The Implications of the Oreshnik Strike

The escalation is Blinkin’s attempt to have Trump get blamed for WW III. That is, if Trump or any of us are still around.

amazing! a missile capable of 20,000 mph. Mach 27...

Wow!

If Elon Musk went full dark Simon Bar Sinister, how much mass would he need to lift into space to built a doomsday kinetic device?

While the USA spent 25 years, and $$ trillions for the woke MIC, and the time of its best tech minds chasing illiterate Muslims in the desert, and working on new ways to deliver porn on the internet - the Russians were working on this.

The key take always should be is they took a three stage ICBM and put at least one if not two mach 20 maneuvering glide vehicles on it. A RS26 would have a throw weight of 4000 lbs or so at mach 20 over a 500 mile depressed trajectory. These are not ballistic missiles in the classic high apogee parabola sense. They are boost out of the atmosphere than skim low and fast over it in a nearly flat trajectory. Pretty easy to do with a three stage 100000lb Icbm class rocker system. First stage puts you up above the atmosphere at 60-100km and mach 5, second stage changes the velocity vector to near horizontal and mach 15 the third stage is held on till near the target and just above the atmosphere it is used to boost earthward and change the near horizontal velocity vector to near vertical and up the speed to mach 20 where the maneuvering glide vehicle takes over in a 80 degree downward trajectory. This matches what the videos show a near vertical entry with 6 sets of six sub sets. Two 2000lb HGVs bottom to bottom make for a nice fit in a nose cone as they are triangular with flat bottoms. Each has three sub sets of munitions inside it ejected out the back side into the slip stream those also have heat shields really just ablative felt coatings very light and very high temp ratings with either fins or mass shifting control packages to bend the last seconds of flight to a sub 10 meter cep.

The videos clearly show 6 sets of six reentry vehicles all at near vertical entry angles with about a second from start of plasma glow till impact that shows at least 3 kilometres per seconds to go from the stratosphere to ground level and if you watch the boost videos you see the first stage burn out and the second ignition and burn as it goes horizontal at a rapidly increasing rate exactly what one would expect for a depressed trajectory boost glide profile.

That’s almost as fast as a spaceship.

Space X Starship could deliver 250 metric tons — about half a million pounds.

To be fair, that’s generally any missile that can get to or climb out of the upper reaches of the atmosphere. The second stage of a Falcon 9 routinely gets into that ballpark when launching Starlink microsats.

The part that should actually frighten you is how fast the MIRVs that the thing carries go even after re-entry. The Avangard is the only Russian hypersonic glide vehicle (read: modern MIRV) known to the West to have been in operational service prior to this, and indeed this may have been Avangards on top of the Oreshnik missile. The Avangard is known to be agile and able to turn and evade in terminal glide and can have a speed *at impact* of Mach 20-27. Even without a warhead, that’s a pretty nasty energy conversion when it hits. Also means that if it isn’t set to air or surface burst, it’s one hell of a bunker buster.

This speed is well above the top bracket of air defense systems and indeed is faster than any Western intercept missile at that depth of the atmosphere. None of our current or proposed energy weapons can track that fast at closer range nor can any penetrate the plasma sheath that that speed generates around the vehicle.

The difference is that these are doing that speed at the bottom of the atmosphere, not in space. Terminal velocity of an Avangard MIRV is Mach 20-27 *at impact*.

150 metric tonnes of mass at orbital velocity...given that two metric tonnes of HGV is equal to 21 tonnes of TNT worth of kinetic energy as plasma like a meteor at mach 20 which is 7 mach slower than orbital speed. Say a 1 to 15 tonne ratio so 150 tonnes is carrying 2,250 tonnes worth of bang or 2.2kilotonnes the yield of a small nuke. Starship can lob 150 tonnes to orbit so splitting that up into a few hundred one tonne uranium cored heatsheild wrapped mass shifting MARVs wouldn’t be that hard. You could take out 150 office building sized targets with a weapon like that. So midtown Manhattan would be dust and fires.

Why depleted uranium because when it hits at even supersonic speed it instantly burns at 6000 degrees F in air you get a giant white hot plasma trail right down the heart of your target that nothing can put out until all the oxygen is used up.

A better way for city busting would be instead of 150 solid uranium cored MARVs you fill them with 800 or so one kg uranium spikes then when you are a couple of kilometres above your targets you kick them out the back end in a swarm of individual spikes. Each one is moving at mach 10 or more and will penetrate end to.end of a building while spewing 20000+F plasma in it’s wake due to not only the uranium burning but it’s kinetic energy into heat as it impacts solid materials. Each one of those 800 individual spikes will burn its way through any structure it hits in a kilometer wide area now you just took out a 150 square km area with fire storm Dresden level fires. The implications for kinetic weapons is past nuclear ones they don’t call them rods from God for nothing. That’s one starship payloads worth, Elon wants a fleet of starships.

It’s still hard for me to wrap my head around 36 conventional warheads impacting with a kinetic energy release of multiple tons of TNT each from one missile.

Mass and Velocity = BOOM.