- The new US stealth bomber may be taken by surprise by ultra-fast missiles coming from near space with the unpredictable ‘Qian Xuesen trajectory’
- Beating the American bomber will be pivotal in any future conflict with China, as it has the potential to slip behind China’s core defence
Why not? Aren’t all modern active counter measures dependent on reaction time? And isn’t there simply a lot less reaction time against a hypersonic inbound?
Hypersonic weapons go up way too high to be used on aircraft.
Is there some law of physics saying you can’t target and destroy a plane from above?
From a ground launched system that requires a ballistic path to hit a agile moving target, it wouldn’t be practical at Mach 6.
No, a bomber doesn’t really have any reaction time based countermeasures like hard maneuvering or accelerating. They might be able to latch a decoy, but I don’t know how likely it would be to carry one, and you’d be very vulnerable with the payload doors open. Stealth bombers countermeasures are all dependent on stealth, so if you know exactly where it is, most any missile should be able to take it down.
You made the general comment that hypersonics don’t make sense “against airborn targets”, so that’s whst I was asking about…not bombers specifically. Fighters are airborn targets also, and those are what I was immediately thinking about when you said hypersonics make no sense against airborn targets.
Oh okay, makes sense. Yeah, but the boost glide hypersonics that China has right now don’t necessarily have a quicker response time than direct missiles because they need to go most all the way to the karman line to get the potential energy to glide down. Future direct attack hypersonics would likely make sense, but the current ones seem pretty anti carrier optimized.