Guden Oden said:MPI said:Right... anti-air artillery is SUCH a novel concept...
Right, but AA shells are of the fragmenting variety. These are straight kinetic projectiles, and unless the caliber is rather substantial all that's going to happen if they hit a plane is they punch a small round hole straight through the 1-2mm aluminium-skinned airframe and the bullet continues merrily on its way, assuming it didn't strike some sort of vital component inside or one of the fuel tanks.
There aren't _just_ proximity fused shells, the newer 57mm Bofors system is so accurate they have a built-in stochastic inaccuracy to give a spread of direct hits. On the edge of the engagement envelope or depending on target the shell can be reprogrammed to a variety of modes(3P).
That's a HUGE kinetic energy also and a military plane is nothing but a fuel tank, engines, weapons and a cockpit. There is no place safe from a hit, really. Fragmented proximity-fused shells also punch very small "neat" holes, just a lot. But what you want for a certain kill is a direct hit. Also, at this velocity the shell could easily be made incendiary.
Of course not. A 40mm system have a range of about 6km sea-level and about 3-4km in altitude. What you could do with this system is to increase the engagement envelope to probably 10 times that with at least as much accuracy(hopefully). The proposed navy(DDX) railgun shells would have GPS guidance, so if an AA shell could have rudimentary last second guidance...
A supersonic target(M2) at that altitude is probably an easier target than any other, plus the time for engagement is huge compared to low-flying objects. You'd have a lot of time computing vectors, and you'd only need a Pk of 0.02 if you could get 50-100 shells in the air.
That's for ballistic missiles, not planes or cruise/anti-ship missiles, a whole different ballgame. They come screaming down at M10 right at you! The engagement envelope for a Patriot battery is that the missile basically must be aimed within a circle of 50km or so where the battery is placed for a possible intercept. Basically the same for the others, although they don't tell you that very often. They are point defences, as they're called.
I'm no huge fan of ballistic missile defence systems, I think they're a huge waste, but then again that's not what I was talking about. I was talking about general AA and tracking. An interesting fact can be noted, though, that all ABM systems including the latest PAC-3 Patriot relies on kinetic energy kills in one form or another.
