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Friday, September 08, 2017

Guardians of the Troposphere

Could massed drones be a defense against nuclear missiles?

I thought the scene in Guardians of the Galaxy where the air defense craft held off the massive alien --for a while, anyway--by knitting together the ships into a solid screen that wrapped up the invader was actually fairly stupid. You have to wait until about 2:20 in.



The movie was good. But that scene required me to really suspend disbelief. With extreme prejudice.

But my thought about massed mini-drones as an anti-aircraft weapon led me to wonder if the concept could be used against incoming missiles.

Could a swarm of drones with explosive reactive armor mounted on top of the drones be used to stop incoming ICBMs?

The drones would fly into the path of an ICBM and hover there in a tight formation to let the ICBM strike one or more of the drones, setting off the ERA panel to wreck the warhead.

Ideally, the drones away from the impact point scatter away prior to impact to be able to go after the next incoming warhead heading for the same target (I assume these would be point defense weapons, essentially).

Is that possible? We surely have the ability to track the ballistic path pretty closely because we have hit-to-kill interceptors. A cloud of drones would be able to spread out to cover any error in that calculated path and even be able to move if the incoming missile maneuvers.

Just a thought.