Skybolt - In hindsight

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DropBear thoughts, whacky suggestions, put-downs, complaints, queries, transgressions??? 8/3/2005 10:46:50 AM

;)

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doggtag can't say I'm a fan of nukes, but... 8/3/2005 4:26:47 PM

...had Skybolt stayed around, it could have "matured" into a very capable (read, very high speed penetrator) conventionally-armed surface attack missile, easily carrying a warhead of at least a ton (twice that of a TacTom). Seen a pic from ages ago of a B-52 carrying two each on the two large wing pylons. I would think just one of them (could we have seen a 2500km range or more with a 1000kg warhead?) would be an ideal palace-smasher, and would certainly send any known naval vessel to the bottom within seconds. The only real issues would've been the precision guidance system: carrying a 1MT-plus t-nuke warhead, Skybolts weren't designed to hit specific buildings in a target city, but rather just get to the city and detonate overhead. Having such a high-speed missile fitted with a precision guidance system could've presented complications: doubtful that GPS signals could effectively guide the weapon. The terminal stage of the Pershing II IRBM had a radar in its nose (reportedly claiming a 15m CEP) to map the target area (kind of like scene-comparison in the TacTom's guidance), and it flew at about Mach 8 in terminal phase. So theoretically we could've gotten away with (had developments been researched in that area) an effective precision guidance system (to within 25m of the target?) for a high-speed (Mach 8+) surface attack missile. Certainly, we could entertain the possibility that, in addition to a straight-at-the-target shoot, we could further enhance the range by "lob-firing" (an arched ballistic trajectory into the target area, then the precision guidance taking over) the weapon towards the desired target. ...just a thought. But since sub fleets and tactical nuke cruise missiles have rendered the Skybolt (and Blue Steel, etc) idea pretty much obsolete, this would be the only saving grace of such a missile: a very large, very fast, mission-critical-target elimination system. And there's no reason we couldn't scale it into smaller quick-strike weapons for smaller aircraft: I always envisioned a SRAM-sized weapon than could arm tactical aircraft and could do a Mach 4+ flight out to 500km or so with a TacTom-sized (app 400 kg) warhead. The high speed of the weapon would make it difficult to counter, unlike subsonic cruise missiles.

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DropBear RE:can't say I'm a fan of nukes, but... 8/4/2005 6:16:05 AM

I was thinking similar thoughts about it being transformed into a conventional. Bit like how ALCM has been re-packaged in the last few years. Skybolts size and kinetics would have made quite the bunker buster of sorts. link Nice! :)

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