming systems designed specifically to exploit weaknesses in various radar altimeters and most people have them.

Another problem with coming in low is that the horizon is very limited. Things tend to emerge very quickly and there is little time for reaction. At 80,000 feet, there are a couple of minutes between a threat being detected (for example a missile launch) and that threat becoming critical. At 200 feet, that time is well less than a second. As a result, there is a lot of effort placed into designing missile launch detection systems that plug directly into the countermeasures suite - so that the chaff and flares et al can be initiated without waiting for a human to make the decision. Also, down low, everybody and his brother is banging away with whatever comes to hand. That's a key thing with altitude; down low, there are problems seeing you but once you've been spotted, there are hordes of weaponry just itching to ruin your day (a 12.7mm or 14.5mm machine gun mount can do a lot of damage if it gets you - ask any helicopter pilot over Iraq about that), up high, everybody can see you but only a tiny fraction of the available weaponry is a threat.

The same logic applies to trying to spot a ground target. At low altitude, the time available to locate, isolate and identify the target is very limited. That makes the pilot's job pretty hard and the objective of the defense is to make it harder, so all the comments about decoys and concealment apply in spades. So careful sighting of equipment can be crucial. Put it in a valley with steep slopes either side and the pilot will have a hell of a job trying to see it - and the more runs he has to make, the greater his vulnerability to ground fire. Then there are nasty little tricks like stretching cables across the valley. You've all seen those red balls attached to power lines to warn helicopter pilots of their presence? Us air defense types aren't so considerate. We even paint the cables so they blend in with the background. Hit one at Mach 1.2 and the bird ain't going home.

One of the reasons behind the development of the B-2 reflected these problems. There were a number of targets we needed to get at that couldn't be got at with what we had to hand; the terrain was wrong for ICBMs and low-level attack was unlikely to be successful. The logic behind B-2 was that its stealth could allow it to cruise higher up, unmolested by air defenses so it could spot elusive targets and destroy them. I have my doubts on that (I've always believed that stealth, while valuable, is far from being an ultimate shield) but that was the logic.