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REPORT COPYRIGHT VIOLATION IN REPLY
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Message Subject
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NRO launches rocket successfully, payload is TOP SECRET
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Poster Handle
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Astromut |
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Post Content
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Err, no it can't. If the orbital plane of the shuttle doesn't pass over the target at the time you happen to need to use it, you may have to wait hours for a window to come open. Now, no one would necessarily know what you were planning until the de-orbit burn, but you're still looking at the better part of an hour from the time you perform the deorbit burn to the time that you're over the target.
Quoting: Astromut Lets say it has two or three rotary warhead launchers in its cargo bay much like the nosecone of a small trident or polaris sub launched thermo nuke missle. Possible. If it's just the nosecone, how the hell is it going to de-orbit itself? A trident missile wouldn't even come close to fitting in the X-37's payload bay; it's too wide and way too long. Just the nosecone though is not going to be able to do what you're suggesting it should do. Cutting out the launch and mid flight phase of an ICBM cuts time down from thirty minutes to five maybe seven minutes to reach targets.
Quoting: AC5 to 7 minutes? Do you have any idea how much delta-V you would need to put a warhead in orbit on a trajectory that would hit its target in under 10 minutes? You would effectively need to nearly completely nullify all orbital velocity. You're talking about 7 km/sec dela-V. Easy Concept. The Airforce unmaned shuttle launching nuclear warheads from its cargo bay. Forget the missle. Do you know how small an independent warhead is? Look up Multiple Independent Reentry Vehicle. MIRV. Airforce jargon. Don't talk down to me. I know what a MIRV is, and I understand its trajectory apparently better than you do. A MIRV cannot, I repeat, cannot go from orbiting the earth to hitting a target in 5 minutes. A MIRV works by being boosted into a sub-orbital trajectory. It doesn't need to de-orbit because its trajectory isn't in an orbital trajectory to begin with, it will come down on its own over the general region of its targets regardless of whether it actively does anything or not. It doesn't require much delta-V, let alone several km/sec of delta-V, to hit its targets, all it needs is a small amount of delta-V for each warhead to fine tune its trajectory to reach each target. Putting MIRVs into an X-37 is not going to give you the ability to hit a target within 5-7 minutes. At best you can de-orbit and then deploy the MIRVs so that they hit their targets once they reach their perigee point on the other side of the orbit from the de-orbit burn. That's going to take the better part of an hour.
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